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I didn't actually beat the entire campaign. With only two levels left the game crashed my computer, and when I booted back up my save was completely wiped, and I just couldn't force myself to play through the whole thing again. So, I will not be discussing the story as a whole, rather parts of it.
Nolstalgia, Future Style.
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A man holding a gun. Yep, its a COD game.
If that paragraph didn't give it away, I didn't particularly like COD:AW. But this isn't some, as my brother calls it "hipster rage" because unlike my last COD outing with Black Ops 2, there are things about COD:AW that I liked. I will go so far as to say this is one of the better COD games, probably up there with Modern Warfare 1.
COD:AW comes to us from newcomer Sledgehammer games, and it's clear that they want to stand out against the other COD titles. AW barely refers to Call of Duty, and there's so much stuff added to try and distract you. But this is a COD title, and all the window dressing soon falls off to reveal the same game we've already played.
This is a common complaint about the COD franchise, that they've just been the same game over and over. It's not paranoia when your right, and AW is no different. Despite the best efforts on Sledgehammer's part, the game is just a slow progression of moving from cover to cover shooting dudes in the face with a variety of weapons. It all handles pretty well, but I feel that compliment no longer holds any weight with the franchise, since at this point screwing up the gameplay would be a bigger accomplishment.
Walk Softly
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Kevin Spacey gives a standout performance as Jonathan Irons.
There's a bit more effort put into the story this time around. Let's just get this out of the way first: Yes Kevin Spacey is here, and yes he is fantastic. Spacey has made a name for himself recently as a sharp-witted villain in House of Cards or Horrible Bosses, and he absolutely steals the show in AW. There's no doubt that he is one of the greatest actors alive today and his ability to absolutely master a scene is unprecedented. Unlike so many celebrity appearances in games he's not phoning it in, easily giving a performance way better then a COD game deserves.
There's a handful of decent performances in the other characters, although it feels like a shame for Troy Baker (The Last of Us, Bioshock Infinite) to go to such a waste as your mostly mute main character. There's one performance that feels like there was a significant language barrier, and it's really unfortunate that she's a major character, as every time she spoke I wished she wasn't.
As for the plot itself? It's dumb, but it's not as dumb as usual. You play as Mitchell, a US marine that looses his best friend, and left arm, in a battle during a second Korean war. Your best friends father is Jonathan Irons (Spacey) founder and CEO of Atlas, the worlds largest private military company. Irons invites you to work for him and gives you a sweet new arm and the use of an exosuit to hunt down the mysterious terrorist cell KVA. Shit quickly goes haywire and Irons is outed as a bad guy, and from there you must fight to stop him.
Like I said, it's dumb. There's twists and turns, but it's all really for naught. Where it sort of redeems itself is in it's ability to double check everything. For all the stupidity flying around, there's always a half-reasonable explanation for it, so dumb shit doesn't just form from dumb ideas. It's an odd level of detail from a series that's usually so cavalier about making stuff up on the fly.
Perhaps what's worst is that the game doesn't really build it's world, it just tells you. Mitchell is late twenties, early thirties, but people still treat him like he just stepped out of cryo sleep. Irons shows him around the Atlas compound while extolling all the good Atlas has done, talking about it's operations around the world. But Mitchell would know all of this, probably watched a lot of it happen. It's jarring and it pulls you out of the moment.
Carry a big gun
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AW is visually impressive, with a great level of detail in everything.
Of course, everything gets resolved with violence. There often seems to be a questionable amount of violence, and you'll often find yourself leveling city blocks for very poor reasons. You will shoot a lot of people in AW with a wide variety of guns, and it all feels strangely cathartic, perhaps because it means the game isn't stopping you to tell you a story.
As for the guns themselves? It's hard to say. There are a few recognizable weapons, stand-ins for contemporary guns like an obvious AK74 variant, an M16 variant, and other recognizable guns. Then there's the weird stuff like the sonic shotgun or the hand-held laser rifle. They all shoot dudes, and they all work, but all of this is despite a confusing naming scheme and bizarre design.
Then of course they'res the much touted new additions to your arsenal. First is the new grenades, one of the things I liked most in AW. You still have two grenade types, lethal and non-lethal, but within these two types are a variety of variants. By holding down the grenade button you can cycle through different sub types. For non-lethal there's a flashbang, an EMP, and the insanely useful threat grenade that shows all enemies in the area, even if they're hidden. For lethal there's explode on contact, guided, and smart grenades that hunt out enemies. I found myself loving all the new grenade types, an the game does a good job of giving you reasons to switch.
Aside from new grenades there's the exo suit. It's...not that great. It honestly feels like an attempt to ape Crysis or Deus Ex: Human Revolution, but fails to come close. Sure, you'll feel like a badass when you push a bus out of your way, but it's so contextual. In regular combat you'll forget that you have a suit. There are a number of abilities, depending on which suit you're wearing, but I usually just ignored them since shooting guys in the head did the job just fine. One of the powers was slow time, congrats guys, I'll let Max Payne and FEAR let you know you finally caught up.
Feels Like the First Time.
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Everything is constantly exploding, all the time.
You may have noticed I've not talked about the multiplayer component of AW. I really didn't feel the need to. The last time COD's multiplayer did anything to innovate, it was stealing ideas from Counter Strike. You join a game, shoot other players, a fourteen year old calls you a faggot, rinse repeat.
It may sound like I'm being unnecessarily harsh towards AW, especially since it isn't a bad game. It's clear that Sledgehammer wanted this one to stand out, to be a bit different, and for the most part they've succeeded. But the time for playing nice with the COD games is long past, this is now the eleventh game in the series, and it's all the same old shit.
I'm no longer angry with the COD franchise. In the past I've referred to MW2 as one of the worst games I've ever played, and I've referred to the entire series as "a monument to everything wrong with modern gaming". I still hold these thoughts, and I still feel that annualizing a series cheapens it, while nickle-and-diming your customers to death with shitty DLC and $60 iterations every year. But I'm not angry anymore, just tired. I keep praying that the new COD will be so bad that they finally stop making them, not because I hate the series, but because I want so badly for the talent behind the games to work on something new.
There's hope here, in AW. It's easily one of the better COD games. It's graphically impressive, there's good sound design, and the campaign has a certain retarded charm to it. Perhaps putting the games on a three year dev cycle will help, and maybe one day we'll see a COD game actually worth playing. Until then, if you were going to buy COD:AW, you would have already. I'll just be here, hoping for something better.
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