Only by leaving WWII in the rear-view mirror does the game live up to the innovation promised by its subtitle.
It aims to tell a story of the brotherhood of soldiers, but it’s ill-served by undeveloped characterizations.
The game’s best moments use the story’s futuristic and space-bound setting to find new dramatic opportunities.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare Remastered, at its most well-executed, is a grueling slice of a very real nightmare.
The game is filled to the brim with content, most of it disappointingly or needlessly executed.
In short, Advanced Warfare advances every single aspect of the already impressive Call of Duty series.
On paper, Advanced Warfare is the best kind of step forward, taking any semblance of our modern world out of the equation.
The tone is still intentionally B-movie bad, but it’s more grating than charming after a few hours listening to the government scientist preach the end of humanity.
Multiplayer is and always will be the heart and soul of any Call of Duty chapter, and, with the exception of one particular option, Extinction, Ghosts often drops the ball.
Rather than each level being an unbroken, laggard endeavor as in Blood Money, the missions here are broken up into smaller, sectioned-off trials.
The battlefield tools Future Solider bestows on you are vast and diverse, providing an assortment of combinations that lead to an appreciably high replay value.
What the single-player campaign lacks in breathtaking set pieces and the variety of settings found in other modern FPS games, it makes up for in challengingly but fairly scripted boss encounters.
Monolith tried to create a full-bodied shooter experience with their limited budget they were given, but titles such as Bulletstorm and TimeSplitters truly experimented with slapstick within the FPS genre.
If there’s a reason to buy MW3, series devotee or not, it’s for its expansive multiplayer scenarios that offer hours upon hours of entrancing, customizable combat.
Assault Horizon’s gameplay is initially relatively intriguing; its pacing is generally more frenetic than past titles, giving the cloud-borne battles an authentic feeling of palpable urgency.
With only momentary cutscenes and in-game plot sequences affording a brief respite from combat chaos, this FPS piles on enough frantic firefight action to at times be downright draining.
The problem is that the on-the-ground immersion of a third-person shooter doesn’t mesh very well with the battlefield awareness that defines the tower-defense genre.
Like a particularly well-coated Dorito, a few of the mini-games’ rather ingenious design is an unexpected treat in a familiar package.
There’s something refreshing about Operation Flashpoint: Red River’s attempt to be innovative and relevant in a post-Modern Warfare world.
And so it goes that Bulletstorm is an unfocused and repetitive mess, never completely succeeding in anything it attempts—excess without abundance, gravitas without weight.