Publisher: Activision
Platforms: PC, X360, PS3, PS4, Xbox One
Price: £39.99
Reviewing a Call of Duty game is a little like reviewing your fridge every twelve months. You know exactly what it does, and while you may not be able to recall precisely what's inside, you can probably hazard a fairly accurate guess. You know there's going to be a bottle of milk, a couple of beers, and a few putrefied mushrooms you should have thrown out days ago. Occasionally you'll discover some delicious bacon that you'd forgotten about, but more often it's a pot of low-fat yoghurt that's been left so long it resembles low-fat cheese, or a box of eggs that really doesn't need to be in there.
So it's no surprise that, despite advertisement claims of being "The most ambitious Call of Duty yet." Ghosts is precisely what you'd expect; a bombastic yet strangely bland campaign dangling off the end of a beefy yet rote multiplayer mode. It is milk, beer and mushrooms, with a strong whiff of cheese and only the merest hint of bacon.
In fact, the only truly significant difference between this and the previous Call of Duty titles is that Ghosts treats itself to a brand new fridge. Being a cross-generational game, Infinity Ward have finally decided to upgrade their IW Engine, serving it with all the technological trimmings. The PC version, which we reviewed, comes weighed down by a whopping 60-ish Gigabytes of HD textures, while acronyms such as HBAO and TXAA abound in the graphics options. The result is that visually Call of Duty now rivals the likes of the Battlefield and Crysis series'.
The campaign certainly makes the most of this additional graphical fortitude. Its wildly varying locations are beautifully rendered, ranging from snow-blasted mountain fortresses, to flooded cities, dense jungles, dazzling underwater landscapes, and even the vast emptiness of space. The game's trademark action sequences are also more intense than ever. Almost every level involves something enormous either crashing, crumbling, or exploding, flinging PhysX enhanced debris in all directions like deadly confetti.
Alongside varied settings, each mission brings with it unique weapons or mechanics. The flooded city, for example, essentially enables you to use the waist-deep water as cover, helping you avoid the aim of enemy soldiers, while literally drowning out the sounds of the battle around you. Another particularly strong mission involves infiltrating a skyscraper to interrogate a heavily guarded enemy agent, and involves frequent use of rappel lines. Here you fight horizontally, vertically, upside-down and inside-out. The underwater and space missions are also enjoyable. Their slower pace, muted sound and eerie surroundings result in an experience that is tense rather than intense, and because of this they're probably the best missions in the entire game.
But the game's strongest feature, variation, is also its biggest problem. Like all the Call of Duty's over the last four years, the campaign has a dotted, staccato rhythm that never gives you a chance to settle. Furthermore, nearly all its more interesting mechanics are entirely disposable. For example, early in the game you can order your pet dog Riley to attack enemy soldiers. But Riley is present for three missions and is never directly involved again. Similarly, one mission set in a dilapidated stadium features a remote sniper-rifle that can be accessed and fired from anywhere on the map, but it is only available for that one mission, which is such an enormous waste.
The result is Ghosts' campaign feels like a series of concept demos for more interesting games, rather than a cohesive product in its own right. Of course, what's supposed to be binding everything together is the gunplay, but as an FPS Call of Duty has become markedly mediocre. It's the world's most expensive fairground shooting gallery. Both the actions of the player and the AI are prescribed to the point where you can spend half the game letting your teammates do all the work for you, and when you are eventually required to shoot at something, there's nothing kinetic about it, no challenge beyond how quickly you can knock the targets down.
These problems have been inherent in Call of Duty for ages, and with each passing year they become increasingly acute, especially when there are wonderfully dynamic FPS' like Far Cry 3 around. And it isn't like there's a compelling story to salvage it either. The setting is admittedly more interesting, moving away from the grim realities of Modern Warfare into near-future fantasy where the US is a downtrodden underdog and so can feasibly be heroic again. But with the exception of the first three missions, this has zero impact on how the game actually plays.
The enemy is the EVIL Federation, who are EVIL because they're South American, and South America is the wrong America. They do EVIL things like torture people to breaking point and have vast spy networks, which the USA would never do. Opposing them are the Ghosts, a mythical special forces group who are all that stand between the Federation and the destruction of the USA. Except, that is, for the USA's massive army which abruptly pops up from time to time to blow the absolute shit out of the Federation, undermining the entire concept of the US being the underdogs.
Worse, the Ghosts are the series' least interesting protagonists yet; robotic Tier One operatives whose only defining characteristic seems to be an irresistible urge to die in the most noble fashion possible. They wouldn't go out to do the grocery shopping unless there was an opportunity to sacrifice themselves for the sake of the vegetable aisle. Furthermore, the plot twists are entirely predictable, and the primary antagonist is strangely one-dimensional despite the effort made to explain his reasons for being EVIL.
That's the campaign, fleeting moments of ingenuity strung together by numbing spectacle and stagnant shooting. The multiplayer is better, although still a long way from the strongest entry in the franchise. Its small maps and low player numbers can't compete with the scope and scale of the Battlefield series, so it attempts to offer variety instead.
It succeeds to some extent, with a wide array of game modes on offer, although they use the same maps and aren't vastly divergent from one another. Alongside staples such as Team Deathmatch are modes like Search and Rescue, which apes Counter-Stirke in its one life, rounds-based structure. The twist is that you can collect the dog-tags of fallen comrades to respawn them. More compelling is Hunted, in which everyone starts with only a pistol, and both teams must scramble for ammo crates dotted around the map which provide randomly generated weapons. Both modes provide a more thoughtful, less frantic experience, which is something you may not expect from a Call of Duty game, and is all the better for it.
The maps are fairly well designed, the twisting streets of the various urban maps such as Warhawk and Stormfront allow for plenty of opportunities to ambush and be ambushed. Although they're all intelligently laid out, only a couple stand out conceptually. Whiteout is a rocky arctic fishing village strewn with wooden shacks and labyrinthine cave networks. But by far the most impressive is Stonehaven, set in a sprawling ruined castle surrounded by undulating moorland dotted with little farmsteads. It's stunningly designed, but its open nature could easily become a sniper infested hellhole.
There are a couple of other unique modes worth mentioning. Squads is a curious hybrid of single, cooperative and multiplayer gaming. Characters levelled up in multiplayer are arranged into AI teams which can then be led into battle against other Squads in a variety of scenarios. But the weirdest of all is Extinction, which tasks you with eliminating a race of alien creatures that look like a cross between a dog and a beetle, by shoving an automatic drill into hives dotted around the map and defending it while it drills stuff. While certainly novel, it pales in comparison to the fantastic Spec Ops Mode of Modern Warfare 2.
Ghosts' multiplayer has plenty to keep you occupied, but none of it is radically new or particularly gripping. Compared to the epic, multi-tiered combat of the Battlefield series, or even the more gritty, tactical conflicts featured in Tripwire's Pacific World War II game Rising Storm, Ghosts is seriously lagging behind. It's also worth noting we experienced a couple of distracting glitches, specifically an issue with crackling sound that would intermittently occur when launching the game, and some rather unsightly flickering shadows on a few of the multiplayer maps.
Ghosts is an appropriate title for the latest entry in this tired franchise. It bears the shape and structure of the Call of Duty games we're familiar with, and does occasionally reach those same highs. But it's a pale imitation of former glories, a shadow blasted into a wall after an atomic explosion, futilely struggling to escape as it treads the same ground over and over. It desperately needs something new to invigorate it, or an exorcism so this tortured soul can finally be laid to rest.
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