Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare
FROM $89.95 | PC, PS4, XO | WWW.CALLOFDUTY.COM/INFINITEWARFARE A stifling single-player campaign and poor multiplayer.
Idon’t think Call of Duty campaigns are supposed to be fun. If I’m reckless at all — like, say, having fun with my jetpack — my vision smears with strawberry jam, blurry and pulsing. My screen shakes, white text yells “Get to cover!” at me and I’m forced to the ground behind hunks of concrete and metal. Then I toss a grenade, which bounces off a squadmate’s calf. Friendly fire will not be tolerated, it says. Very little will be tolerated.
There are plenty of cool moments in Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare. But when I’m in control during the annual shooter’s campaign, I feel weak and ineffective. Many of the enemies can absorb a flurry of bullets (even headshots often just pop their helmets off) and I inflict damage so quickly I have to stay back, run from grenade indicators, pop out of cover and shoot a little bit, then hide again. It’s not fun. It’s war: chaotic, fearful, deadly. Even with the push deeper into science-fiction, CoD hasn’t changed much, except in the diminishing size of its multiplayer population.
Infinite Warfare’s multiplayer remains the opposite of the campaign in many ways: a zipping cyclone of bullets and bodies. Keep circling, checking the minimap, aiming at corners, crouching and jumping. Move weirdly so you’re hard to hit and aim true: only a second separates you from a kill and eating dirt.
The new Frontline mode is my favourite, but not many people are playing it. As I write, I can’t get into a match. Team Deathmatch is more populated, but any time I’ve checked, Black Ops III has at least half as many concurrent players as Infinite Warfare. Compared to Overwatch, CounterStrike: GO, Payday 2 and Rainbow Six Siege, Infinite Warfare is not a very well populated multiplayer at launch.
It also took me about five minutes to gather a public Zombies match — CoD’s staple co-op horde mode — together. There’s one scenario to play at the moment, Spaceland, and it’s a satisfying Left 4 Dead- ish experience, well maintained and campy. But it’s the only one.
Even if the campaign isn’t much fun and the multiplayer follows the ‘more is better’ approach of the past nine years, Infinite Warfare is a hell of a spectacle. It has some of the coolest scenes I’ve ever seen in a videogame. Skydiving to Europa. Careening over a crater in a moon buggy, with big blue Earth hanging in the sky, explosions all around. I never tired of watching entire enemy squads get sucked into space when we blasted their windows.
But those bombastic action scenes pair oddly with Infinite Warfare’s stifling play. Soldiers can both leap through space with ripped suits and be killed by an exploding car they walked too close to.
When the big set pieces and bad story are stripped out, it’s just a grinding cover war. I don’t have a good outlook for Infinite Warfare’s longevity on PC and there isn’t enough for me to recommend spending money on it.
Tyler Wilde