Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare
To infinity… and that’s it
FOR A WHILE NOW, the campaigns in Callof Duty games have felt a little like training for the multiplayer. And with many players having decamped to BattlefieldOne, the developer needed to produce something distinct enough to tempt them back.
It has sort of succeeded. The outer space setting is certainly a contrast to Battlefield’s European fields, but it’s in single-player that Infinity Ward shows it has been paying attention to developments in other games.
InfiniteWarfare shares a few ideas with previous mainline COD games. The story sees a commander wrestling with the dichotomy of winning his battles for the greater good versus saving the lives of his men. In a universe that would find Black Ops’ robot limbs useful, we’re fully human, with just a suit and an oxygen supply to protect us from a horrid vacuum death.
Because we’re in space, we can still wallrun, however, and gravity can be switched on and off as the plot demands. One sequence sees you breach a spaceship’s windows from the outside, sucking all the air out and suffocating the crew. Another, as you fly a fighter ship between asteroids, gives a glimpse of a game that might have been, taking multiple routes, and destroying targets in an order you choose.
From the beginning, with a cloud-diving insertion that reminds us of MDK, you’re led by the nose through missions in which your AI companions wait for you to catch up, before allowing you the honour of landing the final shot, opening the door, or throwing the switch that leads to victory. There’s always plenty to look at, as things explode, topple, and spin into space.
Infinity Ward has clearly been playing old PlayStation 2 games as well, as the whole setup is a little bit Killzone, with a lot of brown marines on gray backgrounds to deal with. Spotting the difference between a bad guy and a member of your squad would be tricky if your reticule didn’t snap to the right ones to shoot when you pull the trigger.
This is handy, due to the amount of time you spend hunkered behind cover. Seeker grenades, gunship strikes, and hacking modules seem to have been designed around this restriction, allowing you to continue fighting even though your head is down. That the designers needed to make this concession is a bit of a criticism of COD’s style of warfighting—standing in the open or jetpacking up for a higher perch gets you cut to pieces, yet that’s precisely what you want to do in order to be a hero.
Your space carrier represents the best idea, allowing you to zoom around the solar system taking on challenges, but this small borrowing from MassEffect can’t distract from the linear nature of this shooter, even if it does show you some remarkable sights along the way.