Call of Duty: Ghosts is officially out today, along with the new Eminem album. It’s the bro-iest day of the year, if you went to college in the early 2000s. Here are five things to know about the latest Calladuty, before you go pick it up.
The Single-Player Is Longer Than You’ve Heard
I’m not surprised that experienced CoD players are ripping through Ghosts‘ single-player campaign in four hours. It’s the most perfunctory feature of the whole experience and it’s got everything CoD is infamous for: Bad AI, railroading level design, and so on. Infinity Ward is so bored they can’t even make being thrown into space exciting. That said, if you haven’t been playing the multiplayer in every previous game on the franchise, it’s a useful tutorial; doing the math, I’d say there’s between six and eight hours of gameplay.
You’ll Want To Turn Up The Difficulty As High As Possible On Single-Player
An hour in, I deleted my save and started the game over again on the highest difficulty setting; that was the only way to really get a challenge out of it. And once you do that, the single-player actually becomes a lot of mindless fun, although the enemy AI is still pretty dimwitted. The verticality in some levels is fun too: Try a goomba stomp!
If You Hate Multiplayer, Try Cranked
I’m well-known as allergic to multiplayer, and Cranked is actually a mode designed to fit my interests. As you might have guessed from the title, it plays out like a Jason Statham movie; once you kill somebody, a thirty-second timer starts. You get bonuses to things like movement speed and reload, but once that timer hits zero, so long, sucker.
It’s brilliant because it erases most of the behavior that makes multiplayer so damn annoying at a stroke. The guy screaming “ONLY USE KNIFE!” and the sniper who hides at the edge of the map are basically meat. Fussy Strategy Guy has to shut the hell up. Clan Administrator Guy has no paperwork to lecture you about. Fighting dirty and being pretty much a total suicidal idiot is the name of the game here, and I’ll be honest, it’s kind of brilliant.
Extinction Is Going To Get Someone Sued
Just like “Zombies”, the last go-round, was essentially an entirely self-contained game that was far more interesting, Extinction is essentially Infinity Ward doing an Aliens game. Said aliens run, climb, and spit acid. Hmmmmm… sounds familiar.
Beyond that, it’s a fun mode, but it’s also not groundbreaking. Essentially it plays like Aliens: Colonial Marines should have, which in of itself is a selling point. Still, if you like team strategy that doesn’t involve shooting at humans, this might be a good option.
Picked it up yet? Let us know in the comments.