Or creeping along the other side of that field, approaching the hull of a massive capital ship, wrenching open an airlock door and stealing inside.
The first time you slip from the cockpit of your Jackal into zero gravity, for instance, maneuvering between asteroids with micro-thrusters as enemy spotlights stalk from above. It’s a shooter’s exuberant but confused apprehension of arcade flight.Īnd yet there are bits of design elegance in the game, moments at which it manages to slip the surly bonds of habituated mediocrity. Events unfold too fast and relentlessly furious for thoughtful play, reducing maneuvers to defense, and defense to triage. Most dogfights go like this: identify a distant colored blip, pursue, take near-lethal damage from a surprise bogey, wheel 180 degrees, then liquidate your pursuer in a hail of bullets-slash-missiles. Instead, in the interest of Call-of-Dutifying these sessions, you have no radar, ships scream out of or vanish into the chaos, and you’re left to wrestle with an interface instead of gratifying tactics. That would be fine, if ships had heads-up markers with distance tracking and everyone moved at speeds that made those metrics worth having. You get a few curious frills on the dash, but the knock-on effects barely register.īut the space battles are titanic tangles of information, sprawling debris fields so cluttered and dimensionally squashed that they obscure your goals and obliterate any sense of proximity to targets. It’s like driving a year-newer model of your go-to ride. You can momentarily hack and possess enemy robots, advance from behind beehived nano shields and launch weaponized copter drones that serve as pitiless escorts, but none of these much alter the cover-pop ebb and flow of gunplay. Explosive-packing spider drones that scamper after hapless foes basically do at the ground level what Advanced Warfare‘s heat-seeking grenades could from on high. Thus anti-grav grenades can now fling squadrons into the air for fish-in-a-barrel execution, though even when the game’s lobbing platoons at you, this feels unfairly advantageous.
#New call of duty space warfare zip#
From the deck of your capital ship, you’ll zip from planet to planet, launching fighter assaults or anti-gravity skirmishes or enemy carrier breach assaults that feel like all the things we’ve done before in these games with a few new tricks.
#New call of duty space warfare update#
That’s Infinite Warfare‘s grand insight: trample or be trampled, all the while basking in the spectacular views.įorget the plot - the game doesn’t seem to mind - and you’re left with a shooter that plays like a service update to last year’s hub-driven military adventure, scaled up to encompass the entire solar system. We’re clearly meant to view Kotch as evil of the reductively unbridled sort, his followers mere lobotomized minions worthy of nothing save the bottom of our boots.
He appears a few times over the course of events, mostly in propaganda videos, glacially speechifying in rote soliloquies garnished with insipid little dictums like “freedom is cowardice” and “death is no disgrace.” It’s also the story of your battle with Rear Admiral Salen Kotch (played by Game of Thrones‘ Kit Harington), a disaffected Martian radical about which those four words are all the game ever gives you. It’s a tale of one-dimensional interplanetary insurgents reduced to no-dimensional quarry - blockades of human or robotic militants jammed into moon base corridors or crowding orbital arenas, meat-or-metal-bags of variable lethality interposed between you and the next achievement unlock. If last year’s cyberpunk Black Ops III by alt-subsidiary Treyarch dared to broach protocol by disappearing down quasi-existential rabbit holes, studio Infinity Ward’s sci-fi shooter rights course by acid-washing any nuance from its galloping potboiler. Slick as in customarily brisk, predictably explosive and sociopolitically anodyne.
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