latedave

You can make your own mind up on loot boxes but this is unfortunately a very average game in its current state. The good news is like the first game it looks fantastic, both visual and audio effects are spot on. Unfortunately DICE seemed to have forgotten how to make a shooting game in the meantime. Maps are very chokepointy, grenade spam is some of the worst I've seen and the progression system makes no sense at all. It's a shame because the missions look great but it feels like a return to the bad old days of BF4, starfighter and sniper camping by teams spawn points is already a problem and because the objectives are often a single spot, matches degenerate into die, run, die run unless you just fancy ignoring objectives and racking up kills which is often more fun. Because of the way star cards work Starfighter mode is the worst of the lot and now microtransactions are turned off be prepared to be blasted by pay to win players for the 40+ hours it'll take you to upgrade your star cards to the right level. The advantages are completely broken, interceptors can have 40% more firepower than the base model for short periods and can turn faster to boot with no penalties for these benefits. i honestly wonder whether they playtested this at all, BF1 had plenty of problems as well but in fixing those DICE seems to have created a whole load of new ones. Onto the campaign, for four/ five hours it's obviously not worth the price of the game and likewise the additional modes. In short if you buy it at the moment you'll need to do so on the basis that like BF4, DICE will start to quickly fix these problems but it's a very disappointing experience at the moment.

The problem with this game is twofold. Firstly the formula is starting to get very stale, I struggle to notice any real differences with Advanced Warfare other than a few tweaks and a reskin. Sure the 'powers' of specialists idea is nice to lean towards different modes but if you look at the online % everyones playing team deathmatch anyway and the silence on chat tells its own story. Maybe it needs to go back to a cleaner time, WW2 again, up the player count and encourage people to play some of the other modes. I like the new revamped zombie mode but it just screams cash-in to have one map. The campaign is dreadful, somehow quite a good concept became one of the most boring COD campaigns I've ever had to play through and it feels a real backward step, particularly after Ghosts which tried to do something interesting. Shame it only gets good once you've completed it. The saving grace is the return 4 player casual co-op but the investment now into the loadouts, skillsets and tweaks means I'll struggle to persuade mates it's still fun for a blast which is a shame because wall running etc are filled with possibilities and the kill time is now so low it's very hard to play a casual fun game. Generally it feels like to me COD's lost its way a bit, the element of 'fun' seems crushed under a desire to overwhelm the player with a mass of options and unlocks and each year it seems to become less of a fun game to play and more of a training ritual. This year just seems to have dropped a few more notches than the last iterations.