The Complete Call of Duty Single Player Campaign Critique (For PC) by Noah Caldwell-Gervais

For his two hour long Call of Duty critique, Noah Caldwell-Gervais adopts the stuffy persona of an Open University professor, complete with under-lit live-action brackets and a distinct lack of visual dynamism. Caldwell-Gervais' video isn't slick. It doesn't need to be. He's actually got something interesting and enlightening to say, charting the series' slide from a respectable letters-from-the-front simulator to a skeezy recruitment tool. Even if you find the idea of a feature length breakdown of first-person shooters faintly repulsive, it's worth skipping to 26:14 to hear Caldwell-Gervais' thoughts on series highlight Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare.

Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare - ZOMBIE FLESH EATERS

TheSyndicateProject takes a break from being super young and successful to bring us a 40 minute glimpse of Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare's Exo Zombies mode. Naturally, Syndicate has his routes and pick-ups down so consider this a useful primer on how to get yourself playing up to rounds with double digits.

Destiny in Detail - Is the Loot System Fair?

Matt Lees makes a convincing case for the longevity of Destiny's multiplayer. A couple of weeks in and I'm already feeling fatigued with its major opposition (and publisher stablemate) Advanced Warfare. I've only played Sledgehammer's game off-and-on so everyone else has long since worked out the best places to set up camp, and which routes to take. Given the fractional health, latency is much more pronounced in AW. Destiny's longer time-to-kill helps to conceal much of these match-up issues, providing an overall fairer feeling experience.

Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare - GET RAVAGED

TheSandyRavage wrecking straight out the gate, natch, on Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare. Ravage runs with an oversized, drainpipe shotgun that looks straight out of Sylvester Stallone's Judge Dredd. I think this is the scattergun that fires 'directed energy' rather than something useful like, I don't know, lead?

Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare / Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare - NOSTALGIA

I'm finding it hard to get excited about Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare. Although the air-dashing looks kind of fun, the near-future weapons don't do anything for me. Guns made up in planned city sweatboxes rarely do. They all seem so dull and interchangeable. I spent most of my time with Destiny wishing I had a possessed Mosin-Nagant with a futuristic, retrofitted sight. I want some connection to reality. The classic Modern Warfare games were equipped with the best of Cold War engineering - the M16 platform vs the AK-47, with run-ins by the FN FAL.

Those guns had resonance. I grew up with them, saw them on TV in proxy wars and The A-Team. Good guy and bad guy guns from a million 80s action movies, choose your fav. You can grab an MP5 and play-act as Hans Gruber, or equip an M60 and pretend you're Rambo or Animal Mother. Guns are interesting to me in the abstract, horrifying things that track alongside ideologies and political movements. I can accept them as grey machinery you lug around like an accessory in an expensive, networked game of tag, but I don't want to be told they're awesome. Knee-jerk revulsion is part of the appeal. These new weapons look like something that'd ship with an action figure.

Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare - TRICKSTER

On one hand this trailer for Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare reads like a mean-spirited attempt to absolutely bury Respawn Entertainment's Titanfall. On the other there's the idea that Sledgehammer Games have sat down and played some stone cold classics like Devil May Cry 3: Dante's Awakening and had a good think about how they can incorporate that total movement model into a first-person military shooter. Double jumps and air dashes in Call of Duty? Even the boring laser rifles can't take the shine off that.

E3 2014 Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare - IN THE INTEREST OF TIME...

Looks like Call of Duty is a full-on science fiction franchise now. Judging by E3's Advanced Warfare footage, Sledgehammer Games have the classic Infinity Ward formula down - teams of grunts stumble through a series of sustained setpieces. It might not sound like very exciting - "Wow! A third studio can follow a recipe!" - but it's worth noting that even the modern Infinity Ward have had trouble getting their ingredients right. We're further into the near future than Ghosts or Black Ops II, using a gun that looks like it takes ammo replenishes from a 3D printer cartridge. Can't wait to be stuck rummaging around the computing isle in a supermarket looking for a compatible reload!

Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare - KEVIN SPACEY

House of Cards fav Kevin Spacey shows up to dump some fascism in this reveal trailer for Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare. Spacey is tipped to be playing the head of an evil PMC that has a stranglehold on American foreign policy. What hasn't been clearly established is the player's role in all this. Are we one of Spacey's minions? Or a member of a local militia in one of these conquered countries?

Perhaps we'll hop between these two ideologies, as in the ill-fated PS3 exclusive Haze? That game teased a moral back-and-forth, but delivered something primitive and clunky. Sledgehammer Games are well placed to at least deliver the usual Call of Duty competence. I must say, I'm pretty disappointed with the tech avalanche on display here. After yesterday's VICE ad I was expecting a near-future grime war, not another round of Black Ops 2 gyrocopters.