Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War & Call of Duty: Modern Warfare - THE HEAT (THE ENERGY)

 

Available to everyone with applicable hardware this weekend, the Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War Beta builds on the snappy Alpha by allowing players to experience the doldrums of being lumbered with set weapon loadouts - never particularly helpful - and, when they finally unlock the Create A Class option, underpowered weaponry with occlusive iron sights. 

Still, I'm enjoying Treyarch (Raven Software, Sledgehammer Games, High Moon Studios, Demonware, Beenox and Activision Shanghai)'s hot war simulator, mainly because the multiplayer levels aren't staggered into a series of irritating head-glitch locations. Action is, thankfully, a little more free-flowing than last year's Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (currently attempting to steal its little brother's limelight by resurrecting a fan favourite shotgun from Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2). I've barely scratched the surface but, if I were to lodge a complaint, it'd be that there's precious little detail or visual cues separating the character models assigned to my team and the enemy's. 

E3 2017 - Call of Duty: WWII

Sledgehammer Games pick up where Call of Duty: World at War left off, rolling period specific flamethrowers and player guided aerial bombardments into a gameplay model that, thankfully, appears to have returned to circuitous, map roaming gunplay after years spent leaping in every available direction.

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.

Call of Duty - PMC

Sledgehammer Games' first solo attempt at a Call of Duty looks set to continue the series recent preference for speculative, near future warfare. This VICE clip, produced in association with the forthcoming game, hints at a premise very similar to Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots - namely a private military contractor growing so large it becomes an independent superpower. Call of Duty 2014 is being made by Sledgehammer Games, a group of developers whose previous credits include 007: From Russia with Love, Dead Space, and the multiplayer component of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3.

NAT GEO

A Deadliest Warrior flavoured tease for the forthcoming Call of Duty: Ghosts. Details are zero at this point, however the title and emphasis on customised balaclavas recalls the rumours that flew around a few years ago when Sledgehammer Games were being prepped to deliver a third-person Call of Duty spin-off that focused on Ghost, the ill-fated SAS dude from Modern Warfare 2.

COMBO BREAKER

Modern Warfare 3, mere months away from being ousted as the in vogue dude-bro shooter, finally appears to be getting the kind of support we've been expecting all year. Last week a fairly sizeable weapon re-balance fix dropped, completely changing the fortunes of players committed to American infantry rifles and Japanese machine pistols. This week, Survival Mode gets an arcade flavoured remix entitled Chaos that makes mulch of sneak tactics in favour of the kind of combo aggravation usually glimpsed in side-scroll shooters or Resident Evil's The Mercenaries. Here's franchise superplayer Tom Cassell to talk us through.

Striker + Extended Mags = Fun

Despite having a self-publishing suite similar to Black Ops, I've spent very little time messing around with Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3's theatre mode. In the first few weeks of release playing online was hassle. The maps are tiny and lined with total debris, making movement difficult. The community has been reluctant to dash about and engage, preferring to sit in corners and ambush. Netcode is disgraced by a crippling latency workaround designed, but unable, to give everyone the exact same AAA experience. MW3 has chugged and frustrated.

That's before you even get into a weapon levelling system that leaves some arms effectively hobbled for the majority of their lifespan. Although I committed acts at least as impressive as the un-skill I've previously posted, there was no record of it - one of the placebo workarounds for the total lag experienced at launch was to set recording to OFF. And so it has remained. Six updates in, online play is starting to become bearable again. Mistakes feel like my own rather than the result of an uncaring, spiteful universe that wants me upset. So this is is me, charging around what looks like Hong Kong hip firing absurd shotguns at unsuspecting enemies. Enjoy.

"We need a shadow of our own."

The outlook's pretty bleak for national monuments in this latest piece of Modern Warfare 3 hype - France's Iron Lady looks like she's about to topple over. Despite some appearances to the contrary, Modern Warfare 3 runs on a new version of the standard Call of Duty engine. Unofficially referred to as IW 5.0, this iteration allows for the faster streaming needed for all the vast, brutalised urban landscapes on show here. The warhorse IW 3.0 engine, used by such titles as Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare and Call of Duty: Black Ops, continues to heavy lift behind-the-scenes for Activision's 007 titles.

"The will of a single man can be broken."

Less than a month until Modern Warfare 3 hits, time for another hysteria trailer! Over the course of three games, the Modern Warfare series has shifted from World War II missions in a contemporary setting to the kind of denied-ops meta-narrative usually seen in Hideo Kojima's Metal Gear Solid games. This campaign clip almost ignores the idea of an America under siege to focus on rhetoric posturing between a Russian radical nationalist and a Cockney war criminal. We're in the realms of superheroics here. A weightless shoot-out on a Presidential airliner only serves to make this point explicit. Considering the countries Call of Duty mainly sells in, and the conflicts we're currently involved in, maybe that's the only tasteful way to conceptualise war on this scale? Last year's Medal of Honor struggled to juggle what it saw as an 'authentic military experience', and basic gameplay demands. The result was a dull, dawdling single-player, spotted with a morally detached jingoism that revelled in the implication that Pakistan was next on the Coalition of the Willing's international hit-list.

MW3: Jugg

One last Modern Warfare 3 clip to briefly demonstrate how one of the player controlled Juggernaut point streaks works. In previous games, the Juggernaut was a heavily armoured enemy type in the Spec Ops game modes. Usually accompanied by foreboding music, these jogging tank men specialised in running you down and ruining your day.

There are two Juggernaut streaks in Modern Warfare 3's multiplayer. The one shown here, Juggernaut Recon, is awarded for reaching an 18-point streak using the Support Strike Packages - point streaks tailored to cater for teams rather than individuals. Other Support Strike rewards include reconnaissance vehicles, and ballistic vests. It's worth noting that when using the Support system, streaks do not reset on death. Regardless of how many times you die, you are always building towards your chosen rewards.

As well as being able to sponge damage and chase down enemies for a riot shield bashing, players equipped with Juggernaut Recon will become mobile motion sensors, pinging enemy locations for allied players. The other Juggernaut streak is available when using the Assault Strike Package, which does reset when you die. Reach 15 unbroken kills and you get the body armour, an M60 machine gun and a ridiculous Magnum revolver.

MW3: Rush

This is the juice! Finally, a rush flavoured shill for Modern Warfare 3, featuring exactly the sort of qualities that should be stressed to get people hyped. Although loaded with freeze-frame info, yesterday's multiplayer reveal basically boiled down to four minutes of slow-motion glamour shots of architecture and character models, arguably the Call of Duty franchise's weakest link. With Battlefield 3 looking like an interactive front line news report, that sort of hawking looked, frankly, batty. Why move on graphics, when the competition's comfortably killing you in that match-up? This minute and change is different though, teasing toys and tech, whilst never breaking 60 FPS sprint pace. This year, if you want to get people excited about the lightly antiquated Call of Duty franchise, you've got to make it look like an ice cream headache - too many treats, eaten too quickly.

MW3: Hang Tough

20XX needn't have worried. Despite the latest Modern Warfare 3 multiplayer trailer disappearing up its own wazoo, turns out the attendant press event, Call of Duty XP, could be counted on for twitchy gameplay feeds. This clip from Spec Ops's Survival does a nice job of demonstrating the mode, showing the staggered round progression, how you'll use the laptop currency system, and the total feedback that made Modern Warfare 2 fun on wheels. Like Nazi Zombies, it looks like the players can be quickly overwhelmed and downed, but at least the enemies aren't an endless procession of bullet sponge National Socialists. The mix and match of different enemy types, including chemical weapon dicks that apparently release disorientation gas upon death, suggests a hyper-mobile siege thinker, that consistently demands new responses and tactics if you're to scrape by.

MW3: Grimace Shot

In contrast to Modern Warfare 2's gameplay feed multiplayer trailers, this reveal for Modern Warfare 3 online leans heavy on the play-as-narrative baloney kicked off by Call of Duty Elite's Karl shills. It's interesting to see eye-catch glimpses of perk load-outs and such, but it never really translates into any meaningful examples in this bloated slow-mo stare at what we can expect come November. It's all just so Call of Duty as brand. I ain't no shareholder, I wanted Call of Duty as fun. Still, there's hype to be had. Call of Duty 4's Overkill Perk is back, allowing two primary weapons; that prowling robot sentry gun looks like a blast; and your equipment load-out now includes Halo style defensive options. It'll be interesting to see how much punishment that electrostatic shield thingy can sponge, and whether or not Scavenger resupplies it. Could be essential for bomb rush/defense on Demolition style gametypes.