Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare

I went back to Advanced Warfare expecting nostalgia and came out with a clearer head about what it actually is: a single-player FPS that briefly made Call of Duty feel exciting again, wearing a multiplayer game's clothes. Sledgehammer's big swing was the exosuit, and it lands. Double-jumping and dashing in any direction changes how firefights flow at a mechanical level - close-quarters weapons get scarier because the gap closes fast, vertical angles open up that older CoD maps never accounted for, and the whole thing runs at a locked 60fps that keeps the chaos readable. The campaign pushes you through a futuristic PMC power-struggle plot with Kevin Spacey as the antagonist Jonathan Irons, and while the story is predictable beat-for-beat, the set pieces are genuinely cinematic: drone swarms over Seoul, grappling-hook stealth ops, three distinct exosuit variants (assault with a jetpack slam, specialist with a riot shield and overdrive slow-mo mode, and a late-game robotic suit that earns its reveal). The HUD is entirely holographic, projecting info off your equipped weapon rather than cluttering the screen. It's a small detail that still looks sharp. The campaign runs seven to nine hours and does one thing the series rarely managed: it has a handful of open, sandbox-leaning mission segments where you can experiment with gadgets rather than just follow the waypoint arrow. Those moments hint at a better game underneath. The rest is corridor-linear with quicktime events and squad AI that trips over itself during dialogue scenes. PC players also hit some specific rough edges on release - audio desync in cutscenes, geometry bugs, and a couple of hard crashes on the final mission. None of those are fatal for a single playthrough, but they're worth knowing about. The Exo Survival co-op mode - the game's answer to Zombies - is the weakest part. It drops you and three friends into standard multiplayer maps against waves of soldiers, lets you upgrade weapons and gear between rounds, but adds none of the atmosphere or weird invention that made Treyarch's Zombies mode a cult favourite. It works, it just doesn't stick. Multiplayer, on paper, was the most ambitious loadout system the series had attempted at the time - a Pick-13 create-a-class that folds scorestreaks into your build, customisable scorestreak modifiers, supply drops for cosmetics and weapons, and exosuit ability slots on top of your standard perk rows. In 2014 that was genuinely exciting. In 2026 on PC, the multiplayer population is effectively dead. Daily peaks sit in the low hundreds, and finding a match outside Team Deathmatch in a populated timezone is a coin flip. If you're buying this today, buy it for the campaign and treat everything else as a bonus if you can find a lobby. Advanced Warfare is the entry that arguably rescued the franchise from the low of Ghosts, and replaying the campaign holds up better than its mixed Steam score suggests. The exosuit movement feels snappy, the near-future tech has aged well visually, and Spacey's villain performance carries the otherwise boilerplate story further than it deserves. Just don't come in expecting a living multiplayer game.

Alex · Scout Team

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