Call of Duty: Ghosts

I went into Ghosts already knowing its reputation, and the mixed Steam score tells roughly the right story: this is a game that does the basics well but never quite convinces you it needed to exist. The campaign drops you into a near-future scenario where the US has been hammered by an orbital weapons platform called ODIN, and you play Logan Walker alongside his brother Hesh and their father Elias as part of a small, elite squad called the Ghosts. The premise has genuine potential, the underdog America angle is a fresh spin for the series, but the execution keeps stumbling. Interesting mechanics like commanding your German Shepherd Riley, or firing a remote sniper rifle across an entire stadium, show up once and disappear. The story tries to balance family drama with globe-trotting spectacle, but the pacing has too many lulls between the genuinely exciting set pieces: a zero-gravity shootout in orbit, an underwater scuba infiltration through gorgeous reef formations, a tank assault on a missile facility. Those moments land. The connective tissue between them often does not. Multiplayer is where the game earns its keep. The Create-A-Soldier system brought full character customisation to the series for the first time, including around 20,000 possible loadout and cosmetic combinations and playable female soldiers. Maps include destructible and alterable areas, which adds a layer of unpredictability that the series needed. The killstreak system got a shake-up too: the KEM Strike works like a nuke reward, and the ODIN killstreak can be triggered by eliminating the opposing team's top player and completing follow-on challenges. New modes like Cranked, where each kill boosts your speed but starts a 30-second countdown to your own explosion, and Blitz add some genuine variety on top of the returning Team Deathmatch, Domination, Kill Confirmed and Search and Destroy staples. The Squads mode, which lets you build a roster of AI-controlled soldiers and pit them against other players' squads, is a functional offline option that shares XP with the main multiplayer progression. Extinction is the wildcard here, and it is probably the best reason to buy Ghosts over its contemporaries. It replaces the Spec Ops missions from the Modern Warfare era with a four-player co-op mode that pits you against swarms of fast-moving alien creatures that scurry up walls and burst from underground hives. The enemy behaviour is genuinely different from anything else in the package: erratic, animalistic, and a lot more threatening than human AI. The base game ships with one Extinction map, though, and the rest sit behind paid DLC, which remains a frustrating limitation given how strong the mode is. On PC, Ghosts runs well, smooth frame rates and a significant HD texture option that makes it among the better-looking shooters of its era. The audio can have issues in fullscreen mode, which is an old technical wrinkle that a quick switch to borderless window fixes. Player counts on PC have thinned considerably over the years, so finding active multiplayer lobbies may require some patience depending on the time of day you play. Retrospective reception has not been kind: the game consistently ranks low in series rankings, and the mixed critical score from launch has only curdled further with time. None of that makes it unplayable, but it does mean you are buying into a specific kind of value: short campaign, fun Extinction co-op, and a multiplayer sandbox that was perfectly serviceable in 2013 and is now a quieter version of itself. Alex, Scout Team