Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare

My first hours with Infinite Warfare felt like reading a correction letter. The game launched in November 2016 to one of the most disliked reveal trailers in YouTube history, with franchise fans loudly protesting the sci-fi pivot away from boots-on-ground warfare. Playing it now, away from that noise, a different picture emerges. The campaign is genuinely good, and in stretches it is exceptional. You play as Lieutenant Nick Reyes, a pilot-turned-commander aboard the warship Retribution, fighting a solar system-wide war against the Settlement Defense Front, a Mars-based military separatist faction that has blockaded Earth and controls resources across the colonies. The setup is pulpy sci-fi, but Infinity Ward commits to it fully. The writing earns emotional weight through its characters rather than its plot twists, and your robot co-pilot Ethan ends up being more memorable than most human companions in the series. There are no cheap reversals, no secret betrayals. The story just builds, steadily, toward a conclusion that lands. The structural curveball that makes the campaign work is the Jackal, your customizable fighter ship. Between ground missions, you can launch from the Retribution and take side assignments across the solar system: dogfights in open space, zero-gravity hull-breach assaults on enemy destroyers, a grappling-hook sniper run through an asteroid field. These missions range from short and punchy to genuinely tense set-pieces, and the Jackal dogfighting controls are tight enough that chasing enemies through debris fields stays satisfying across the whole campaign, not just the first sortie. The zero-G combat on foot is rougher, more scripted than freeform, but it still provides visual variety that keeps the pacing from going flat. Two post-completion difficulty modes, Specialist and #YOLO, add real replay incentive for players who like punishment: Specialist removes health regen without Nano Shots and enemies can literally shoot weapons out of your hands, while #YOLO adds a full permadeath restart condition. The multiplayer is where the mixed 61% Steam score makes more sense. Six Combat Rigs, named Warfighter, Merc, FTL, Stryker, Phantom, and Synaptic, replace the traditional class system. Each rig offers three selectable Payloads (charged active abilities) and three Trait perks that shape your playstyle passively, from the Synaptic's run-and-gun tuning to the Phantom's stealth and long-range focus. On paper that sounds like meaningful build variety. In practice, the Rig system sits on top of the same wall-running, thrust-jumping, slide-cancelling movement borrowed wholesale from Black Ops III, and the combination never fully gels. The maps rarely reward the movement system, supply drops gate weapon variants behind grind or luck, and the player population was already thinning at launch. In 2026, finding lobbies on PC is not guaranteed. Zombies in Spaceland, the cooperative wave-defense mode set inside a 1980s horror-themed space theme park complete with exploding clowns and Fate and Fortune Cards, is a much warmer recommendation than the competitive side, especially in co-op. The honest summary is that this is a game with two distinct halves of quality. The campaign, the Jackal missions, and the Zombies mode deliver enough to justify the time. The competitive multiplayer is a relic with a deflated server population and design choices that critics and players agreed felt half-formed even at launch. If you are buying this for the campaign, the space dogfighting, and some couch-friendly co-op zombie waves, the value is real. If you are expecting a thriving competitive scene, reset those expectations before you launch.

Alex · Scout Team

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