Call of duty infinite warfare ม บอทหร อป าว

A leap into futuristic space combat hasn’t breathed a lot of new life into Call of Duty. With a scenic but poorly paced single-player campaign and multiplayer and zombies modes that succeed mostly by sticking close to what Black Ops 3 did last year, Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare is a generally fun but inessential shooter.

2016 has been one of the best years for single-player shooter campaigns of the past decade. We’ve seen Doom, Titanfall 2, Gears of War 4, Battlefield 1, Deus Ex: Mankind Divided… and they're all better than Infinite Warfare’s campaign. It's not for want of something to differentiate it: this is a Call of Duty game where you fight in zero-G environments, and where you fly a spaceship called a Jackal and have a robot buddy called Ethan who is endearingly written. It should be awesome... but it’s mostly slow and plodding, and by the time the pace picks up there’s not enough game left to wash the disappointment of the first two-thirds out of your mouth.In the campaign, you are the effortlessly charming Reyes, a United Nations Space Alliance (UNSA) Navy pilot with Tom Cruise-like features and swagger, and you're promoted to captain of a starship when the Settlement Defence Front (SDF) — a Mars-based terror organisation with significant resources — removes the previous captain from his command.

Every SDF quote would make a Sith Lord pause.

You can tell the SDF are the bad guys because loading screens are littered with quotes from them, and every single one would make a Sith Lord pause. "Freedom has no place in the light of our sun." That's a direct quote from the SDF High Council, and according to another loading screen the SDF has an Elite Propaganda Unit called The Veritas. If that's the propaganda the Veritas is letting out, imagine what other cartoonish evil they're hiding. Kit Harrington (Game of Thrones) leads them by way of a stereotypically evil British accent.

The entire cast works hard to keep you invested in the story. The dialogue is well written, even if the plot itself fails to make sense at times. For example, Staff Sergeant Omar (David Harewood of Homeland) sells his hatred of the robot E3N (Jeffrey Nordling from 24) like an android screwed him over on the Nostromo. And when he's best friends with E3N (or Ethan) in the next mission for unconvincing reasons, he sells that as well. The cast commit to their roles wholeheartedly.

Being that the SDF are literally freedom-haters and you are Joe America, it is your job to find and dismantle them, once and for all. Infinite Warfare contorts itself in an effort to nail that gung-ho, “Ooh-Rah” militaristic tone closely associated with the Call of Duty series, despite the science-fiction setting.

This is an action-movie universe where sound travels through space.

Consistency is an issue which repeats itself throughout Infinite Warfare as it works hard to build out its Earth-versus-wayward-colonies fiction. It's heavily reminiscent of James S. A. Corey's The Expanse series, but it lacks the attention to detail necessary to make the science in the fiction stick. This is an action-movie universe where sound travels through space with ease, prolonged exposure to open space is survivable, and you can collide with things at hypervelocity without disintegrating. It acts like it wants to be a serious sci-fi story without giving up the dream of also being Star Wars. This is at its worst when you're shooting early on, because the ballistic weapons you start out with do too little damage to people in space.

This is a problem, because one of the few things Call of Duty can typically be counted on to deliver is the feel of a good shooter. Low time-to-kill (TTK) is one of the factors that creates the signature pace of the series, but Infinite Warfare messes with that. Too many enemies are armoured, increasing that TTK and forcing you to wait behind cover as you wear them down, slowing things dramatically. A cover-leaning system allows you to duck out without fully exposing yourself, but you still take a significant amount of damage as you acquire targets and shoot them – once to remove their helmet and again to put them down. On higher difficulties, it's safer to just wait behind cover until you’re regenerated and then charge back into action than to risk being beaned while leaning, rendering the cover system moot.

The tools to smooth out the combat are right there, but Infinite Ward doesn't want to let us use them.

There's a wealth of weaponry and gadgetry available, but it's drip-fed to you at an unsatisfying pace throughout the campaign. Items like the Seeker drones and ATADs (automated robots designed to find your enemies and kill them) give you oodles of power while also feeling futuristic. Energy rifles, arcing laser cannons, and self-targeting shotguns demonstrate clever weapon design. But you spend most of your time without access to the stand-out heavy weapons (or without the ammunition to use them), which further increased my annoyance with the bullet-spongey enemies. The tools to smooth out the combat are right there, but Infinite Warfare doesn't want to let us use them.

As the story continues and your weapons get better, these problems solve themselves. Those energy weapons shred through the robots which litter the rear half of the campaign, and the pace picks up again as you careen towards the ending. Sadly, at five-and-a-half hours long, Infinite Warfare is just starting to feel good when it ends. In the final act, the action plays at a pace and tempo that few games can manage the way Call of Duty does. But prior to that final third, it feels like it's going on forever.

There just isn't five-and-a-half hours' worth of game in it.

There just isn't five-and-a-half hours' worth of game in it. Compare it to last year's Call of Duty: Black Ops 3, or even last week's Titanfall 2, and it seems ludicrous. Both have campaigns that are longer, but neither feels like they’re dragging along. They lack the flat spots peppered through the first two-thirds of Infinite Warfare, and both feature highly varied gameplay from moment to moment. Infinite Warfare, by contrast, is largely the same three gameplay loops repeated. You're either flying a Jackal (your dogfighting spaceship), shooting in corridors, or shooting in zero-G.

Part of the pacing problem comes from the fact that a significant portion of your time is spent treading water as you meander through the bridge of your capital ship, the Retribution. At the end of a mission you walk to the bridge – a 30-metre trek which exists to give you the option to watch a news story about a mission you just completed – and after you select your next mission, you walk yourself back down to the hangar bay. You stand on an elevator and engage in idle chitchat – it's reminiscent of Mass Effect's elevators, in that it's tedious and it's obviously hiding a loading screen behind the scenes.

I did the maths, and throughout the entire campaign there were roughly 28 combined minutes of walking to and from mission briefings and standing on elevators. When the other five hours are high-octane explosive action, half an hour of shipside downtime is extremely noticeable. It's filler, designed to pad out a single-player run that is lacking in real substance. Each time I found myself on an elevator it felt like those terrible episodes of Dragon Ball Z where Krillin and Tien would yap while Goku was just off screen, fighting the greatest fight of all time.

It combats the idea that Call of Duty is nothing but a linear corridor shooter.

The Jackal side missions aren't much better. Infinite Warfare uses the briefing sessions to give you the opportunity to choose where you will fight next, giving you the opportunity to earn upgrades for your guns, your soldier, and your Jackal. It's a great idea, and it combats the idea that Call of Duty is nothing but a linear corridor shooter, but there aren't really enough missions or variety to make it worth the effort.

Some of them – the ground-tethered side missions – are actually good, offering some variation to the typical Call of Duty gameplay. Stealth is in play, and while that stealth gameplay isn't great thanks to dumb AI and a HUD which wasn't built for that style of play (a minimap would help so very much) the change of pace it creates is more than welcome.

But after you've struggled with the controls in one Jackal-focused mission, you've struggled with them all. The flying just isn't intuitive. You're able to shed too much speed too quickly, going directly from full thrust to a standstill in mere moments. Thrust is bound to an upward push of your left thumbstick and there is an element of analog control to it, but the moment you pull down on the thumbstick you kick into a slow reverse. Each time I did this in a dogfight I quickly started spinning over my Z axis, losing both my target and my orientation. Couple this with the fact that Infinite Warfare puts you in the shoes of an elite pilot without ever telling you how to properly fly – about three space missions in I was told I could press left or right on the D-pad to rotate on my X axis, and until then I'd been without this otherwise extremely useful tool.

There's also an issue with situational awareness in 3D space, because there's still no minimap in your HUD. That means you're reliant on danger indicators to tell you when you're being shot and from where. This isn't a huge problem, however, because the moment you lock onto an enemy you're *really* locked to them, and the ship does the majority of the flying for you. It's similar to Interdicting ships in Elite: Dangerous, except that in Infinite Warfare it's the entire dogfight instead of an exciting prelude to one. It makes every Jackal mission feel like the same thing with slightly different scenery: jump in, lock target, hold fire, switch. And the few times you get into an actual dogfight are over too quickly because you stop on a dime when you try to alter your thrust, dropping you out of the engagement.

It's difficult to work out where enemies are shooting you from.

When you're in space but out of the ship, Infinite Warfare suffers again at the hands of its minimalist HUD. Whether you know it or not, so much of your own day-to-day orientation is handled by things other than your vision, but in a first-person shooter vision is really all you’ve got. Space-focused games have always struggled with this, and invariably their solution has been a 3D-oriented mini-map. By using you as the fixed point and displaying enemies based on their position in 3D space relative to you, Infinite Warfare could solve so many of its problems. Without one, and positioned against the backdrop of infinite darkness that is space, it can be frustratingly difficult to work out where enemies are shooting you from. Likewise, it's hard to find cover when your enemy can float above and behind you (as far as your perspective is concerned).

To solve this particular problem in a different, less effective way, Infinite Warfare highlights enemies for you at the beginning of an engagement, turning gunfights in zero-G into a memory game as you acquire as many as you can before the highlighting square disappears. Once gone, your only option is to look for tracer fire while floating in a disorienting vacuum and follow it back to its source.

This is a large part of Infinite Warfare's problem: for every great idea there's a Call of Duty trapping holding it back. And that's the mistake Infinity Ward has made – one of the same mistakes it made with Call of Duty: Ghosts three years ago, which was the series’ lowest point since The Big Red One. Infinite Warfare's campaign shows improvement over that game, but not much. Considering that if first-person shooter single-player campaigns are how you like to spend your time you're spoiled for choice this year, so there's little reason to spend it on this one.

Multiplayer

Multiplayer in Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare is where it shines. It's where the series has always shone, even when the single-player was worth playing. And thankfully, Infinity Ward does a much better job here. The key to success? Sticking close to the Black Ops 3 formula.

Pick 10 is a fantastic system, because it's simple to understand while still allowing you to make your soldier your own.

Infinite Warfare carries over the Pick 10 system, for example, with 10 points to pick your weapons, attachments, equipment and perks. This is a fantastic system, because it's simple to understand while still allowing you to make your soldier your own. Tough decisions, like whether to take extra equipment or deck out your gun with more attachments, give you something to do in between rounds – but it's not burdensome the way the Create-A-Soldier system was in Ghosts. Scorestreaks and Rigs (which are functionally the same as Black Ops 3’s Specialists) are kept separate from Pick 10, which means you're not giving up a weapon just to make sure you can take a UAV, and you know that every player has at least three perk-like abilities thanks to their Rig.

Rigs define your basic character archetype. Synaptic is a speedy, mobile rig which focuses on hit-and-run style tactics, while Stryker is something of a builder, able to create turrets while alerting you to nearby enemies. The rigs are clearly identifiable in-game by their unique player model, but they're defined by their Payload and their Trait. FTL, another agile Rig, can equip the Eraser Payload to become highly lethal, using a pistol which evaporates enemies. Alternatively there are two payloads designed around escapability, like the Phase Shift which removes you from danger by putting you in an alternate dimension. But all FTLs can equip one of three perks to open up new possibilities: the Perception Trait, for example, allows you to know when someone is looking at you from off-screen, a replication of the Sixth Sense perk in Black Ops 3.

In that sense, Rigs give you a rigid set of perks while inviting you to define your playstyle around them, which is a good thing. It allows you to work out how your enemy is playing without giving you an entire picture of what they're equipped with. By the same token, by using the Pick 10 system creatively you can still surprise your enemies with interesting combinations of perks and weapons.

Infinite Warfare plays a little slower than Black Ops 3, which I think was a necessary adjustment. Call of Duty has been getting faster and faster for years, but with Black Ops 3 it risked focusing on mobility to the extent that it raised Call of Duty's skill floor a little too high for my tastes. The balancing act for the series has always been based on allowing basically anyone to have fun while giving the elite players a high skill ceiling to reach for, and slowing things down just a touch is a good move in this sense.

Infinite Warfare's spawn system punishes those who leave their teammates to lone-wolf it.

The only problem this slower pace creates is through the spawn system, which is noticeably worse than Black Ops 3. As it exists right now, Infinite Warfare's spawn system punishes those who leave their teammates to lone-wolf it. The way it works is that you will spawn back into the match depending on parameters laid out by Infinity Ward — they could be proximity to teammates, proximity to enemies, proximity to held objectives, anything — and if everything is going well, you'll have a few seconds to orient yourself before you get back into the fight. When things are not going well, you'll spawn directly in front of an enemy and die immediately. This is a problem with all games on small maps, especially as the teams spread out and mingle amongst one another. It can be extremely difficult for the spawn logic to determine a safe location, and spawning into death is a terribly unsatisfying way to die. And yet it’s happened to me multiple times over the past few days, usually when I'd run away from my group to try to get some cheeky flank kills. (Although the reverse happened too, where I'd sprint around a corner and an enemy would spawn and die before me).

Every match I’ve played thus far seems to use peer-to-peer (p2p) hosting.

Another huge issue for Infinite Warfare is that in every match I’ve played thus far it seems to use peer-to-peer (p2p) hosting, where last year’s Black Ops 3 usually landed me on a dedicated server. Dedicated servers are essentially the base standard for shooters these days, and with good reason: with a dedicated multiplayer server, all players are treated essentially equal. The server stands in as the primary location for all information transfer, and the only difference available to players is in their personal infrastructure. With p2p-hosted games, the game is run and hosted from the one randomly chosen player's machine. The host has an advantage, because they are the server. Everyone else has the latency created by connecting to the server from a distance.

Dedicated servers also have the advantage of running dedicated hardware, and therein allowing the server to run at a higher tickrate. This means the information is processed by the server more times per second. Rainbow Six: Siege gave us a fantastic demonstration on the difference this can make: early on in Siege's life the servers ran at 30 hertz (at best), and as a result you would sometimes die to enemies you just couldn't see, or after you'd apparently already ducked back behind a wall. When the servers were upgraded to 60hz, instances of this decreased significantly (although they still occurred when players had pings over 200).

This disparity between what you see and what the game sees happens quite often in Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare, and it's either because of lag on the end of the p2p host, or (if there is a dedicated server in the mix somewhere in Activision’s system) it's because the servers themselves aren't running at a tickrate similar to the speed the game runs at. The wonderful smoothness of having Infinite Warfare's multiplayer run at 60fps is negated a little if the servers (p2p or dedicated) can't keep up.

The map design is quite good in places, with the science-fiction setting of the campaign lending itself to a great deal of creativity. The designers do a good job of using the mobility features of the Rigs to provide options for higher-skilled players – many conflict areas have extra, sneakier entry points which are only available to players who can wall-run and double jump. The acrobatic gunplay this creates opportunities for is where Infinite Warfare is at its best, as great players clash mid-wall run like medieval knights on a vertical jousting field.

Maps like Mayday and Skydock lean heavily on wall-running to break up the map. Unfortunately, unlike in its wall-running competitor Titanfall 2, the areas where you can wall-run in Infinite Warfare are very strictly defined, in that not every flat surface can be wall-run upon and it's not always clear about whether you can or not. In practice this means that when you're pushed to the outskirts of a map, the narrow area of traversal turns you into a sitting duck — if your opponent appears ahead of you, you're unable to strafe and you're forced to run in a straight line at them.

Breakout is a map where this is less of an issue. It features a fairly traditional layout, with obvious lanes of conflict, varied sight line lengths, and many sneaky corners for cheeky camping opportunities. But it also uses wall-running to create less obvious routes for flanking. By relegating wall-running to flanking, the narrow corridors the walls create becomes less of an issue. It's not ideal – ideal would be a wall-running system which operated like Titanfall 2's, which empowers you with the ability to run on almost any vertical surface – but it's a great execution of the system as it has been implemented.

Frontier, which is closed off and features many tight corridors, is my least favourite map. Too many rounds of Frontier descend into automatic shotgun spamming spray-a-thons, as players crouch-slide in close and dispatch of their enemies before they can react, reducing the already quick time-to-kill to nanoseconds. On a map like Precinct or Throwback this strategy can still work, but it's restricted only the most agile of players thanks to a short maximum range on the shotgun's damage output.

This balance between map design and character loadouts is Infinite Warfare at its best. Since Call of Duty 4, the series has done a great job of letting you pick your poison, so to speak, by allowing you to learn the maps and create a soldier type which will enable you to best tackle that task. Infinite Warfare nails this philosophy with good map design, a low skill floor (and a high skill ceiling) and a variety of weapons which allows you to properly analyse a situation and then attack it.

Infinite Warfare's biggest multiplayer problems are solvable.

I'm given hope by historical precedent that indicates Infinite Warfare's biggest multiplayer problems are solvable. Spawn logic can be tweaked – and I'm sure it will be –to minimise (if not eliminate) instances of players spawning behind you (or you in front of them). And the introduction of high-tickrate dedicated servers worked for Rainbow Six: Siege – there's no reason it wouldn't work here as well.

Zombies in Spaceland

Zombies in Call of Duty has an (un)life of its own now. I count myself among the group of people who would happily to buy an annual update to the cooperative series-within-a-series (at a reasonable price).

If you've been skipping the Zombies (and Zombie-like) modes in prior games in favour of the multiplayer, or if you’re new to Call of Duty, Infinite Warfare is the best place to start. Zombies in Spaceland dumps you and three other players into an abandoned theme park – its single map location – and then challenges you to live for as long as possible as it throws waves of undead park-goers, exploding zombie clowns, and fast-moving mutant boss zombies at you.

What makes Zombies in Spaceland work is simple: you learn by doing. Or perhaps it's “learn by dying.” Dying when social interaction is critical to the experience means more than it does in other circumstances, like in competitive multiplayer, because there's a sense of being in it together. If a teammate is downed you want to help them up to keep them playing, and if you die you feel like you're letting your team down. So where in competitive modes (where kills aren't the objective) you might happily respawn as fast as possible, in Zombies in Spaceland everyone operates as one to try to remain on their feet.

More than that, Zombies makes dying fun. When you drop in Spaceland and your teammates fail to get you up again, you’re warped to an afterlife arcade where you try to play and win your way back to life. Games like skeeball and water-pistol shooting provide an amusingly thematic way to challenge you to earn your way back into the 'real world', all while making sure you don't get a free pass straight back into it.

It's not enough to know where you need to go.

The map lends itself to a silly sort of fun, with roller coaster rides, slippery slides, and David Hasselhoff DJing next to a cineplex. The traps around the world complement the mood, as tilt-a-whirl rides spin wildly to smash zombies and power-ups are spit out by carnival-style games. It loops back on itself repeatedly, adding to the required knowledge for those trapped inside the park. It's not enough to know where you need to go, because you need to know the fastest way to get there as well.

While still alive you earn progress through cash money, and this is where the delicate balancing act of survival is at its best. If you pay $1,000 to open a gate, you might not have enough to buy a new gun when you get through. And if you haven't the money for a gun, you're either going to have to use your weak starting pistol or you'll have to run all the way back to the beginning of the gauntlet to pick up a cheaper (and worse) weapon. If you choose to hold onto your money, you can frantically try to earn more by killing zombies or boarding up entry points — but in doing this, you're restricting the earnings potential of your fellow survivors as well.

Once I got into a rhythm with my co-op buddies, things started to click. Fate and Fortune cards are basically single-use Ultimate abilities, like the ability to throw infinite grenades for a period of time. If you can coordinate your use of those with your pals, you can really begin to dominate.

Nevertheless, you'll inevitably reach a point where raw skill can't overcome a sheer lack of understanding, and the tension critical to the Zombies experience returns. Suddenly you're frantically running away from a boss zombie while also trying to lure away undead to give a teammate the opportunity to revive another, conserving as much ammunition as you can. When you run out of ammo you buy the first gun you see, because it's better to have a sub-par gun than the default pistol. And eventually you'll die, just like the others.

And then when you start again, you'll be armed with a little more knowledge, maybe a random friend you made along the way and a desire to make it a few waves further this time. It's not a complicated formula, but it works. And just as it did in the multiplayer, Infinity Ward does well to stick close to the recipe laid out by Treyarch. One area where it could improve is in the goofiness — Shadows of Evil, from Black Ops 3, new exactly how to balance menace and silliness to nail the B-Movie schtick essential to their Zombies games. Spaceland, on the other hand, leans a little too heavily on craziness.

Verdict

There's a massive amount of content in Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare, though especially if you played Black Ops 3 last year there’s little of it that’s particularly impressive. The campaign is ignorable and the multiplayer needs a little technical work to be as good as last year’s, but the overly silly Zombies mode keeps me coming back. It may not stand out in a year that’s been crowded with great shooters, but it still produces that familiar Call of Duty action.