Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare - Multiplayer Preview

Of course, none of this would matter much of the gameplay didn’t evolve with the customization. As mentioned earlier, the maps and modes have been designed to reflect the increased mobility of your soldier and this leads to some fun moments. You might be running around on the ground and see an enemy sprint by on a cat-walk two stories above you. In the past, you would have no choice but to try and gun him down before he vanished out the door. Now you can jet-pack up to the cat-walk and give chase. There are loads of moments like this in Advanced Warfare, with most maps having lots of verticality to let you try and escape from or out-maneuver opponents.

As for the game modes, the developers have opted to mostly bring back old favorites and tweak them to take advantage of the new mobility system. At the presentation, the developers revealed that there will be twelve modes in the final release, listing off Team Deathmatch, Search and Destroy, Kill Confirmed, Hardpoint, Domination and Capture the Flag as returning modes. The one new mode we did get to try was Uplink, which is a spin on Capture the Flag where the flag is replaced with a single drone that both teams must fight over. Once you have the drone you must take it to the enemies’ Uplink (essentially their flag) which is floating in the air so you must jet-pack up to it.

The other mode that has not been seen since World at War (when it was called War) is Momentum. This mode is like a riff on Domination where there are five capture points in a row and both teams try and push the other back by capturing all of the points in a sort of tug-of-war. Only one point can be captured at a time, and the more captures and kills a team gets, the faster they can capture further objectives. I also had the chance to try out Hardpoint and Team Deathmatch. The former mode as well as War saw many of the capture points on the roofs of buildings, forcing you to jet-pack up to the objective in order to capture it and allowing attackers to come into the objectives from odd angles to surprise the defenders.

I got to play on three different maps when exploring these modes, all of which had a lot of verticality and a mix of indoor and outdoor areas. The first map, Riot, was centered around a burning prison that had a ground floor strewn with debris and an upper floor consisting of a network of cat-walks. Outside of this central structure were a variety of small enterable buildings and more open areas which were a lot of fun to jet-pack around. The second map, Biolab, took place in a snowy environment filled with buildings made from large crates with man-sized windows that you could jet into and out of. Despite a good mix of indoor and outdoor areas it was probably the least memorable of the three.

The final map I played on, Defender, was the largest and most open of the three, taking place below one end of the Golden Gate Bridge. It had a variety of bunkers and trenches you could run through, or stick to the high ground and jet over the gaps. This level also featured one of the dynamic map events introduced in Ghosts, in the form of a large wave that comes in and submerges a portion of the level. Although the other maps I played did not feature dynamic events, Defender signals that there will be more to come.

One thing evident across all modes and maps was the enhancement to the visuals and audio. Indoor areas like the Prison looked particularly impressive with great lighting and particle effects stemming from the fire burning inside, although the outdoor areas in some maps were somewhat less inspiring due to flat lighting. More impressive are the improvements made to the audio, with most weapons sounding very meaty compared to previous games. Combined with the improved ragdoll physics, the new audio gives most combat encounters a bit more weight and impact which made kills all that much more satisfying

Despite these improvements and changes, much of the time the gameplay in Advanced Warfare felt fairly familiar. Weapons still don’t have much recoil and you spend a lot of time running (or jet-packing) around the map giving chase to other players as in previous games. The changes made here will surely excite core fans of the series, but none of them are original outside of the Call of Duty universe; whether or not they do enough to draw in new players or veterans who have burned out on the franchise, remains to be seen. Look for Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare to launch on November 4th, 2014 for PC, Xbox 360, Xbox One, PlayStation 3, and PlayStation 4.