Call of Duty is an age old game that released in (October 29th) 2003, creating an iconic series for both PC and console users. As shown in the picture above the most recent game was released on the 4th of November, unless you bought the legacy edition which comes with one of the series’ most iconic games - Call of Duty: Modern Warfare. My experience with Call of Duty actually starts out with the first game and playing from the perspective of soldiers fighting in World War II all from my home computer. Transferring from PC to consoles, I played Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (Call of Duty 4) on the Xbox 360, started my Xbox Live career 7 years ago with the release of Modern Warfare 2, and continued to play all of the games from then to the present (excluding Advanced Warfare).

The first thing to worry about when it comes to purchasing a video game (for me) is the price.

Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare comes out to $59.99 plus tax and the Legacy Edition of said game comes out to $79.99 plus tax; however, if you were lucky enough to snag a copy of the game during Black Friday, the Legacy Edition comes out to $59.99 plus tax. Reading it from my receipt the game was $64.41. Not too bad for a purchase that probably rounds up to at least $84.

What’s the gameplay like?

Infinite Warfare is a game created by one of the three developers of the Call of Duty series, Infinity Ward. This developer created two of the iconic “masterpieces”, Modern Warfare and Modern Warfare 2. One would expect gameplay to be similar; however, these games from 2011 to 2016 have jumped around when it comes to said gameplay. The most dramatic change actually emerged with the release of Advanced Warfare (by the same developer) in 2014 with the addition of the Exo Suit.

If you clicked on the hyperlink for Exo Suit it’ll lead you to a video that goes in depth about the mechanics of the Exo Suit - I really wish I could explain more about it but my information really stems from “it appears in that single game and carries onto the following releases.”

The reason why the following releases continue to keep this Exo Suit (changing the name with the transition to newer games) is to follow the trend of moving forward into the future of warfare. Infinite Warfare takes another step into the future by taking it so far that it goes into the realm of starships (when I first saw this while playing I immediately thought: Star Wars), lightspeed travel, and the colonization of other planets within our solar system. I never really found the usage of Exo-Suits really useful in most of the games that apply this mechanic - the implementation is mainly to make the game feel faster, more futuristic, and give the player more options towards advancement and fleeing when it comes to combat situations.

Single Player

The single player story takes place within the perspective of an Earthborn character by the name of Nick Reyes in the year of 2080 (doesn’t seem so far, huh?), an ace pilot that transitions from fights with his boots to fights in space from his Jackal an earth based fighter spacecraft. To me it feels just like any futuristic first person shooter does - there are energy weapons and ballistic weapons to use with the disposal of your enemies. With the introduction of robotic counterparts, it’s told to the player that robots are weaker against energy weapons and so I trudged through the whole campaign with only an energy LMG and an energy SMG. Space fighting is really interesting because it’s based on lock-on and having to only move the analog sticks slightly as you aim ahead of enemy spacecraft or hover around destroyer class spaceships holding the right trigger and switching whenever the weapon in use is overheated.

Although the game follows the whole: player goes out to destroy antagonist and ends up learning from his mistakes, there’s the addition of side missions. Side missions generally occur along with the progression of the story missions. Being the completionist I am, I sought out to finish all of the side missions before continuing on with the story. Side missions are basically this: player is given briefing about mission which goes along the lines of, “we destroy this, this will cripple enemy forces” or “we protect this, this will give us an advantage.” and then the player hops into their fighter spacecraft and fights the enemies either with said spacecraft or by shooting people with energy and bullets. But along with the shooting and killing the game introduces a new mechanic that tracks enemy awareness while sneaking and features it with a side and story mission where you depend on it. A very nice addition; however, not really utilized enough.

Multiplayer

Multiplayer follows the same procedure of most FPS games including classic modes such as team deathmatch, mercenary team deathmatch, capture the flag, and many, many more. Weapons are very different giving the player a new grasp on hybrid weapons, weapons that can be altered mid-game; for example, an SMG that can turn into an assault rifle. These hybrid weapons are the RPR Evo (ballistic SMG that can turn into an assault rifle), EBR 800 (energy sniper that can turn into an assault rifle), and the ERAD (energy SMG that can turn into a shotgun - only with the epic type, though). Along with different weapons, there are different RIGs, a spinoff from Black Ops III’s version of specialist classes, in which the player can choose one from six with their own special abilities in order to enhance their multiplayer experience. THEY ALSO ADDED A GRENADE TIMER (NEVER WILL I EVER OVERCOOK GRENADES plus this really applies to primary grenades).

Another new feature to mention is the health system. While shooting at your enemies you can see how close they are to death and then wonder why your last bullet didn’t deplete their last pixel of health. While going over health, there’s also an increased time between health regen from your last fight. In the original Call of Duty releases your screen would fill with strawberry jelly and within 2-3 seconds your screen would be clear. In Infinite Warfare it takes 3-4 seconds between engagements to regenerate health which is a lot of time depending on different situations.

Zombies

A feature introduced in the Treyarch-developed Call of Duty games has been included in both Advanced Warfare and Infinite Warfare. The zombies mode in Infinite Warfare provides a new story with four different characters that take on zombies in an amusement park for the first map. Each has unique traits such as different melees (knife animations), different outfits, ethnicities, and troupes. There are more zombies maps to come with a release of a different map pack every projected four or five months - which could give rise to newer weapons in both multiplayer and zombies.

Conclusion

Although the single player experience was pretty repetitive it felt somewhat rewarding on hardened difficulty. I enjoyed the space dogfight sequences and had fun shooting at robots. The multiplayer transition was pretty hard because I haven’t touched a multiplayer game in a while due to complications with school internet. The features and little aspects make the game a lot different and test the waters for changes to the multiplayer environments for later Call of Duty releases. I don’t play zombies much which is probably why I don’t have much to say about it. If I were to rate this game I would give it a 7/10. I would recommend people to play this game; however, if they want to play it for the story just rent it and still rent it for the multiplayer. I’m just hoping for a Modern Warfare 2 release somewhere in six years.