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 Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare’s campaign. It's a Call of Duty game where you fight in zero-G environments, 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.
For this first review in progress post I’m looking exclusively at that single-player campaign. Multiplayer impressions will follow soon after I’ve gotten some time with the major modes and Zombies under my belt.
In the campaign, you are the effortlessly charming Reyes, a United Nations Space Alliance (UNSA) Navy pilot with Tom Cruise-like features, 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.
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.
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.
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 seemingly no reason, 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. The American Nationalism prevalent in the modern versions of the series lacks consistency, however. The crew aboard the United Nations-run starship Retribution is proudly multinational and none of the action takes place in America, and yet soldiers in the rec room will still chant "USA!" in elation at times.
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, oxygen deprivation goes unnoticed, 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.
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'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 them (or without the ammunition to 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. 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.
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