Call of Duty Infinite Warfare - Xbox One Review

Posted on: 2016-11-23

Our rating:

Call of Duty Infinite Warfare was a pleasant surprise as it has one of the best campaigns I have played in the series since the original Black Ops game, with tense and emotional drama.


Call of Duty is generally the punching bag of the internet and honestly I don’t understand why because as games they’re functional, with great graphics coupled with over the top and entertaining campaigns. When Infinite Warfare was announced back in May it became one of the most disliked Youtube videos ever and it racked up over 3 million dislikes for the reveal trailer. Is the game bad? No it’s not. It has one of the best singleplayer campaigns in the series and an entertaining 1980’s themed zombie mode.

Call of Duty Infinite Warfare - Xbox One Review

Call of Duty Infinite Warfare takes place in the far future where the human race has colonised the solar system, however the people of Earth are up against a rebellion called the Settlement Defence Front who want to eradicate them. The SDF attack the UNSA forces in Geneva during a parade where all their ships are in one place and everything goes to hell and they end up only have two large scale ships left in their fleet. The captain of the Retribution is killed in action and the main character lieutenant Reyes becomes the new captain. The campaign is excellent with likeable and funny characters especially your robot sidekick Ethan, it can get emotional in parts as well especially near the end of the game as each of your squad is killed off.

 

The gameplay is a departure from the other games where you can engage in space battles in your ship shooting down other ships in the same air space as you. You will also fight in zero gravity which changes the dynamic of the standard boots on the ground combat as you have to predict where your enemies are going to float etc. There are standard Call of Duty moments where you are on the ground running around like a mad man where you slide on your knees as you fire dual pistols which is still satisfying. It’s the parts that move away from the standard formula that are more interesting and entertaining as you can tell they have put in a real effort into this campaign.

Call of Duty Infinite Warfare - Xbox One

It’s a shame that they didn’t utilise this setting for the multiplayer because the multiplayer is a carbon copy of Black Ops 3’s multiplayer even down to the specialist classes except they call them “Combat Rigs” instead. The combat rigs basically have special abilities like the specialist where they have over powered weapons that charge over time. They could have been really creative with the multiplayer by having space battles or zero gravity modes which could have shaken the formula up, but no they played it safe and it was a huge disappointment.

 

The zombie mode is a lot of fun and I don’t say that lightly as I usually can’t stand zombies. It is set in a 1980’s theme park where you are under the direction of a horror film maker; it’s cheesy and funny especially when David Hasselhoff chimes in as the DJ. It’s random, whacky and extremely entertaining.

Call of Duty Infinite Warfare

Graphics are superb but I always expect that with Call of Duty games and they always deliver when it comes to presentation. The environments are varied with areas such as the sandstorm riddled surface of Mars to the cold tundra of Jupiter’s moon. Facial animation is fantastic with perfect lip syncing coupled with the excellent voice acting from the entire cast especially Ethan with his quips and jokes. 

 

The only problems I had is that some enemies in the campaign especially the robotic grunts took too many bullets to put down and they could kill me with only 2 or 3 shots and this was on normal difficulty. Another problem is that sometimes the game struggles to detect when I wanted to wall run which resulted with me falling to my death.

 

Call of Duty Infinite Warfare was a pleasant surprise as it has one of the best campaigns I have played in the series since the original Black Ops game, with tense and emotional drama. It is shame that they did not utilise the setting in the multiplayer as it is copy and paste from Black Ops 3. I would play this game for the campaign and zombies alone as the multiplayer feels uninspired and boring. 

3/5

Call of Duty Infinite Warfare - Xbox One Review - 365Bristol



Article by:

Sam Coles - a.k.a. The Bristolian Gamer

Sam has lived in Bristol all his life. A keen cyclist he speeds around the city but video games are his bread and butter. Whether the old Nes and Snes games or the XBox One and Playstation releases he loves them all. Sam runs his own gaming blog called Bristolian Gamer where he had been reviewing indie games, doing retro reviews and venting his anger at the industry when it does wrong since 2010. Sam joined the 365Bristol team in December 2014.