Advanced Warfare Multiplayer review

Advanced Warfare released a week ago as the latest iteration in the never-ending CoD franchise, promising a new take on the series’ worn-out formula. When it comes to CoD, it’s always going to be about the multiplayer, but does AW right the wrongs of the mediocre Ghosts?

I’ve played every game religiously since CoD4 on the PS3, so I thought I’d take the plunge once again, but I was still wary. COD: Ghosts was a mess, plagued with far too many issues to mention, but worst of all, it just wasn’t fun any more. Despite my misgivings, Advanced Warfare is definitely a massive improvement on Ghosts, but it still has issues of its own.

First off, the guns lack power. It regularly takes half of an AK12 clip to take an enemy down, and most guns suffer the same fate, which can be highly frustrating when there’s more than one target. 

The killstreaks are incredibly uninspired and they can take some getting to, as most take a large amount of points to get. CoD: World at War had a simple 3, 5 and 7 killstreak system. Getting a simple UAV without hardline can take four kills in team deathmatch, and there’s a noticeable lack of streaks throughout a lot of games. 

Infected only has a 12-man limit instead of the usual 18 which pretty much stops me playing, the spawn points for Ground War are a mess, and the exo perk system is near useless, apart from the stealth, which hardly ever works anyway.

Grenades of all varieties are weaker than wet tissue, the throwing knife, (throwing ball?) is pathetic and the tactical insertion takes an age to set. The new loot system is okay, (far better than Ghosts which wanted you to pay to customise your soldier) but it seems to be completely random. (At least you can trade unwanted junk for extra xp.)

Despite all of this, the game is still great fun, and the boost-jumping is much more than just a gimmick. It changes the entire landscape of the game, as you’re now forced to keep an eye on every rooftop, with the level design complementing the new changes with plenty of vantage points. The jumping also helps to curb camping, as it’s so easy to cross and flank at speed. Every location usually has 2-3 points of entry, so you can never be entirely safe if you’re trying to hide. It makes the game more exciting, with less of the corner-hugging seen in prior releases.

The class system is decent, as it keeps the point-based system first used by Black Ops II. You’re supposed to be one point away from having everything you need, and it’s very adaptable depending on your style of play.

Most importantly, for the first time in years, they seem to have sorted out the connection issues that plagued the series on the PS3, as the PS4 edition allows me to connect to all of my friends without a single error so far. Of course it should always have been this way, but it’s better late than never.

Overall, this is probably the strongest COD experience since MW2, but beneath all the hype it’s pretty much the same old game as before with a better range of movement and jumping. If you can get your friends together, it can be great fun, but it was never going to be as ground-breaking as they promised. They were going to have to tinker with the stale formula at some point, I’m just thankful that they haven’t broken it.

Overall 6/10

(This was written after the recent update.)