Above: Players can soar through the air thanks to the exoskeletons.
Map variety
One of great things about the maps is that they emphasize vertical warfare. Now you can fight in three dimensions, with players jumping to higher levels to get a height advantage.
I’ve enjoyed the Riot map, which is set in an abandoned prison in the wake of a riot. You start on opposite ends of a rectangular building. When you go inside, the environment is blood-red from the lingering flames. The central route takes you right into the two-level cell block with a wide open space in the middle. It has a tunnel to the outside in the middle of the cell block. Outdoors, you can fight on several levels and bounce among the buildings. You can fight in the outdoors, or get into melees in the narrow hallways inside.
I also liked the Defender map, which is set on the coast near San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge. It is a green place by the seashore with a bunch of old concrete bunkers. It has a circular building with a large arena inside. But much of the fighting takes place in the abandoned bunkers at short range. The big in-map event is a tidal wave that hits the bunkers, flooding the low-level areas.
Above: Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare exoskeleton combat.
New modes
Multiplayer has 12 modes. I like sampling them by playing Ground War, a 9-vs.-9 battle that rotates among the different modes. These include familiar ones such as Team Deathmatch, Hardpoint, Capture the Flag, Search & Destroy, Kill Confirmed, and Domination. The Domination mode, where your team has to secure and hold three flags on the map, is my favorite.
Two new modes include Uplink. In this one, a neutral satellite drone drops onto the map. Teams fight for control and try to carry it to the opponent’s Uplink. When you hold the drone, you can use your weapons. But when you are beset by the enemy, you can toss the drone to the enemy, and it disarms them for a moment. Then you can pull out a weapon and shoot the enemy.
Another new mode is Momentum, where you fight to control multiple territories on the map. There are five points, and the more of them you control, the easier it is to gain more.
Other random things you’ll like: a virtual firing range where you can test newly assembled weapons and kits.
Above: Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare Scorestreaks are now part of the Create A Class system.
What you won’t like
Death, and lots of it
You’ll find that a lot of expert players will bounce around in the air and shoot you from above. Advanced Warfare has no shortage of ways to die. You can get waylaid at a doorway, knifed from behind, sprayed with bullets from a hip shot, sniped at long range, pummeled from an aerial Scorestreak, or shot by someone that you’ve wounded. Sometimes, your score will be horrible and you’ll feel like quitting. Some of the players out there are too fast and too good. It helps that the matchmaking system puts you with other players of similar skill. Even so, most matches have a wide range of skill, and few soldiers will be sitting ducks for you.
All of this requires some mental fortitude. If you feel like you’re not good, it can be hard to soldier on.
A small minimap
The minimap is a great way to get some awareness of what’s happening around you. But the map is so small and hard to read that you’ll find it of little help. You can actually figure out what is happening by the 3D sound more easily than you can by looking at the 2D minimap.
Scorestreaks are still out of reach
I have a horrible time racking up lots of kills in a row. I’m lucky if I can achieve the lowest level, or four kills in a row, to get the unmanned aerial vehicle. These rewards for kill streaks are dubbed Scorestreaks. But I must have a spectacular match to get anything cool. From afar, I’ve admired Scorestreaks like the Bombing Run, XS1 Goliath (where a big mech invades the battlefield), and the ultimate, the Paladin attack aircraft.
Since I couldn’t earn these things in regular multiplayer, I headed over to the Combat Readiness Program, which gives you random Scorestreaks for free, to get a taste of the higher value Scorestreaks. But I sure wish they would bring back the streaks where it added up your kills over the course of multiple matches to get you your rewards.
The old stuff is gone
If you really liked the older, more realistic, modern-day Call of Duty, that’s long gone. You have to get used to the new world order.
Above: The snowy compound of Biolab is one of the new maps coming to Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare.
Conclusion
As I noted with my review of the single-player campaign, Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare is worth your time. It delivers with its story, great acting, dialogue, the realistic facial animations, cool weapons of the future, and the welcome change in pacing from combat missions to stealth missions. And multiplayer makes it better.
The variety of options is enormous in Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare multiplayer. Sledgehammer and its helpers at other Activision studios have done a great job giving you lots of reasons to keep coming back to multiplayer combat. I suspect I’ll be enjoying Advanced Warfare’s multiplayer for quite a while, at least in comparison to Call of Duty: Ghosts. I’ve already figured out a groove for continuous improvement, and that’s important.
When you die as much as you do in Call of Duty, you must have something to look forward to. And that’s dealing death right back to the other players.
Score: 89/100
Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare was released Nov. 3 for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, and PC. The publisher provided GamesBeat with an Xbox One copy of the game for the purpose of this review.