Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare multiplayer is a Darwinian jungle (review)

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Get used to it. In the multiplayer combat of Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, you are going to die. With its first stab at Activision’s annual franchise, Sledgehammer Games has created a lethal Darwinian jungle.

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The only way to survive and win (as the war computer WOPR in the film WarGames once stated) is not to play the game. Set in the years 2051 through 2061, Advanced Warfare gives you some serious firepower and capabilities as a superhuman soldier. You can use an “exoskeleton” to boost-jump your way to the top of a building. You can punch someone across the room with a pneumatic fist.

But the weapons and gear that make you stronger also make survival harder when others use them against you. While you can do more killing in this Call of Duty, you’re also doing a lot more dying, particularly if you’re an average, older player like me. Fortunately, Advanced Warfare delivers quality multiplayer worthy of a Call of Duty game. That’s important, as 40 million people play Call of Duty every month, and multiplayer is the main reason they keep playing year round. It is a key part of why Call of Duty has sold more than 175 million copies and generated $10 billion to date.

That’s the fate I’ve resigned myself to after playing a couple of weeks of multiplayer in Advanced Warfare on the Xbox One. Yes, dear reader, I have died countless times in order to bring you this information.

I have a 0.42 kill/death ratio in Advanced Warfare. For every four times I shot someone, I died 10 times. In last year’s Call of Duty: Ghosts, I had a 0.37 ratio after 22 hours of play. Back in 2012, I had a kill/death ratio of 0.37 in Call of Duty: Black Ops II. In 2011, my kill/death ratio was 0.43 in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3. That is, of course, a pitiful performance. But I enjoy it nonetheless.

I’m getting a little bit better in Advanced Warfare. I credit that in part to getting better access to more lethal weapons and accessories. I have, for instance, a laser sight on my submachine gun that I can use to target enemies while firing from the hip.

What you’ll like

Combat Readiness Program

If you haven’t learned the basics, Advanced Warfare has a place for “noobs,” or new players. The Combat Readiness Program is a new multiplayer mode that makes noobs feel good about themselves and slowly gets them acquainted with regular multiplayer. Like one of this year’s other sci-fi shooters, Titanfall, the CRP mixes artificial intelligence bots with real noob players in the same matches.

After I played the Combat Readiness Program and logged more hours in the regular multiplayer, my kill/death ratio rose from 0.34 to 0.42. That’s quite an improvement.

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In this mode, you play anonymously. You have no voice chat, so people can’t put you down. When the round starts, you may choose a preassembled weapons kit that is tuned for a particular kind of player — like sniper, heavy weaponry, balanced, or “run and gun,” where you hustle along with a submachine gun shooting at everything.

In normal play, you can customize your kit, or class, so that everything is just right. But as a new player, you can easily mess up your selections. If you play a run-and-gun style with a submachine gun, you should also have the perk that makes you run faster. The developers have preselected features that fit well together in the Combat Readiness Program.

If you get a certain number of kills in a row, you get prizes like a remote turret or recon drone in regular multiplayer. But most noobs never last long enough to get a string of kills, so they don’t get to learn how to use most of these Scorestreak prizes.

Mastering the exoskeleton

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The armored, high-tech exoskeleton you wear is what gives you superhuman power. You can vault up walls, scale buildings, and hang in mid-air. You can dodge enemy attacks. Melee strikes are also quite powerful. You can launch one against an opponent and send them flying against the wall. You can even use the Exo boost to land on top of an enemy from above.

You can also use your Exo suit to give you special abilities such as a shield, extra health, or the ability to hover. But the great thing about the suit is that it doesn’t slow you down. You’re still playing at 60 frames per second, and you can move fast in your suit.

Weapons upgrades

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Perhaps the greatest creation by Sledgehammer’s developers is the “threat grenade.” When you toss it, it sends out infrared signals in all directions and maps images of all of the enemies in the area, including those who are hiding behind walls or barriers. If you have a powerful enough weapon, you can shoot right through those walls.

This helps get rid of “campers,” or the cowardly players who stay in one spot, like behind a door, and kill whoever runs by. Campers are very unsportsmanlike.

I liked trying out the different scopes. The Laser Sight works well with a submachine gun as it helps you aim when you fire from the hip. The Thermal scope uses a heat map to show you the red-hot outlines of enemies, but it can be slow. The Target Enhancer scope has a built-in threat detector, which means it will highlight an enemy in red when you are looking down the scope in a given direction. It will even see that enemy through walls, much like the threat grenades do.

Huge amounts of customization

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Previous games used a “Pick 10” resource system that enabled you to choose 10 different things to throw into your soldier’s combat loadout. Some of these items were expensive, like your primary weapon, and could cost a lot. So you could only load up so much gear. With Advanced Warfare, that system has now become “Pick 13.” With the extra points, it’s not so hard to carry two primary weapons.

I carry, for instance, an ASM1 submachine gun and an ARX-160 assault rifle. I add a Laser Sight to the submachine gun and a Target Enhancer scope to the rifle. I also add a foregrip to improve the handling of the submachine gun. I have a couple of Scorestreaks to rain hell on the enemy when I’ve got some good kill streaks. And I have a Semtex or Variable grenade.

For Perks, or special abilities that cost one point each, I use Lightweight to make my soldier run faster. I use Peripherals to increase the size of the absurdly small minimap. And I use a Blast Suppressor to hide my Exo jumps from enemy minimaps. For my special Exo ability, I use the Exo Cloak, which makes me invisible for a few seconds.

That’s about all I need to go into battle. If I’m going to run-and-gun, I use the submachine gun. If I have to take long shots, I pull out the rifle.

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In between the matches, you receive new Supply Drops, which let you customize the look of your character or try out a new weapon. The options for weapons are in the hundreds. And as for clothing, there are also lots of options for things like kneepads or gloves.

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.

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.

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.

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.