Call of Duty: Ghosts sits at the front of a decade-long series of first-person shooters. The Call of Duty series has evolved significantly since 2003, but Ghosts fails to deviate much from its previous installment, perhaps signaling the decline of a popular series.
At first play, Ghosts’ single player campaign brings thrills and incredibly interesting moments, but these don’t carry on throughout the campaign. From fighting in space to controlling your dog partner in stealthy missions, it would seem the game uses variety to increase the fun of the single-player experience. However, this variety becomes very limited and almost feels like a gimmick used for a level or two and then forgotten.
The single-player mode lacks a strong, coherent story to connect to the latter half of the campaign, subsequently making the game feel weak by its end.
Recent Call of Duty games spent time on a deep and engaging multiplayer, and Ghosts delivers a fun and fast-paced experience on that front, as well. Multiplayer allows for multiple customized characters in your squad who all level up differently. The player unlocks different guns and perks through this level up, and it also helps find similarly skilled players to play with.
Out of the new game modes added to multiplayer, a personal favorite is called Cranked. In this mode, the player is rewarded with faster speed and other bonuses when they kill an opposing player. The kill also starts a timer of 30 seconds that causes the player to explode unless they get another kill and reset the timer.
The standard modes such as Team Deathmatch and Free-For-All are as fun as they always were in previous games, but Ghosts cleans up and streamlines the interface in multiplayer, and overall the experience is much smoother and faster.
On screen, Ghosts looks great and keeps a high and stable frame rate throughout. Even during the most hectic moments of multiplayer, the game’s frame rate does not noticeably fall, which helps keep the action moving.
A new mode seen in Ghosts is the extinction mode. This mode is reminiscent of the zombie game modes found previously in Call of Duty but with a few changes.
The main goal of the extinction game mode is either with one or four players guard a drill as it destroys alien nesting hollows. Aliens of varying sizes will try to attack the drill and players can repair any damage done as they fight off the aliens. Successful kills give players money, which they can use to buy new guns and different bonuses during the fights.
Extinction is most fun with a full party, and Ghosts allows for online parties or parties on the same console and TV. When using a full party for extinction, the real strategy comes as different players have to take on different roles in the defense of the drill.
However, extinction doesn’t feel as fast as the old zombies game mode and the drill rarely gets damaged enough to cause panic. The majority of player deaths in extinction come from being overrun by the aliens or running out of ammo which makes drill defense an afterthought.
Overall, Call of Duty: Ghosts improves many features that are persistent throughout the Call of Duty series. The gameplay feels like an incredibly polished version of the previous installment and is always fun and well done.
At times the game can just feel like a new skin on an old game and not even a particularly creative skin at that. Though previous games had interesting changes from Black Ops and its 1960s setting to Black Ops 2 and its futuristic setting, Ghosts just feels like an upgraded version of a Call of Duty seen before.
