Yau

A franchise that has gotten cluttered and lost a bit of focus. This installment is a decent attempt with plenty of additions to make it a worthwhile, but none of them are polished or without faults. Campaign is super average. I like the ambitious level design where every mission has a different theme and play style. Good concept but the execution left a lot to be desired. Many elements felt forced, the zombie level in particular seemed like an interactive teaser trailer for the zombie mode. Giving you a nice free-roam level, but quite a bland sandbox that doesn't really give you the freedom you initially think. The pacing of everything is also really off and slow. Most of the campaign just doesn't feel like a Call of Duty game. Maybe just a touch too experimental that needed a lot more sauce. Really also have to mention my personal distaste for the voice actor for Frank Woods. It has become really grating, and I wish the voice actor would just use a tone that's a little less forced. Multiplayer, pretty much same old. Not really much quality of life updates and the voice chat is really ruined by spamming. You're either spending the first minute of every game muting the people who can't shut up, or you turn off the chat entirely and it feels like you miss out on a big aspect of the social side. Hackers are still plentiful sadly, I do appreciate the company's efforts recently but it's become quite a problem sadly. Zombies is really nicely fleshed out. I'd like to see it dial back a bit on the silliness and maybe have a game mode or customisation options to limit the shenanigans and perhaps play by the "old rules" as a game mode. Warzone is a bit of a coin flip. Quite buggy at times, with prox chat popping off for no reason for example. Would love to see more map innovation instead of these goofy cartoon skins that really feel out of place. I would love an even more casual game mode like DMZ, which is probably my all-time favourite thing from the franchise in recent memory. Overall, I was pleasantly surprised with this installment of the series but only because my expectations had dropped so low.