'Call of Duty 2' and its Soviet campaign focused in on the battle for Stalingrad, something that 'Call of Duty: World at War' also did very well, albeit with better results. 'Call of Duty 3', for example, took the tanks gameplay system and crafted the Polish campaign around it, dumping players into the Battle of the Falaise Pocket. World War II games, by and large, took major battles from the era and funneled them as best they could into the game's mechanics. This might seem like a cop-out to lump the three original games together into one heading, but really, they're very much the same game with better graphics and richer mechanics than actively adding anything different. 'CALL OF DUTY' / 'CALL OF DUTY 2' / 'CALL OF DUTY 3' That said, it had its moments and the story - while riddled with inconsistencies and cliches - did build up to something close to a satisfying finish. Yet, none of it could connect in the same and it may have simply been a case of trying to do too much rather than necessarily trying for something new. Sure, the familiar elements were there, you knew where the story was headed and the action felt like it was working on a bigger, better scale. It's a shame, because there could have been something original here, by making it a more stealth-focused game than what ultimately turned out to be 'Black Ops'-lite.įor what had come before in 'Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2', the threequel felt like every other threequel you'd see at the cinema. Although there were some interesting and well-made missions - 'Federation Day' sticks out, for sure - there wasn't enough in 'Call of Duty: Ghosts' to make it memorable beyond this. You'd think with those kind of credentials, he'd be able to come up with something a bit more original and compelling that what went on here. If you can believe it, the storyline for 'Call of Duty: Ghosts' was written by Stephen Gaghan, the man who wrote Steven Soderbergh's 'Traffic' and directed ' Dolittle', Robert Downey Jr's first post-Marvel movie. Come to think of it, the only thing 'Black Ops III' had going for its single-player campaign was the 'Nightmare' scenario. About as dire as the 'Black Ops' shingle got, the third installment tried to rope in RPG elements with absolutely no thought to how it'd work in a fast-paced, first-person shooter environment and ultimately never added anything to it. When 'Black Ops 4' launched, leaving out a single-player campaign was probably the best thing they could have done with it. To be fair, by the time 'Black Ops III' rolled around, you could tell that Treyarch were tacking on the single-player campaign to fulfill a generally held contract with first-person shooters. Sure, you might have had those power-suits to jump around the map, but really, it made so little odds to how interesting the game was that it ultimately ended up being more annoying than exciting. Not only that, the whole story was just dumb as hell and not one of the missions remotely stood out from the other. His face looked like some kind of skin-robot mask, and the voice acting sounded like a guy who was counting out his earnings with each and every syllable. Never mind it's got Kevin Spacey in it, the fact remains that having Kevin Spacey in a 'Call of Duty' game was just plain weird. At least you got the remastered version of 'Modern Warfare' with it.
Not only that, the clunky and flat dialogue from all the actors concerned - Kit Harington, that guy from 'Generation: Kill' and 'Mad Men', Dano from 'Love/Hate' - just adds to a misshapen part of the franchise. You pilot fighter jets in space, sure, but the control system never once goes above feeling like you're on a rail shooter. The storyline doesn't really make much sense, and the fact that it tries to take the game into space adds almost nothing to it. While 'Infinite Warfare' is often cited as the punching bag of the franchise, there's pretty good reason for that - it really is terrible. Obviously, multiplayer is a completely different aspect of the game, so for this, we're focusing in on single player and is why we're leaving out 'Black Ops 4' altogether.
With the rebooted 'Call of Duty: Modern Warfare' hitting shelves next week, we're looking at the best single player campaigns of the franchise. You had games like 'Call of Duty: Ghosts', 'Black Ops', and then you had the more sci-fi elements like 'Advanced Warfare' and 'Infinite Warfare' - not to mention the multiplayer aspects of 'Black Ops 4' on top of that. Since launching in 2003, ostensibly as a competitor to 'Medal of Honor', the 'Call of Duty' franchise has gone through some pretty significant changes.