Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare – Beginner’s guide, tips and tricks

Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare includes the best multiplayer action the series has seen for some time. With the all-new Exo suits, combat has taken on a whole new feel with soldiers now able to jump, slide and boost their way around maps.

This means that even the most experienced of COD players have a learning curve in Advanced Warfare, so VideoGamer has put together some tips that both beginners and veterans will find useful on the battlefield.

Don’t sprint everywhere

Running head first into rooms is the quickest way to get yourself killed. Sprinting causes a slight delay in your ability to fire, meaning any enemy who isn’t sprinting has the advantage. Sprinting across open terrain is fine, but when entering objective zones or closed spaces, make sure you cancel the sprint so you’re able to bring your gun up or quickly hip fire should you stumble across enemies.

An easy way to do this is, while sprinting, quickly tap L2/LT to temporarily aim down sights (ADS), this will cancel your sprint. Also, once you reach a certain level you will unlock the Gung-Ho perk, which allows you to shoot and reload while sprinting, which is great for run-and-gunners.

Don’t chase one opponent

If you see an enemy running into a building, or get a couple of shots off but don’t get the kill, don’t be tempted to chase after them. You’re more likely to be killed by another opponent or be ambushed by a waiting enemy as you enter a room.

The best thing to do is move on and focus on finding another group of enemies, but make sure you get away from the area as soon as possible if you shot the soldier and didn’t kill them, as they’ll be looking for you.

You can still cook grenades

Although frag grenades are now fired from your soldier’s forearm, they can still be cooked by holding the grenade button (RB/R1).

Other grenades can be manually detonated by double tapping reload (X/Square), but make sure you’re not around enemies, as you’ll likely also reload your weapon, leaving you vulnerable.

Adding a scope will slow aiming down sights

Adding any sight or scope to a gun slows the speed in which the soldier brings the gun to his or her shoulder, so for players who prefer to run around the map with submachine guns, it might be worth adding other attachments to further improve the weapon.

You’ll sacrifice some range and accuracy, but if you mainly fight up close and rarely take long shots, it’s worth it.

Make sure at least one of your classes has a weapon suited for range, though, for the larger maps.

Pick your perks to suit the class

If you’re using a silenced weapon, choose perks that suit the gun. Cold Blooded, Blind Eye and the Exo Cloak ability are all suited to stealth, as are a few others.

Practice your class setup in a few matches and continue to tweak it until you feel comfortable.

If you run into an enemy, melee!

Melee beats bullets in close quarters every time (unless it’s a shotgun), and it’s a natural habit to try and back off and shoot them when you come face-to-face, but you’ll most likely die.

Try and get into the habit of meleeing any opponent you run into, rather than hip firing, especially if you have a weapon that takes quite a few bullets to take them out.

Learn the intricacies of your game mode

Each mode has its own little tricks of the trade, and it helps to stick to playing a few select modes to help learn them. If you play all modes at once, you’ll find yourself failing to adapt and not playing as well as you might expect because you won’t pick up on these little tricks.

For example, in Kill Confirmed, it’s not worth chasing down tags of your own kills, because it leaves you vulnerable to other enemies. You’ll still gain the same amount of XP if a team-mate grabs the tags, so focus on killing others and grabbing tags which are close to you, rather than running across the map to collect your kills.

In Team Deathmatch, it helps to understand the the basic starting moves of players on each map. Knowing where players run at the start on each map will help get early kills.

Don’t trust random teammates

Don’t trust team-mates you don’t know to watch your back, especially in objective modes like domination or hardpoint. While they may be covering an exit, without communication via a headset you don’t know when they’ve been killed, so a shot in the back is always likely. Try to work as a team, but don’t rely on random players too much to help.

It’s always more efficient to play multiplayer with friends and work as a team, but don’t cluster together, as you’re susceptible to grenades and ambushes from opponents.

Change the look sensitivity

If you’ve ever found yourself dying at the hands of an opponent who spins round impossibly fast while you’re still facing the wrong way, it might help to change your look sensitivity.

Don’t go all the way up to the max straight away, as you’ll find yourself feeling motion sick and struggling to keep up, instead gradually up the sensitivity over the course of several matches until it is at a speed you feel comfortable with.

Some players can go to the highest setting, others feel more comfortable around six or seven, it’s up to you, but the default setting is often too slow to be useful, especially when aiming down the sights.

Don’t reload after every kill

It’s instinct to try and reload after every kill you make, but often you’ll have enough bullets left in the clip to take on another enemy or two. Reloading immediately after downing a foe leaves you open for any other nearby enemies, and you’re helpless to stop them filling you with bullets, so try to break this habit.