Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare hands-on: Uplink to the past?

Alright, I’ll be honest: I was thinking of not bothering with Call of Duty this year. After playing every game since 2007, I’d pretty much had enough, punch-drunk from years of man-shooting and starting to feel that playing online was for 12-year-olds and their superhuman kid reflexes. Ghosts was so-so. Plus: I wasn’t really feeling the whole exo-suit vibe Advanced Warfare was going for, and Kevin Spacey’s futuro-collars were putting me right off. So when I trundled off to the multiplayer preview event, I wasn’t expecting much.

What I found was a COD game that has thought about making some substantial change to its core, without ruining that undeniable (if waning) Call of Duty magic. The exoskeleton is key to this: it makes play feel more athletic, but also conversely slower while you’re on the ground, and there seemed to be more of a focus on strategy than simply run and gunning.

Maybe this is because you’re a lot more nimble, being able to boost jump, slide, and dodge. It sounds counter-intuitive – if you can move so adeptly, then surely you’ll take more risks? And yet the opposite applied, at least in this preview session – if you move much more dynamically, you’re more likely to draw attention to yourself and therefore get dead. The dodges and slides were used tactically, bringing a new dimension to Call of Duty (if not shooters in particular).

The best mode for showing off how effective these new abilities can be was new addition Uplink. If Ghost’s Blitz gametype was akin to American Football, then this is essentially basketball. A data drone (the ball) must either be thrown or dunked into the opposition’s uplink portal, while you prevent them from doing the same. Dunks are worth two points, throws just one. It’s a lot of fun, and can get utterly tactical: do you aim to dunk all the time for more points, or grind out wins from afar? Do you man-mark the star player on the other team (the ball carrier is always flagged on your HUD), or go for a zonal defence?

You can’t fire when you’re holding the ball, but you can throw or pass it. I managed to kill a rival player after throwing him the drone, robbing him the chance of firing his weapon.

Uplink was a lot of fun, and in my brief playtime I probably had more fun with it than in the entirety of Ghosts. That said, with Call of Duty you never really know what it’s going to be like until it hits the streets (beating game journalists is like stealing food from children: fun, but nothing you should really take too much pride from). It’s back on my radar, then, for now. Until the next time I play it, bask in the non-glory of me defeating a bunch of people who are paid, somehow, to be terrible at games.