Set in the year 2054, Call Of Duty: Advanced Warfare adds powered exoskeletons, hover bikes and homing grenades to the world’s favourite first-person shooter. There’s a plot: Kevin Spacey is the boss of a private military contractor with an eye on world domination. You’re a tech-enabled mercenary who decides to try to stop him, an intervention that involves travelling around the world shooting people. The exoskeleton your soldier wears lets him jump long distances and hover briefly, making battles incredibly mobile, with maps designed over multiple vertical levels. Death now comes from all sorts of unexpected angles. Away from the frenetic but relatively short-lived single player campaign, multiplayer now has a Destiny-style loot-earning system, which gives new impetus to the perpetual online war. Apart from that, and the game’s artful level design, it’s business as usual for a franchise built on intense, chaotic multiplayer shooting matches. It’s possibly Call Of Duty’s best iteration since Modern Warfare.
ALSO OUT THIS WEEK
The Muppets: Movie Adventure, PS Vita
The Muppets: Movie Adventure is a platform game with five themed levels. It starts with Captain Greenlegs (Kermit), before moving on to Princess Miss Piggy, Sheriff Animal in the wild west, The Great Gonzo fighting vampire vegetables and, finally, back to Kermit, this time in space. It’s absolutely abysmal. Although aimed at children, it’s frustratingly difficult, forcing you to repeat huge chunks of its bland, lifeless levels as you perish once again, either through cack-handedness or because of the game’s often grotesquely unfair collision detection. The introductory scenes aren’t animated and none of the Muppets’ voice actors were involved, it’s devoid of humour and the characters are so small onscreen that the game conveys none of their personality. In the 90s, it used to be fairly standard to label any old rubbish with a recognisable brand to trap the unwary or very young. These days it’s unforgivable. On no account encourage it by buying this garbage.
Sony Computer Entertainment Europe, £22.99
