After completely skipping Ghosts, A black friday deal convinced me to pick up AW with some of the bonus I got from work last week. I will post videos of me sucking it up in this topic along with my thoughts on the game.
First off, I would say this game is worth a red box rental for the campaign. The story is cliche and the characters are flat, but the overall gameplay is fun and the visual show pieces are a blast to watch or play through. Sledgehammer gets a pass as this is the first campaign they've done solo. The only major fail is the non lethal grenades. You have 3 different types Threat/EMP/Stun that can be toggled by holding down the non lethal button and hitting the reload button. The problem is when you hold down the non lethal button you are already committed to throwing, you cannot opt out of it, and in an intense situation where seconds may matter you're forced to toggle between 3 choices that you may accidentally pass up. With all the new intricate details on the HUD, they could have came up with a better way to change the non lethal outside of having to commit to a throw. Thankfully this is a campaign issue only.
After playing a few rounds of multiplayer today, I am impressed with the map designs. There is a lot of verticality to them and they aren't camper friendly from what Ive seen. I've come up across several campers and gunned them down with out them ever knowing what happened. That being said, its very hard to stay alive in this game so far. The videos channels of COD fanatics were not lying about that. You can't get double kills if you are seen first by both enemies, its not going to happen. Guns kill a bit slower than I'm accustomed to for a COD game, but it does allow for an escape, especially with the new exo dodge that I am getting use to. The double jump is similar to Titanfall, but less refined. Its a bit more clunky feeling, but that's not a bad thing. Most of the score streaks are manually controlled, as you'll see as I fail at them miserably in the video below. This is a very much welcomed change. Players no longer can get on a hot streak by stacking up 3 lethal AI controlled streaks and make everyone else miserable on the map. Everything seems to have a counter as well. There is even a palpable mic attachment for guns that will pick up suppressed fire close by on your mini map. They've also force you to choose between speed reload, and stealth... which irks me because reloading is a bit slow in this game.
This is my second match ever... Still getting use to the jumping aspect. I fell off the map 3-4 times like an idiot and somehow I still went positive. I would have had a pretty good K/D that match if it wasn't for that.
In this video I got put on the other team... and I find out why they were dominating so much. The system hack is a cool concept, but seriously? The big ass symbol has cost me kills and caused me to die because I can't see wtf is in front of me... of course most of the time there is an enemy in sight, and the giant logo cuts off my concentration. That needs to go away, the hack is powerful enough as it is.
https://community.callofduty.com/thread/200912705
It seems they regularly patch exploits and glitches... this is definitely a change from previous games.