Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare Review

Sledgehammer got three years instead of two and spent them on a single idea: put an exoskeleton on everyone. Boost jumps, dashes and hover let you take a fight vertically, and the map design finally has to account for a player who can leave the ground at will. It changes the feel more than any addition since regenerating health, and while the community argued about it for the rest of the decade, the arguing itself was a sign of life.

The campaign builds a private military contractor into a superpower and gives its head a genuinely good actor who does real work with a thin script, which lifts the whole production above its peers that year. The story still resolves into a corridor and a boss fight, and the exo abilities are doled out mission by mission rather than trusted to the player. Multiplayer supply drops introduced the cosmetic and weapon lottery that would define the next decade, for better and mostly worse. As a reset it worked. As a game it is good rather than great, and it seems to know it.