Call of Duty: Ghosts Review

After closing the Modern Warfare trilogy, Infinity Ward needed a new premise and picked one that never coheres: a South American federation has crippled the United States, and a family of special operators moves through the rubble. The problem is not the setup but the total absence of a hook. Riley the German Shepherd got the marketing and amounts to a scripted takedown sequence. The zero-gravity and underwater missions are novelties that end before they teach you anything.

The villain is introduced, explained and dispatched without a scene anyone remembers. Multiplayer swapped killstreaks for a squad-points economy and larger maps that drained the momentum this series runs on, and players noticed within a week. Technically it straddled two console generations and satisfied neither, arriving on new hardware looking like a slightly cleaner version of the old one. Nothing here is broken, which is precisely the complaint. It is the series at its most procedural, executing the annual checklist without ever making an argument for why this year needed a game.