Well, I managed to snag a BETA token for CoD5 on the 360. It's very much a clone of CoD4 when it comes to the game engine and all the controls etc are pretty much the same. However, as of my experience thus far I am left feeling that it is good, but not the greatness that came with 4.
It basically allows you to play three multiplayer maps in a number of game modes including team death match, lone wolves etc. It has the same ranking system, with perks, challenges etc. You can get up to rank 11 before it caps, but you open a number of initial challenges that will allow you to unlock extra parts for your weapons. However, I do have a gripe here in that in CoD4 completing weapon challenges either got you scopes etc, or camo depending on if you were completing number of kills or number of headshots. In CoD5, it still has both sets of challenges, but they don't always necessarily unlock soemthing and it looks like camo is non-existent in this iteration as far as I've seen.
The weapon's themselves are actually fine. I was worried it would be a bit of a void going from the cool newer weapons back to 1940's fare, but it doesn't feel all that different. I imagine with some additions like the flame thrower which you can't try in BETA, or the Molotov cocktail which you can. :- it will balance itself out to feel like the same fun variety. And some of the new perks will add a variety of skills depending on players preferences. For example the last stand perk now not only leaves you on the ground with pistol in hand, but allows you to revive fellow teammates who are in the same condition and alerts you to them with a big medical cross on the overhead map. And the kill streak bonus's are as fun as ever. You can't very well call in F-18's or a helicopter to terrorize the enemy as punishment for them having let you killed them so much. Instead, the three bonus attacks come as a reconnaissance plane, just like the UAV really, and a mortar shelling that puts the air strike to shame my mercilessly pounding an area for a good long period of time and with great effect of huge plumes of dirt thrown into the air. But the best is the replacement for the helicopter in a lot of 6 dogs, pertaining to your country i.e. German shepherds for Germany etc. who chase down all of you enemies and dive for their throats. Yes the same dogs that were hunting you in first player in CoD4 now work for you and in great numbers. There is nothing more rewarding than following your dogs who home in on your enemies only to see some hidden fool get pounced on while you assist with machine gun fire. Think if the helicopter could follow you into buildings and every last little crevice in a map. There is also something so satisfying about knifing an enemy dog or three as they jump for your throat and surviving instead of just pouring as much ammo as you can into the side of a helicopter.
In the three available maps, one allows the use of 2 ever respawning tanks, one on either side of a fairly round arena style map. The driver controls the main canon, while a second passenger can ride atop and use a chaingun. However, if no other passenger gets in the driver can switch himself to the chaingun should he so choose. The tanks are not entirely invincible either. Many of the people I played with carried missile launchers or sticky grenade demo packs that have remote detonation, plus a number of grenades. Sometimes I lasted a while in the tank against those less experienced, sometimes my joyride ended very quickly. It depends on the skills of the players. An additional fun twist is that the chaingunner is more or less in open air and can be picked off his tank with a decent aim. I myself managed to kill an enemy chaingunner from inside a bomb-smashed building's second floor through a pane of glass with my bolt-action sniper rifle as they drove between some cement slabs a few hundred yards away. (my favorite kill so far)
I think the biggest downfall so far though, and what leaves me with a feeling of good, but not great, is the level design. While this might just be a symptom of the fact that only three of many more levels are available to play, I don't love any of them. In CoD4 everyone has maps they LOVE. After playing this it makes me truly realize just how great and how much time and thought went into CoD4's levels. When playing I often felt like I was in a feasible real world location. In CoD5 while there are many cool new aspects, most of the levels feel like arenas instead of real places. The three available as sort of previously mentioned are a circular German/Russian bombed out city area with some cargo containers and trains around, a rectangle/squarish Japanese palace type of place with lots of stairs and walls throughout, and a ocean side Japanese fishing village which is mostly rectangular and contains a lot of straw/bamboo huts with bridges and water streaming down to the ocean which you can only wade in a bit. Each has its ups and downs. The somewhat openness and the tanks of the first make it fun. The angles from which you can attack in the second is great for sniping or close quarters combat. And the fun factor of the third with sneaking underneath huts or wading in the tall grass in the water sneaking up on an unsuspecting group of enemies makes this feel the most genuine to reality. I think this one is my favorite of the three.
However, the largest suffering points for all three is that they are absolutely filled with clutter. The best way I can relate this is to the airbase map of CoD4 with the tons of concrete walls and missile launchers etc just thrown down everywhere but minus the huge amount of flat space and few nice sniping spots. Each of these levels just has stuff strewn all over the place. Whether its just tons of straw huts, or bombed out refuse or perplexing staircases it feels like they've been overdone. It's like the designers said, we've got 10 feet of open air here lets thrown a turned over rowboat in to make it that much more closed up. It's hard to find any good amount of space that's even remotely wide open. Everything is always next to something, so you end up having to mostly fight with rapid fire weapons or shotguns as you are constantly running face first into an enemy. Even the level with the tank, more time is spent driving around/through obstacles than fighting the other tank or blowing away enemies in the open. The biggest problem all of this causes is your team and the other team just get spread out everywhere.
There's no coming from one side to get to the other side like the cargo ship in 4 or any of the maps in 4 really, you start in one spot and your lucky to start there again, its just crazy all over the place, and the closest I can relate it to more like a halo type of match. start in a random spot then jump into the arena and see who's health bar lasts the longest. I didn't feel like any of the levels had strategy to them. There was a couple of sniping spots but they were all so easily reached by anyone that they turned hands every few minutes. It didn't have the same fighting to make your way to the top like the three story building in CoD4 and they were precariously located in the middle area of the maps instead of opposite ends. It was like a clown show at one point when an enemy was in one elevated snipers hut. A teammate of mine climbed up the ladder and killed him then an enemy in tow killed my teammate then i killed the enemy as i was coming up a ladder behind him. Its more zany go everywhere kill spree than strategically move from place to place as it felt in CoD4. What I would love to see is some great wide open field with foxholes dug in it like what took place in most of Europe.
Anyway, don't get me wrong. it is good, and I will be buying it. I just don;'t think I'm going to rush out to do so. I'll be more interested to see what Infinity Ward has up their sleeve for the 6th one, I think a Vietnam one or a futuristic one could be a lot of fun. In the meantime this is fun, but its not CoD4 if that's what you're expecting.
It basically allows you to play three multiplayer maps in a number of game modes including team death match, lone wolves etc. It has the same ranking system, with perks, challenges etc. You can get up to rank 11 before it caps, but you open a number of initial challenges that will allow you to unlock extra parts for your weapons. However, I do have a gripe here in that in CoD4 completing weapon challenges either got you scopes etc, or camo depending on if you were completing number of kills or number of headshots. In CoD5, it still has both sets of challenges, but they don't always necessarily unlock soemthing and it looks like camo is non-existent in this iteration as far as I've seen.
The weapon's themselves are actually fine. I was worried it would be a bit of a void going from the cool newer weapons back to 1940's fare, but it doesn't feel all that different. I imagine with some additions like the flame thrower which you can't try in BETA, or the Molotov cocktail which you can. :- it will balance itself out to feel like the same fun variety. And some of the new perks will add a variety of skills depending on players preferences. For example the last stand perk now not only leaves you on the ground with pistol in hand, but allows you to revive fellow teammates who are in the same condition and alerts you to them with a big medical cross on the overhead map. And the kill streak bonus's are as fun as ever. You can't very well call in F-18's or a helicopter to terrorize the enemy as punishment for them having let you killed them so much. Instead, the three bonus attacks come as a reconnaissance plane, just like the UAV really, and a mortar shelling that puts the air strike to shame my mercilessly pounding an area for a good long period of time and with great effect of huge plumes of dirt thrown into the air. But the best is the replacement for the helicopter in a lot of 6 dogs, pertaining to your country i.e. German shepherds for Germany etc. who chase down all of you enemies and dive for their throats. Yes the same dogs that were hunting you in first player in CoD4 now work for you and in great numbers. There is nothing more rewarding than following your dogs who home in on your enemies only to see some hidden fool get pounced on while you assist with machine gun fire. Think if the helicopter could follow you into buildings and every last little crevice in a map. There is also something so satisfying about knifing an enemy dog or three as they jump for your throat and surviving instead of just pouring as much ammo as you can into the side of a helicopter.
In the three available maps, one allows the use of 2 ever respawning tanks, one on either side of a fairly round arena style map. The driver controls the main canon, while a second passenger can ride atop and use a chaingun. However, if no other passenger gets in the driver can switch himself to the chaingun should he so choose. The tanks are not entirely invincible either. Many of the people I played with carried missile launchers or sticky grenade demo packs that have remote detonation, plus a number of grenades. Sometimes I lasted a while in the tank against those less experienced, sometimes my joyride ended very quickly. It depends on the skills of the players. An additional fun twist is that the chaingunner is more or less in open air and can be picked off his tank with a decent aim. I myself managed to kill an enemy chaingunner from inside a bomb-smashed building's second floor through a pane of glass with my bolt-action sniper rifle as they drove between some cement slabs a few hundred yards away. (my favorite kill so far)
I think the biggest downfall so far though, and what leaves me with a feeling of good, but not great, is the level design. While this might just be a symptom of the fact that only three of many more levels are available to play, I don't love any of them. In CoD4 everyone has maps they LOVE. After playing this it makes me truly realize just how great and how much time and thought went into CoD4's levels. When playing I often felt like I was in a feasible real world location. In CoD5 while there are many cool new aspects, most of the levels feel like arenas instead of real places. The three available as sort of previously mentioned are a circular German/Russian bombed out city area with some cargo containers and trains around, a rectangle/squarish Japanese palace type of place with lots of stairs and walls throughout, and a ocean side Japanese fishing village which is mostly rectangular and contains a lot of straw/bamboo huts with bridges and water streaming down to the ocean which you can only wade in a bit. Each has its ups and downs. The somewhat openness and the tanks of the first make it fun. The angles from which you can attack in the second is great for sniping or close quarters combat. And the fun factor of the third with sneaking underneath huts or wading in the tall grass in the water sneaking up on an unsuspecting group of enemies makes this feel the most genuine to reality. I think this one is my favorite of the three.
However, the largest suffering points for all three is that they are absolutely filled with clutter. The best way I can relate this is to the airbase map of CoD4 with the tons of concrete walls and missile launchers etc just thrown down everywhere but minus the huge amount of flat space and few nice sniping spots. Each of these levels just has stuff strewn all over the place. Whether its just tons of straw huts, or bombed out refuse or perplexing staircases it feels like they've been overdone. It's like the designers said, we've got 10 feet of open air here lets thrown a turned over rowboat in to make it that much more closed up. It's hard to find any good amount of space that's even remotely wide open. Everything is always next to something, so you end up having to mostly fight with rapid fire weapons or shotguns as you are constantly running face first into an enemy. Even the level with the tank, more time is spent driving around/through obstacles than fighting the other tank or blowing away enemies in the open. The biggest problem all of this causes is your team and the other team just get spread out everywhere.
There's no coming from one side to get to the other side like the cargo ship in 4 or any of the maps in 4 really, you start in one spot and your lucky to start there again, its just crazy all over the place, and the closest I can relate it to more like a halo type of match. start in a random spot then jump into the arena and see who's health bar lasts the longest. I didn't feel like any of the levels had strategy to them. There was a couple of sniping spots but they were all so easily reached by anyone that they turned hands every few minutes. It didn't have the same fighting to make your way to the top like the three story building in CoD4 and they were precariously located in the middle area of the maps instead of opposite ends. It was like a clown show at one point when an enemy was in one elevated snipers hut. A teammate of mine climbed up the ladder and killed him then an enemy in tow killed my teammate then i killed the enemy as i was coming up a ladder behind him. Its more zany go everywhere kill spree than strategically move from place to place as it felt in CoD4. What I would love to see is some great wide open field with foxholes dug in it like what took place in most of Europe.
Anyway, don't get me wrong. it is good, and I will be buying it. I just don;'t think I'm going to rush out to do so. I'll be more interested to see what Infinity Ward has up their sleeve for the 6th one, I think a Vietnam one or a futuristic one could be a lot of fun. In the meantime this is fun, but its not CoD4 if that's what you're expecting.
