Call of Duty®: Advanced Warfare - Gold Edition

I truly love this game & respect the hard work you guys at SledgeHammer put into this game,
However Its 2015 and We want DEDICATED SERVERS.

Edit: it's now 2017 and there is still no dedicated servers, they promised this before the release of the game, never forget.

I was going to recommend this game initially, but one month after release and the developers seem to have gone silent on us, no more updates or messages on the steam community. I am going to split this review into two parts, single player and multi player and talk about the pros and cons. Here we go:

The Single-player campaign - Length: 6-7 hours - Difficulty: Average ( I played about 8 hours of it )

So we get another typical cod campaign, the story is great, altho not at the same level as Black Ops 2 was, your choices do not impact the ending, in fact the campaign is preety much all linear. Graphics are the best the franchise has ever seen, and so are the audio effects, also gameplay has been refined to be extremely fast paced and enjoyable. Kevin Spacey's performance is incredible, at some points the engine is struggling to keep up with his performance, making you wish Sledgehammer would have used live action cutscenes instead of CGI. The campaign is overall a great experience, if not a bit too short, they could have expanded on it and made it longer, it has some plot holes and rushed moments.

Pros:
+ Cool story
+ Fast paced gameplay
+ Great graphics and audio design
+ Kevin Spacey, Troy Baker give incredible performances

Cons:
- No decisions to take
- Completely linear
- Very short, you can finish it in a day or two
- Lots of plot holes

Overall SP score: 7.5/10

The Multi-player: ( I played about 15-20 hours of MP )

The core multiplayer experience is great, the freshest cod we got in years, the amount of guns is lower than in previous cods but they compensate by adding a lot of customization to your character and weapons, game uses the Pick 13 system from BO2 but improved, you get 13 points that you can use to create the kit that suites your playstyle most, even the killstreaks are customizable. The exosuit completely changes the gameplay, making it extremely fast paced and way more enjoyable than the past cods. At this point, you might ask, what's there to hate about it....and here comes the bad part. They done ♥♥♥♥♥♥ it up again.... Devs promised dedicated servers prior to launch, went completely silent about it after launch, they also keep ignoring all the problems most of the playerbase is having, continuing to push updates that balance a few guns and fix a few prestige issues...really? At this point they seem to have completely forgotten about everyone who bought it, playerbase is dying by the day, already at 5k ppl online/day from the 30k+ on day one and they just don't care about it.

Pros:
+ Exo-suit completely changes the way multiplayer works
+ Great graphics and audio design
+ Preety cool future inspired weapons
+ Lots of customization

Cons:
- Terrible post-launch support from Sledgehammer Games
- No dedicated servers ( game uses p2p connection resulting in horrible host advantage that ruins the game )
- Connection issues on a lot of maps, most people can't ever join certain maps cause of sync issues
- Extremely fast progression, I got to level 50 in less than 10 hours ( not that much of a con, still...)
- Cutting off features to sell them as DLC later on ( also splitting the community )

Overall MP score: 6.5/10

FINAL SCORE: 7/10

Game was run on:

CPU: AMD Phenom II x4 955 3.6Ghz
GPU: GTX 760 2GB
RAM: 8GB DDR3 1600Mhz
SSD: Kingston v3 128GB

Settings: 1920x1080 res, all settings maxed out, FXAA

FPS for SP:
Minimum: 60
Average: 75
Maximum: 100+

FPS for MP:
Minimum: 45
Average: 65
Maximum: 91 (capped at 91 -.-")

Game has FOV slider and a lot of options making it run very well regardless of system.

As you can see it runs way better than Ghosts did, that alone being a huge improvement.

Lowest price atm: 24 euros/30 dollars/20 GBP

TL;DR: Game is better than Ghosts but lack of dedicated servers and connection fixes mainly cause of no support from Sledgehammer Games results in a terrible multiplayer experience. Campaign is cool but very short. I'd avoid it until they keep their promises and fix the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ game. Sorry for the wall of text :)

(TL;DR can be found at the end of the review)

Call of the annual Duty - Underdeveloped Lagfare

I've been a huge fan of the Call of Duty franchise when Modern Warfare hit the stores. For years I've been playing pretty much nothing else and dumped hundreds, if not thousands of hours into it. I also played Modern Warfare 2 & 3 but it wasn't the same for obvious reasons. Since then I wanted to buy another CoD that could bring back the nostalgia. Then Advanced Warfare comes along and actually gets a lot of good reviews and I get curios: Another studio, a longer delevopement time and fast dropping prices.

I bought this game for 20 euros and pity the fool who preordered it for 60 euros and thought that he would get a good game. I lowered my expectations as far as possible and still I got disappointed. I really can't see why so many people like this game and where all the good reviews come from. Okay, better than Call of Duty: Ghosts. But being better than something really bad doesn't make it good. You can polish a piece of ♥♥♥♥ as much as you want, you can gold-plate it and wrap it in present paper but it still stays a piece of ♥♥♥♥. On to the actual review:

Singleplayer:

I enjoyed the campaign far more than I would have thought. The story is alright, yet very predictible, the characters ain't great (except Kevin Spacey for the sake of being Kevin Spacey) and the AI is still far away from being "intelligent". But all the new gagdets they could introduce with the futuristic setting make up for it easily. On top of that they added a ton of vehicles stages. It's the kind of singleplayer you would expect from a CoD game.
You won't miss anything if you don't play the campaign as it is very forgettable but it's a fun non-brainer if you want to pass 6-7 hours. Sadly it has absolutely no replay value. Less cutscenes, quicktimes events, press f to do action x, following or waiting for npc's to do one specific action and a certain minimum of freedom could have done the trick there.


But let's be honest. We all want the game for the multiplayer ;) And this is where ♥♥♥♥ hits the fan.

Multiplayer:

• you need to connect to the Advanced Warfare services first and appearently it only works when it wants to
• No dedicated servers. No dedicated servers. NO DEDICATED SERVERS. NO ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ DEDICATED SERVERS!
  (┛◉Д◉)┛彡┻━┻
• P2P connection system: One player hosts the server which pretty much always results into huge lags for the other players. On top of that the host gets a big advantage and the gameplay suffers a lot under it. It always feels like you have to shoot 2,5 magazines into the enemy while you get killed instantly. If you watch the killcam you often realize that most of your shots didn't reach the enemy or never were fired. Heck, the game even introduced a competitive ranked mode. Why would I want to play that with all the connectivity issues?
• Ping is displayed as bars, it's like your car's speedometer says very slow, slow, fast and very fast
• no server list, you have to join a matchmaking queue for a specific game mode
• alarming low amount of players, decreasing pretty fast. The game is a month old and could die quite soon unless the die-hard fans stay
• if nobody plays the the gamemode you want to play you are stuck in the lobby, which will be pretty much always the case unless you play TDM or Domination
• no servers = no server costumization: Most gamemodes are way too short. Before you really get into match and feel what certain enemies play like the match is already over. An average TDM is about 5 minutes just to be stuck in the lobby again for at least 1 minute.
• matchmaking tends to make really unfair teams (upper half from last game against lower half)
• quite a lot of cheaters around, no servers, no VAC-bans
• the guns all feel boring and soulless, many of them seem to be pretty unbelanced, also there is only a little amount of weapons
• everyone is jumping and spraying with assault rifles or shotguns, SMGs and heavy weaponary are pretty much not viable, snipers and grenades are quite useless unless you play a objective-based game mode because of the insanely high mobility
• the jumping makes the gameplay way too hectic and needs either some ressource or a cooldown that limits it (as soon you touch the ground you can doublejump and dash easily followed by a groundslide, which every player does as soon he gets hit and can't react by killing the shooter leaving you with two options: Either fall back to reload or chase him and get picked by his teammates or himself.)
• low amount of maps which aren't very fun. Playing TDM for about 30-40 minutes can give you a full rotation
• the community is still awful, feels mostly like playing with a bunch of degenerates who think a good KDA is as much as an achievement as curing cancer, AIDS and Ebola while having a bad KDA or using certain equipment makes you the anti-christ himself. Turning off voice chat is obligatory. Turning off chat is sadly not an option.

We are in the year 2015 and in my eyes it is shame that such a game could reach the market. Did anyone test the pc version? I think not or they got paid quite a lot for a positive review. It seems to be normal today that the marketing recieves x times more money than the development department. Publishers need to stop ruining the game experience ultimately for profit and let the studios make fun and technically enjoyable games. Either cancel the CoD series for PC or publish the game for consoles first and one year later release a proper pc port... It's like the game keeps screaming "PLAY ME ON CONSOLE!" or is whispering "Please... Please, kill me".

TLDR: Singleplayer is alright, but you won't miss anything. Multiplayer feels like a very bad fusion of the generic CoD gameplay and Quake, Unreal Tournament, Crisis or Titanfall with massive lags making it an unenjoyable gaming experience. I wouldn't pay more than 10 euros for this game, maybe 15 with a season pass.

Some big patches could get the game into the right direction but I highly doubt it as they probably focus on getting the DLCs out.

__________________________________________

Update #1 (15/01/12): So here they are. The costumization DLCs. For at least 2€ each you get nothing but a few cosmetic items that add nothing to the gameplay. I wanna play a shooter and don't dress up a doll or paint my weapon. Way to go...

Update #2 (04/02/15): Nearly 3 months have passed since release and now a 1,6 gb patch comes around, adressing a few things I mentioned: Several weapons get buffed, while the ones that are really broken stay overpowered, matchmaking and connectivity were improved a bit, a security and anti-cheat programme is added and several maps got improved for different game modes. I'll have a look into it but I don't think this patch will turn me around. Also it is overdue and should have been released a long time ago.

Update #3 (24/02/15): Connectivity really has improved but is still far beyond every other shooter using dedicated servers. The lag is horrible. I also met quite a lot of aimbotters on the double xp weekend. Only way to get rid of them is leaving the game and hoping not the be matched again with them. You can report them ingame but I am not sure if this results in a ban for them. I think there is a fun game hidden in this mess but as for now the devs don't seem to be interested in reveiling it and I can't recommend it.

I won't do any further updates on this review unless something drastical comes along. So much potential thrown away and abandonded it just hurts...

Moral of the story? Don't buy any CoD titles for PC!