Why gamers hate Call of Duty but critics love it

Please note:-  This isn't really a review. Its just a post describing my disappointment.

I was an early fan of the Call of Duty series. I really enjoyed the first few games, namely Call of Duty + United Offensive expansion, Call of Duty 2, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare and Call of Duty 4: World at War (couldn't play call of Duty 3 because it isn't available for PC). These games provided pure adrenaline rush, due to their ability of making the gamer feel like he was actually fighting a war.  I didn't play any games in the series after that, because I knew that they were clearly milking the franchise with their 'copy-paste' strategy. Anyway, after a gap 5 years, I picked up this year's 'Ghosts' for the PC because I wanted to give my once-beloved franchise another go. BIG mistake.

The major flaw I noticed, common to both multi-player and single-player, was how 'weak' most guns sounded. Even on my powerful 5.1 PC sound system, most guns 'clicked' rather than 'thudded'. This is ridiculous, especially since this is a war-themed game (where weapon sounds contribute a lot towards immersion). With respect to the multi-player alone, I found the supposedly 'new' games modes quite disappointing. Professional reviews are going on and on about how 'innovative' the multi-player is, but all these new modes are just rehashed versions of tried-and-tested formulas. Also, the addition of playable female mercenaries in multi-player serves no practical purpose, except maybe providing eye candy for a certain class of male gamers (obviously I don't belong to that category). There was a certain amount of hype about this game implementing destroyable environments in multi-player (like in Battlefield games), but it turned out to be just that - a hype. Some environments are indeed destroyable, but they always get destroyed in the same way irrespective of different player actions. For example, the rubble of a destroyed structure will ALWAYS fall in the same direction, even if you have hit it from different angles during each game. This means, the developers hardcoded this behavior just to give players the illusion of environments being destroyable. Although the multi-player is pretty decent, its nothing to write home about. There are much better multi-player games out there for sure.

Coming to the campaign, the less said about it, the better. I really missed quick-saves, but can't really complain about that because no multi-platform game ever has a quick-save feature anymore, except action-rpg hybrids like Mass Effect, Deus Ex etc.(consoles are to blame for this, but this matter is beyond the scope of this post). That apart, the campaign seemed like an interactive movie rather than a game. It is so scripted, to the extent that I can't open a door or pull a lever in my sight, until the game tells me to do that. There are games which create very immersive experiences in spite of being heavily scripted (like the Half-Life games), but in this game, the ridiculous amount of scripting actually ensures that there is no immersion at all. The artificial intelligence of both friends are foes is mediocre at best. My team-mates seem to take a LOT of hits before dying, and they also hardly inflict any significant damage to the enemies. And the enemies are so dumb and lifeless. I wonder why almost every professional review says that the Ghosts campaign is 'lengthy and memorable'. Nothing could be far from the truth. There are no more than a couple of memorable stuff in the entire single-player game, and a 5-6 hour campaign isn't what I would call 'lengthy'. My time to beat the game on 'normal' was 5 hours 6 minutes, which seems to be on par with the average playtime mentioned on www.howlongtobeat.com. The entire campaign is far too easy and monotonous. The basic formula for beating the campaign is this - Pop out of cover to shoot, get back to cover to regenerate health, rinse and repeat until all enemies are dead. The addition of the dog Riley, which the developers claimed to be groundbreaking, is nothing more than a gimmick which works occasionally but often falls flat. Lastly, war-themed games are supposed to be as realistic as possible even if the story takes a back-seat. But in this game, the gameplay is anything but realistic, and even the story seems so generic and dull.

After beating Crysis 3, I thought there could be no game which was more boring than that. But COD Ghosts is slightly more boring than Crysis 3 as well. At least Crysis 3 had gorgeous visuals to compensate for 10% of the boring gameplay, but COD Ghosts's visuals are nothing extraordinary. Extremely disappointing. Also, the huge difference between average critic scores and average user scores (68/100 vs 19/100 on metacritic as of now) does make gamers suspect that Activision actually pays critics to write favorable reviews. I just can't seem to understand how games like these manage to sell millions, or if the sales figures too are fabricated just to maintain the franchise's reputation. If it does sell millions, then I suppose a good chunk of those sales are due to 12-year old kids for whom their parents buy the games. It has reached a point where, even if Activision packs frozen dog turd in a plastic bag and markets it as 'Call of Duty - Riley Edition', people would still buy millions of those. I'm disappointed that I spent my hard earned money to buy this crap at full price (especially since Activision are too greedy and price their games 15-20% more than the standard price), but I'm PETRIFIED to think about the million ways in which such games could seriously harm the gaming industry. If people keep buying millions of copies of highly watered-down games like these, then almost every developer would start making similar games. I mean....why would they even consider making innovative games, when it is possible to sell millions by just releasing the same game with a fresh coat of paint every year?

If someone were to reverse-engineer the Call of Duty games from past few years and obtain their source codes, I'm sure that a majority of the code would be the same across all these games (with maybe some minor modifications). The only way this insanity would end, is if people stop buying such games. But I don't see this happening any time in the near future.