Call of Duty: Ghosts review: a huge disappointment

I’m just going to say this up front: I was a huge fan of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare. Infinity Ward’s first game set in the modern era made the franchise a global smash hit, and its combination of an electrifying single-player campaign and highly addictive multiplayer modes helped propel the game to record-setting sales. But then came the high-profile studio break-up in 2010, and the good-but-not-great Modern Warfare 2. Growing bored with the story and tired of the army of profane 12-year-olds that populate the game’s multiplayer, I stopped playing or following the series.

But when Call of Duty: Ghosts was announced, I’ll admit I felt a little bit of hope and curiosity. Perhaps the move away from the Modern Warfare title would herald something interesting and new coming to the series. Perhaps Ghosts could give me something like the enjoyment I got out of the original Modern Warfare game. I went into Ghosts hopeful. I came out bitter and angry.

Before we even start, I should note that I had a hell of a time just installing the game. I had pre-loaded the game on Steam, and after it unlocked, I tried to play the Single Player campaign. It began to install, and then suddenly the installation failed. An update is needed, it said. Then I had to download the entire game — all 30+ GB of it — all over again. I’m not sure if this was a game bug or a Steam bug; but based on the game’s Steam forums I’m not the only one who experienced it. It was a huge pain in the ass, and needless to say it delayed the release of this review by about six hours.

The single-player campaign: kill me now

For a triple-A title with millions of dollars and the full weight of one of the world’s biggest publishers behind it, Call of Duty: Ghosts is surprisingly bad. The game puts you in the shoes of a few different soldiers, but mostly you’ll play as Logan, an American spec-ops guy who, together with his brother Hesh, father Elias, and some other spec-ops types, are fighting against the Federation. Star Trek fans, this isn’t the Federation that you’re thinking of; it’s a coalition of South American forces that got their hands on an American space-based weapon and used it to jump-start a war that eventually saw them push their way onto US soil.

Pretty quickly, you meet up with the titular ghosts, an elite unite with an extremely cliched origin story. To make a long and stupid story short, the ghosts are meant to be the most elite, stealthy, and deadly force in the world. Together with these guys, you’ll work to stop the Federation’s plans and simultaneously track down Rourke, the game’s primary antagonist.

It’s tough to get into all of the reasons why without spoiling things, but the game’s story is terrible. It is implausible, poorly-explained, features several utterly predictable and completely cringe-worthy twists, and ends in the absolute worst possible way, leaving plenty unresolved and setting up the apparently inevitable sequel Call of Duty: Ghosts 2. It is an infuriating way to end the game, and it’s only made more frustrating by the fact that it makes very little sense.

Perhaps even more frustrating is the fact that the whole concept of Ghosts is completely wasted. If Ghosts had actually been a game about a band of outmanned, outgunned elite troops fighting back an invasion using guerrilla tactics and stealth (which is supposedly the ghosts’ forté), it might have been interesting. But in reality, there’s very little stealthy or subtle about the ghosts; almost every mission inevitably “goes loud” and although the US is supposedly being overrun, the squad is still equipped with the latest weapons and gear, including tons of air support, tanks, planes, ships, etc. You spend most of the game blasting away with gigantic machine guns in the least subtle way imaginable, and it feels like the game should have been called Call of Duty: Grunts rather than Ghosts.

The characterization in the game is also abysmal. I think we’re meant to care about Hesh, Logan, and their Dad, but their relationship is really never explored; instead, we’re just expected to care about them because they’re a family. At one point Logan and Hesh return to what I think may be their old house (which is inexplicably a suburban mansion; apparently the US military is better paid in Ghosts’ version of reality), and Hesh points to something says, “I never thought I’d see that again.” I missed what he was pointing at because I was looking somewhere else, and when I turned to look, I couldn’t figure out what he meant. That is basically the only time Ghosts attempts to suggest that any of these characters are humans who have or ever had a life outside of special forces missions. Ghosts is perpetually telling rather than showing, and the end result is that by the end of the game you won’t really care about any of the characters.