WW2 #34: Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare
Press F for the subtlety of a Sledgehammer
This review was originally posted on March 2, 2020.
Initial release: November 3, 2014
Platform: PC, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, XBox 360, Xbox One
Developer: Sledgehammer Games
Finally, a game that doesn’t make me feel like shit for playing it. In this turn-based strategy game for the Game Boy Advance, you — shit, wait, wrong game, sorry
[SFX: sound of rewinding]
After bailing out Infinity Ward during the Modern Warfare 3 development fiasco, Sledgehammer Games would make their first solo foray into the Call of Duty franchise with Advanced Warfare, a seeming direct response to the direction Ghosts went in, a darkly cynical story of the future (continuing the trend from Ghosts and Treyarch’s Black Ops II) set in the 2050s. Despite the name, it has nothing to do with the then-recently concluded Modern Warfare trilogy, and that’s perhaps for the best, as Advanced Warfare generally attempts to avoid the jingoistic pitfalls of Infinity Ward’s output. It’s a breath of fresh air after Ghosts, I can tell you that.
Sledgehammer instead use the future setting to make a commentary not only on American imperialism but also the war industry, PMCs and — perhaps unintentionally — how capitalism plays into all of this. It’s an interesting take that’s unfortunately overshadowed by the memes. Well, that and Kevin Spacey is in it. While this game was released a few years before allegations that he once sexually assaulted a teenage boy, (to which his response was to pick the worst possible time to come out as gay,) everything he’s in feels a bit tainted now, you know? But good news — he’s the villain. Of course he is — a big-name celebrity taking one of the biggest roles in a game like this rarely turns out to be one of the good guys. So naturally you get to kill him at the end. There’s some catharsis in that.
The game opens with North Korea attacking Seoul (why? this is one of the several questions I have about the game, as in why North Korea and where did they get the military tech for it? This isn’t ever really explored or explained — perhaps they expect the player to just assume China is behind it?) You play Mitchell, a US marine, six months out of basic and equipped with an EXO suit — an advanced exoskeleton that grants the wearer a number of capabilities. Though North Korea predictably loses, Mitchell’s friend Will is killed and he himself loses an arm. Later, at the infamously meme-tastic funeral scene, Will’s dad offers Mitchell a job at his PMC, Atlas Corporation, arguing that the US military doesn’t do right by its veterans. Which, okay, fair, we pretty much throw our veterans under the bus, especially if they express any political opinion that isn’t blind patriotism. The rest of the first half of the game is a sort of cross section of Mitchell’s career with Atlas, repeatedly tangling with an ecoterrorist group that, partway through the game, triggers meltdowns at nuclear power plants across the western hemisphere and introducing a sort of semi-apocalyptic status quo where parts of the world are just uninhabitable now.
When they finally catch up with the terrorist leader four years later, he bestows some important information that turns the story into a conspiracy thriller, and though it’s a predictable course for the plot to take, it’s an extremely unsubtle jab at PMCs.
See, here’s the thing. Jonathan Irons (Kevin Spacey) is in this to make money. And when he gets word that the ecoterrorists plan to melt down reactors worldwide, he lets it happen — so that Atlas can swoop in and save the day. Four years after the terrorist attacks, the world has been changed pretty severely — and Atlas is now doing business with most of the governments of the world, providing security at ports, power plants, you name it. They’re the biggest standing military on earth — a superpower. When word gets out that Atlas developed a bioweapon that can potentially target specific ethnicities, he rants to the UN general assembly that they’ve all done a terrible job running the world, and that he’s in charge now — because they’ve outsourced everything to Atlas anyway. In a later rant, he talks about how the US has continually waged war for a hundred years, and it’s brought no peace, no progress, just more war, and so he declares war on the United States itself. The worst part is, he’s not wrong… but that’s the problem. This is a decent — if shallow — examination of the relationship of PMCs to national armies, and how much of a hold capitalism has over a nation’s ability to defend itself or maintain order. Irons’ comments about the US military — a century of war with nothing to show for it, and simply throwing away the people it throws into the meatgrinder when it’s finished with them — are spot on. But is a PMC — war for profit — really the solution?
The game makes a pretty emphatic “no,” but who knows whether we’ll see what Sledgehammer thinks the alternative is. Their next title was supposed to be a sequel, but after the hostile response to Infinite Warfare Activision mandated a back to basics approach with WWII instead. An Advanced Warfare sequel has yet to materialize, with Sledgehammer instead producing Vanguard, an early Cold War title, as well as the third title in the Modern Warfare reboot because everything is the same all over again.
At any rate, this is a major update on the traditional Call of Duty gameplay, which had gone relatively unchanged since the beginning. In addition to the standard Call of Duty gameplay, your EXO suit gives you a variety of different abilities, though these change depending on the mission. Your performance during the game is also tracked; as you rack up kills, headshots, grenade kills, and so on you earn points that you can spend, RPG-like, at the end of every mission on a variety of skills such as faster reloading. It’s an interesting touch that would be nice to see expanded into something greater.
Honestly this game is a blast to play. The new abilities allow for a greater range of gameplay styles, letting you bounce all over the battlefield to shoot the shit out of the bad guys. The new weaponry, futuristic versions of real-world hardware, feel great to use. The game has you jetting all over the world over the course of a number of years, with a variety of missions from a hunt for ecoterrorists through an empty, flooded Detroit to an open-ended stealth mission in Irons’ personal estate in Bangkok to flying an actual fighter jet. It’s a great-looking game graphically as well; while the cutscenes were obviously ahead of the curve at the time, the in-engine visuals are nothing to sneeze at. Call of Duty had long had an emphasis on great visuals and things are no different here. It’s still the same old Call of Duty, big, dumb and loud, with an over-emphasis on QTEs, but military sci-fi always has the potential to be entertaining (when it’s not openly fascist, hi Robert Heinlein.) And it’s nice to finally play something that isn’t either capitalizing on real-world misery, or straight up imperialist propaganda.
