Another year....another Call of Duty game. Here are the reviews for this game.

Eurogamer – 7/10

Joystiq – 3.5/5

Videogamer – 7/10

CVG – 7/10

NowGamer – 7.5/10

Destructoid – 5/10

IGN – 8.8/10

DigitalSpy – 4/5

USGamer – 3/5

GameTrailers – 7/10

OPM – 8/10

GiantBomb – 3/5

Gamespot – 8/10

Kotaku – ‘Not Yet’

OXM – 8/10

Eurogamer.de – 8/10

Gamestar Hungary – 8.5/10

Polygon – 6.5/10

Lazygamer.net – 8.3/10

Games.ch – 90/100

Gamefront – 74/100

Push Square – 6/10

We all know as long as COD sells 20 million copies we will see the same game over and over again but what if this game does not sell well as Blops2 ? Will that finally convince Activison to change Call of Duty or put all of the time and resources in to Destiny to compete with Titanfall ?

It still amazes me how a franchise defined a Generation with COD 4 and has ended up like this.

1) I can still see this selling well

2) Activision will run this shit into the ground because it's what they do. Call of Duty is still going to be around for the next couple of years at least.

Doesn't surprise me at all, look at what happened to Need For Speed or Tony Hawk. They didn't have as many imitators as Call of Duty, but they were the hot shit of their day and both got less and less interesting and creative as a result of the annualisation. Frankly Call of Duty has had the best of it. Black Ops 2 was pretty damn experimental for a sequel in a long-running annual franchise and I think the only game in the series I didn't really enjoy was Black Ops 1. We all saw this coming. Still, 7-8's are pretty good for the equivalent of Tony Hawk's American Wasteland.

Conventional business best practices say you cut your cash cows once they stop making profits at the level they used to. Unless these games are getting cheaper and cheaper to make, I can't see them sticking with the franchise for much longer if it doesn't top the sales of the last game.

@adam1808: Don't forget Guitar Hero as well.

The game is going to sell for sure. I don't think for one second that good (not great) reviews are going to put a chink in the Call of Duty armor anytime soon. Playing the new COD on the new consoles will be a must for a lot of people (and I will include admit myself too, if I make a last minute console purchase). They did throw the gauntlet at Grand Theft Auto 5 for breaking all those sales records, saying they "look forward to getting them back". We'll see if they do.

I'm actually a little bummed, for whatever reason I was actually thinking about picking it up this year (haven't really played since since BLOPS 1). But according to Jeff they took out Headquarters and Search and Destroy which are two of the like 4 modes that I actually played when I used to play. So I doubt I'll pick it up, especially because these games hardly even go on sale.

I just wish people still played COD4 on PS3, I'd just play this shit still. :(

No they don't. At all.

But what do you mean exactly by "ended up like this" ? You mean ended up as a competent shooter?

These aren't 3/10's we're looking at. Call of Duty is still a good-to-great experience depending on who you ask. It may have not added or changed much of the formula but what is there still gets it right a lot more than the majority of it's contemporaries. Everyone moans and complains so much about this franchise continuing to deliver a solid title each year - and what is equally disturbing as it is depressing is that the internet seems to be ecstatic about the fact that a new game came out and it only got average scores. Instead of being bummed that we only got an average rather than awesome game, everyone is cheering as some weird inner demons are satiated through the failure, or rather minor shortcoming, of a popular franchise.

Personally I haven't played Call of Duty since Black Ops which I thoroughly enjoyed. You know how much I was bothered by Black Ops 2 and Modern Warfare 3 being very similar to their predecessors? Not at all, because why would I be? Do people really think that the failure of CoD will magically burst open the floodgates and we'll suddenly drown in quality shooters the likes of which we've never seen? The entire situation is baffling. Nothing is stopping developers from creating an amazing new First Person Shooter experience. If it will be good then it will sell and be successful. It isn't CoD that is holding back the industry through it's success in iterative game design, it's the industries inability to do better than CoD that is holding everyone else back from enjoying something different.

I may be disappointed, but I'm not surprised that it turned out to just be a stop-gap title as work is done on the real next Call of Duty game.

What -really- disappoints me though is word that the game apparently greatly under-utilizes the dog, and that's just awful. I can accept a lot of letdowns in the game, but CoD had a clear win with more dog. What a missed opportunity.

@humanity: Fair enough. We will see if Titanfall can move the FPS genre forward.

That's not true at all. Even if the sales of the COD franchise stagnates, those games still make a SHIT TON of money. I mean, enormous amounts. There's a reason EA has been going after COD for so long, it's because it's the most profitable franchise in the industry bar none (maybe WOW has it beat? At least some years ago). Of course Activision would like it to sell better and better, but even if it doesn't it'll still make them a fuckton of money.

Activision will do as Activision does, they will milk this motherfucker dry. They've done it countless times before, and they'll do it again. Activision doesn't give a fuck about quality as long as the games are profitable, and COD will be profitable for a long, long time to come.

And I don't think worse reviews will do much to the sales. People who play COD MP will still buy COD. More of the same? No surprise there. Most of them won't complain about that at all. It's one of the most "review proof" franchises in the business.

Honestly I doubt it but everyone in games media seems to be very stoked so maybe the press knows something we don't because the gameplay, apart from some light parkour action, doesn't seem all that different than what we've been playing for years.

This comment leaves me scratching my head because Destiny looks like a next gen Borderlands with a more serious setting and presentation and Titanfall looks like Halo Mark 2. Which is to say I have less than 0 interest in Titanfall but am pretty much a lock to buy Destiny.

You know a game is bad when it receives an 8.8...

It won't be this game, but the next Call of Duty game that you start to see sales drop, if consumers react to this game the same way critics did. So I still fully expect a stupid number of sales for this thing.

A game that is perfect doesn't need to change. Buying 3 copies (360, PS3, Xbox One)

That is really the first time that a COD game gets called out because it is so similar to the one before. What happened here? Did Activision not pay this time?

So all of the other times that it was basically the same game were fine because....?

Like whatever I'm sure that the multiplayer will still be the same CoD multiplayer that everyone wants.

but 8.7 and 8.9 still constitute "great"

My PS4 copy should be arriving in the mail today. I think I'm going to exchange it for Killzone.

@billyhoush: a game which in contrast has changed it gameplay up dramatically in recent years.

I do wonder if they skipped this year and released this game Fall 2014 instead it would get a point bump in its score.

Call of Duty defined a generation of FPS and then sold itself down the river. At least Street Fighter IV, arguably among the top five of the most influential and important games this generation only came out with a few cheap upgrades. (4 as of 2014, 3 cheap, 1 free)

Mass Effect didn't flood the market with games either. I can't think of another game as being Call of Duty, Mass Effect and Street Fighter levels of influential, BioShock? I never thought BioShock was particularly influential, aside from audio logs being everywhere thereafter.

To be honest if it wasn't for Call of Duty 4 we may have all been better off, the surge of XP systems in multiplayer and generic shoot guys gameplay might have been less overwhelming.

It's unbelievable they are still using that fucking Quake III engine. Jesus Christ.

Jim Sterling using "bourgeois" to describe graphical fidelity. Groan.

So the dog didn't help it, huh?

Wow, I am quite surprised at the Gametrailers review. Those people seem to love Call of Duty.

Yo, you play as a dog. That's instantly worth 7/10 at least.

Straight from Jeff's review:

"The game actually rewards you for teabagging."

Whoever thought this was good idea needs to be taken into a dark room and "interrogated" under the light of a single, bare lightbulb.

Interrogator: "The numbers. WHAT DO THEY MEAN?!"

Developer: "I, what? No, I was just--"

*Brutally silenced via real-life teabagging*

In all seriousness, this isn't 2000. Who thought this was a good idea?

I am eagerly waiting for the Bombcast tonight.

Reminds me of Shadowrun. There was a viral achievement for teabagging people.

At least there's no plastic peripherals to clog up our living room this time.

Oddly enough, no one ever forced you to buy a bundle with an RC car or cheap night vision goggles.

This game will sell, yes, but will it sell as much is the question. Activision definitely doesn't want their metacritic average dipping below 80 I'll tell you that much.

I think it's pretty hard to look at Battlefield 4 and then this game and not be pretty disappointing. BF4 is probably the best looking game I have ever seen. Plus it has 64 players and all the rest. From their review, they really loved BF 4.

hahaha

As opposed to all those other games where people were forced to buy those special limited editions?

Lets be clear that this game will probably sell fine if not well but I also feel that players are bored with it.

2/6-Pressfire(SP review)

http://www.pressfire.no/anmeldelser/Xbox360/7707/call-of-duty-ghosts-enspiller

Translation:

http://bit.ly/1aplIyI

@jdh5153: This is the funniest thing I've read on this site in weeks.

Would you go so far as to say Same Giant Bomb?

It's finally happening...the review scores are falling...

This is the first CoD I'm skipping since I bought Call of Duty 4. It'll still sell like fucking crazy because of the casual crowd, but I'm hoping there's some kind of decline.

The wheels coming off CoD would be the best possible start to the new gen.

Hey, the review scores are finally in line with what that stale, repetitive franchise really is...well except for IGN's score but they always over inflate their scores even when the text review sounds like something that should be rated lower

It's a brave new world.

@humanity: One time I went into a GameStop to look at the used GBA games as they were clearing them out to see if there were any that I'd like and the clerk told me that he had hired a hitman to murder my entire family unless I preorded 3 games, at least 2 of which had to be the most expensive packages of preorder, bought a disc cleaning kit for each system I own, and subscribed to Game Informer for 2 years.

Out of all your posts that have made people scratch their head and wonder if you're serious, I think this is the best one yet. Hilarious stuff.

@jimbo: why?

It's the Simpsons of video games. It's so LCD and awful but still rakes in dumptrucks full of cash. The best you can do is be bitter about it and go play COD2.

Stockholders: I don't want the fun, creative free running game. I want the fun, creative money making game.