You can see it––Call of Duty: Ghosts (CoD:G) took a big step back. Gone is the photo-realistic style of the Modern Warfare series. Gone is the high-contrast look that made the franchise appear so vibrant, like battle footage shot on video with a handheld camera. It's gone. Absent. Nevermore to appear, it seems.
The sharp graphics of Modern Warfare were a savior for Call of Duty fans. After another muddy, cartoon-like Treyarch release, Infinity Ward would be back to save the day. Only, now Infinity Ward has done the same thing. If the CoD:G engine is actually new, it was apparently built on the groundwork of the Black Ops series. With the Infinity Ward brain trust fired, chased off over withheld bonuses, or poached by better studios, Treyarch seems fully in command of the Call of Duty series, even on its off-years.
Which would explain the shelving of the highly-useful Spec-Ops mode, found in Modern Warfare 2 and 3, for a Zombies clone: Extinction. Fortunately, Extinction plays more straight-forward than CoD Zombies, actually inviting newcomers and not putting them off with a lot of hidden passages, monkey boxes, and switches that need to be thrown ten miles away. However, the mode is nothing new, playing to me like a cross between Left 4 Dead and, strangely, Borderlands. Which are both good coop experiences, but offer a lot more creativity in their worlds than CoD:G can manage, with its nighttime setting, nondescript town, and generic alien bugs. (How did these feral creatures with the long fingernails actually reach earth? In intergalactic pods? Don't they want our help to get back?)
I've yet to read a game reviewer call out the regressive graphics of CoD:G. Instead, I read Activision boilerplate about the "new engine," and endless comparisons over the game's various versions, as if there is a marked difference in looks. By all accounts, there isn't. You get the same muddy, cartoon-like graphical style on each platform, current and new.
Another thing you won't read in an official game review: the multiplayer is a joke. "More of the same competent multiplayer from Call of Duty" is absolutely not true. (To quote the Joker telling on how-I-got-these-scars, "Not. One. Bit.") You wonder for how long a game reviewer actually plays the multiplayer that he pronounces competent. A doctor sending a dying man home with an apple would be doing as bad of a job as I've read in these official reviews.
The multiplayer is laggy. Think about it, laggy, with 500,000 players available to be matched up? We won't go into where the dedicated servers are, because that's well ... not worth our time. The game's lag, and lag compensation techniques (which, for the uninitiated, can be seen in full glory on YouTube) mean, you get shot with two bullets, but in the killcam, your killer shot ten or fifteen into you. It means, running around a corner, and dying from bullets that are supposedly curving around with you. (Actually, no, the game didn't register that you went behind cover yet.)
Forget these mistakes, even. The entire multiplayer philosophy has apparently changed, on purpose. You die hardcore-mode fast. The guns are so powerful, you don't need a sidearm. You don't need tacticals. You don't even really need care packages anymore. Turrets? The gun in your hands is more powerful. Want to use five or six perks at a time? Sure. Collect 'em all! In a wrongheaded move to add melodrama to every gun battle, Infinity Ward amped up the power and death on the battlefield to where you can die five times in a row, for simply spawning and taking a few steps. Those deaths will be shots in your back.
The maps are too-large, as has been rightly pointed out (good eye, game reviewers!), and yet the spawns are often close to your death point, so the guy who killed you can kill you again. (Or, as the thinking might go, you can get fast vengeance on him, which also happens.) Meanwhile, map design is a lost art. While the maps have a lot of detail and appear to be almost a backdrop for Sims: Soldiers, the maps funnel you in such obvious ways. You're going in circles before too long, on some of them. And all that detail makes it easy to hide in. CoD:G could be used to administer eye tests at local schools. "Can you spot the attacker camped in that pile of rubble? No? OK, he needs glasses."
CoD:G multiplayer comes across as a cynical effort on Infinity Ward's part. Make everyone too fast, too powerful, and too hard to spot, and then let the natural gamer reaction take over. "Must! Do! Better!" It's hard to care about a game where so much randomness is baked into the recipe. Call of Duty used to be a competent twitch-shooter. This isn't.
(I can't comment on the single-player. Haven't played it. Likely won't. Why a game reviewer spends five paragraphs talking about a campaign that maybe doesn't even last five hours, is more game reviewer logic. Way to go Ohio.)