Tired, boring, broken installment....
That, however, is where my praise ends. This game has some of the worst graphics I've seen in 2011/2012. This is another classic Halo case, where a company finds an idea and milks the crap out of it, and each game steadily loses quality, but increases in DLC available to make more moeny. The graphics in Modern Warfare 2, 3, and in Black Ops 1 and 2 are practically comparable to my personal favorite FPS, Call of Duty 2 (remember, one of the first Xbox 360 games?). The terrain texture is blotchy, at best. Weapons sound worse than the cheapest toy gun you can find at Walmart. However, the weapon modeling is fantastic, and the guns look good, even if they sound terrible.
The survival mode is fun....for about a day. Unimaginative waves of units flood in, and even by the fifth wave it becomes ridiculously hard to kill enemies (meaning it takes way more shots than it should). Then of course you are given the challenge of killing a Juggernaut - an enjoyable feat.....until you realize that you'll be seeing juggernauts every few minutes. Play through about wave 30 on each map, and you'll begin to see some deja vu...
Perks and kill streaks.....why O Activision, do you insist on putting these game-ruining devices into your FPS games?! Perks allow you to do absolutely ridiculous things such as: falling from height without injury, being invisible to radar (shouldn't be a radar in the first place), reloading at super-human speeds, moving faster while aiming down the sights (should always be able to move this fast)....and lastly, the single most idiotic perk to curse CoD, the ability to shoot from your hip more accurately. I have seen so many morons running around akimbo (or any gun really) - even MANY times the room leader - NEVER AIMING DOWN THEIR SIGHTS! Call of Duty has always been a game of easy shooting. It is not difficult to shoot a weapon full auto and hold it on the target..mainly because there is virtually NO MUZZLE CLIMB, and as a result shooting is VERY EASY and takes little to no skill. People rarely miss (and even if they do, they get the hit: insert snipers missing but getting the kill pun here).
Kill streaks only allow the "skilled" to dominate. If kill streaks were limited to say, Ballistic Vests, Ammo Dumps, UAV (the actual UAV, not a computer controlled entity that shows locations on radar), and even predator missiles...that would be fantastic. In call of duty, he who gets his 10+ kill streak reward owns the room without difficulty. The only situation where an AC130, or Helicopter kill streak would work is with a huge, open map. But there isn't such a map in CoD, there are only old, lazily re-skinned maps that leave much to be desired.
The knife in the rib cage, so to speak, is the horrible online game play. Players are rewarded for charging head on into danger. The reason this is possible, is because players, like me, who have excellent connections have to go up against players who have terrible connections, and as a result you can see an enemy pop around a corner, empty half your clip into them, and then you'll die by what sounds like a shotgun. When you watch the kill cam, however, you will see a hugely different story. You won't have fired a single shot, the enemy will have been standing in the doorway for a good second, and he fired a whole clip at you before you got off a single shot. There is roughly a full second delay between my screen and my enemy's screen. This makes it impossible for me to do any online game play. There have been countless numbers of times when I have found myself shooting several rounds into my enemy as I run around a corner, and then i'll die from a knife...when I watch the kill cam it is nowhere near what my screen was projecting.
Overall this is a game that will occupy a few days of your time, but then you'll begin to see the crippling faults: boredom, poor hit registration, and general unoriginality. Activision is milking Call of Duty for all it's worth, and we can only hope in the future we will get a game that is more original, better designed, and closer to its roots that made it such a great franchise.