Apart from the haters, and the people who cannot get it to run good on their systems, this may be my favorite COD to date. Is it similar to the others? Absolutely. Is it different enough to make me glad I bought it? Absolutely.
I started the campaign, but really wanted to play the multiplayer, so I cannot really speak of the campaign, except for what I played, it seemed very good. I got maybe 1/3 of the way through it, and it was fun, but multiplayer was calling. I will get back to the SP but I wanted to see if the MP was better then Black Ops II, which suffered from incredibly muted enemy footsteps, and almost no need for ADS. Ghosts takes what worked from Black Ops II and fixed the problems that made me hate BO II. Not only that, but you can play against bots in any mode.
The perk system was similar to Black Ops II, which I liked, and am glad it returned to this edition.
It seems that some people have problems with it running smoothly, but I have not experienced that. I have an Intel 4770k CPU and a GTX 760 GPU, and it runs perfectly smooth for me. If it needs patches, I am sure they will come, but that is not an issue for me from my experience so far.
EDIT on 11-7-13: I want to mention the graphics. I pushed the Advanced Graphics button and increased all the graphics and filtering, and then started the SP campaign. I switched over to MP and the distant images looked kind grainy. It turns out you have to alter the graphics for both the SP and MP separately.
I finished the SP campaign, and it was very good, and fun for me. I didn't care for the dog sections, and there was one part where you have to swim past sharks that was annoying, but the rest was top notch. And the graphics were sharp with a silky smooth framerate. I wondered why MP didn't look as good, and I figured out to raise the Advanced Graphics for MP too ( I thought doing it once would cover MP as well), and wow. It looks tons better. Sharp and crisp with no frame rate drop.
Plus, something they introduced in this game is the ability to slide, which I really like.
Very good game.
EDIT 7-9-13: I played a team based MP game and did notice the shuttering some have mentioned. I think it is more of a connection issue, but instead of the players only glitching around the framerate freezes momentarily as well. It wasn't too bad, but I am starting to see what others were talking about. I usually play Free for All, or with bots and so never noticed this before.