GAME IS DOPE
The game is very good so far. And most noticeably right off the bat, the game is just fun. You can try to analyze and quantify it which I will do in a bit but honestly, you know something is fun when you play it for the first time or not without getting too intellectual about it.
Titanfall was immediately fun to me. By comparison Advanced Warfare was interesting. Unique. A breath of fresh air. But I don't think my feelings were this is a lot of fun when I played it the first time. Blacks Ops 3 is a lot of fun. Immediately. And addictive.
So initially its take a bit to grasp the movement stuff. I don't think its as easily digested as Titanfall which immediately made sense to me and lets you do great stuff right off the jump. It took me a bit to grasp the double jump here because it has a little physics to it and is like a slower thruster pack rather than the more rapid bouncy boosts that AW and Titanfall do. You can't just run around with the jumping freedom of Titanfall. But I do think the system they made actually suits COD in a much better way than AW did. And if you put the design stuff of Titanfall in there, it would essentially turn COD into a completely different game. This still feels like COD with something extra instead of AW which turned every fight into a side and jump boosting war. Now that's not necessarily a bad thing. But I think AW lost a lot of traditional COD players because it was so alien to traditional COD combat but this isn't. Most of the time you are fighting on the ground like you always have. You can do some cool jump angle shooting and wallrun shooting to catch people off guard but it's not the bread and butter of combat. It's like extra seasoning to it. You do that stuff situationally here to throw people off.
The time to kill is a little fast, but surprisingly I'm fine with it even though I'm generally in favor of longer kill times in games. It kind of suits the game. And it mostly feels right. If they made the time longer, I wouldn't have a problem with it, but I don't really have a problem with it now. There is a flow to the game that makes the current time to kill work in a way that a relatively fast time to kill normally doesn't. You kill quick and then keep on moving to get that next kill. It's like frantic but in a good way.
There is flinch (aim punch) and I actually like it. No toughness to counter-act it. A lot of people are complaining about it asking Treyarch to tone it down but I kind of like it. It makes long range gun fights challenging sometimes which is often missing from COD.
The kill streaks seem to feel good in the way that they were in blacks ops 2. You feel good when you get them without it necessarily being brutally punishing like they were in MW 2.
I don't think this is the COD to necessarily bring back people who have left COD. We are light years away from what COD 4 was. And I miss that sometimes. I wish another studio would make a traditional slowed down non futuristic COD game in the vein of COD 4. This game is fast. It's the evolution of the direction COD has been pushing towards for years. The maps are smallish creating frequent engagements and a fast pace and the maps have a very modern 3 lane approach rather than the more sprawling affairs that COD maps use to be. COD games now are like COD on crack mixed with ADHD. (but still less chaotic to me than AW) The reality is though I don't have a problem with it here. I think its great here so far. It's like the perfect culmination of that formula in fact. I just think the other activision studios should also satisfy the people who want a re-creation of COD 4. Or hell just do the god damn remaster of COD 4/MW 2 that everyone would buy like crazy.
But yeah its really good so far. My only real complaint is the same one I had watching the beta on ps 4.I wish the maps were just a bit bigger. Not titanfall big. Just slightly bigger than they currently are. I'll post more thoughts after I put more time in, and maybe try to post a beast game, if I can put one up to show it off.
