Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare (2014) (PC) (Sledgehammer Games)
0Back in the mid- to late 90s, I understood FPS games. Shooters like Half-Life and Unreal 1 consumed a large proportion of my gaming time; to the point that I primarily thought of myself as a shooter fan (RPGs came much later and was something I slowly got more and more interested in over the course of several years). It's true that my experience is a little atypical since I never got into the multiplayer side of things and thus only focused on the campaigns, but back then the SP mode was obviously a much bigger deal in FPS games than it is today.
Then something happened when Call of Duty arrived onto the scene. And I don't mean just Modern Warfare (which was already pretty far into the CoD series), but the rise of military-based shooters as a whole. Heavily scripted sequences aside, it's hard for me to put my finger on what exactly changed but the twitch-based shooting galleries/"Whac-A-Mole" gameplay loop have always been difficult for me to both appreciate on a conceptual level and execute on successfully in the moment-to-moment action. I always feel stupid and frustratingly slow to react while attempting to play through any CoD campaign. Last year's Advanced Warfare is no exception, since every time I returned to the game I died over and over again and was unable to make any progress whatsoever. I get that you're supposed to hang back and pick off enemies methodically, but even when I can muster enough patience to do that the player character usually ends up getting surrounded and mowed down anyway.