TPG Second Look: Call of Duty Ghosts PC Review

By – David Queener

Ghosts is the third story to be told in Call of Duty since the original Modern Warfare, though it is unclear if it will be a trilogy like the Modern Warfare and Black Ops tales.  Ghosts is a Call of Duty game as you expect it, taking nothing from the experimentation of Black Ops 2’s branching plot lines, multiple endings, and configuration schemes.  Ghosts is very much an Infinity Ward style campaign with a linear trajectory allowing for no deviation, but masterfully paced in content.  The single player campaign borders on the perfect length for the story and it is refreshing to play a game that builds itself up and ends before it wears itself thin.

The building up is important though, because the game does start out weak. Call of Duty does not do peacetime well, and Ghosts takes its first steps during this period, with your father telling the story of the group known as Ghosts.  The Mission Valley becomes home to the Uncanny Valley as father-son bonding is attempted by idtech 3 models with personalities we don’t yet know, with voice acting doesn’t quite seem up for the task.  Despite this weak start, Ghosts quickly creates a more interesting impression with the first gunfight taking place in zero gravity aboard a space station, and then a return to a shattering San Diego as visible shock waves ripple destruction through asphalt, soil, and homes.  After a rocky start in terms of quality, you settle in for several missions of rather uninspired gameplay.

This is Call of Duty as you hear it described; iterative cover-oriented gameplay down corridors against dumb as a doornail AI.  The presence of Riley, your trusty dog, helps things along.  His presence doesn’t add much to the gameplay, but he is a charming creature to behold.  Despite all the marketing, Ghosts did not overplay Riley’s paw.  He is part of the story, but not integral, and certainly not shoehorned in.  He will not accompany you to Antarctica, or aboard a helicopter.  He embarks (an unintended pun but one I will accept) on missions where it makes sense to bring a highly trained dog, and is otherwise left at base.

Missions are led by your brother, orders are given by your father, and at the heart of the enemy is a family friend.  Back story audio logs directly acknowledge the linear nature of the game, specifying how even as a young child your character followed your brother so closely, so literally, that on a walk along the beach, your father saw only one set of footprints in the sand following him.   It is almost humorous, yet it serves as a reminder of how limited your choices are.   This especially comes as a shock after Black Ops 2’s missions that you could actually fail, and have the story continue.

Ghosts’ story is a strange one.  An inter-continental war with an old world No Man’s Land and a stalemate.  The idea is that massive fighting in the middle east destroyed the oil fields, causing a shift in the balance of economic power toward South America (Ghosts does not entertain the idea that it would actually shift it toward North America with the oil fields of Canada, Texas, Wyoming, other states with the infrastructure of traditional drilling and fracking already in place).  This shift in power correlated with the rise of a powerful general, who is apparently so powerful he was able to unite three different countries with dramatically different cultures, power structures, politics, and two major languages between them.  That is frankly a bit hard to swallow.  It then takes a much larger jump by having an American space-based superweapon lack any substantial defenses, not have ground based overrides, and be allowed by its own system to fire on American cities.

Simultaneously the general was organizing a massive army to invade America, through Central America.  The game does nothing to address how the governments of Central American countries feel about a mostly unified South American force moving through it, bringing conflict on their door just as much as on America’s.  Once again, a Call of Duty story arc is built upon a foundation of American incompetence, and a skill of only being able to recover a fumble in a way that comes out neutral in terms of gains.  Your story is one of recovering from fumbles and undoing ground lost for the most part.  On the more positive side, this game does take you to a nice variety of locations and experiences.  Sure you rappel down skyscrapers and infiltrate antarctic oil rigs, even take a trip to Vegas, but you also command a tank for two distinct sections, fighting against a column of tanks and invading an airstrip.  Helicopters are piloted, the ocean floor is explored, and space is invaded once again, all while keeping within the context of the plot.  Ghosts is not strictly a boots-on-ground experience, and it helps.

What doesn’t help is the poor performance. Combat itself feels okay, but strange stuttering can be experienced simply wandering around, or even just interacting with the menus.  Frames will be dropped by mousing over a menu item.  The game may appear unresponsive, and background effects jump around.  My chosen settings did not have any noticeable impact here, and I was never able to find a moment where the menu functioned quite right.  The available options are decently robust, but there is no FOV slider, and the game locks you in at an FOV of 65.  It works okay for the single player, but the multiplayer makes you feel like you are running with blinders. I have seen opponents walk right past each other.  I have experienced killcams in a lonely staircase, only to witness that my killer was walking in the opposite direction on the same staircase.  They had only just glanced the back of my boot, as we passed each other, shoulders touching.  The FOV alone can make for a wretched multiplayer experience.

Unfortunately it doesn’t stop there. Ghosts looks interesting on paper, having the Strike Packages of Modern Warfare 3 (Assault, Specialist, Support) combined with a more free form Create-A-Class system where you can skip on equipment for more perks, or vice versa.  The perks system is now point based rather than tier based which frees up their behavior and identity.  Perks no longer have odd secondary benefits to balance them out against each other. Want your weapon ready quicker after sprinting? Use Ready Up for 1 point.

Want to move quietly?  Use Dead Silence for 2 points. This flexibility allows for much more specific classes and theoretically leads to a better balance. Theoretically. In practice, you would be mad to skip on Dead Silence, Amplify, and SitRep.  Your movements are very audible to anyone if you don’t have Dead Silence, which is countered by Amplify, so you had better have it equipped as well.  The game world is littered with IEDs (which can be chucked and stuck to any surface quickly so there is little risk in placing them every time you spawn) so you will need SitRep, or Blast Shield if you think you are good enough.  You also need to spend those points on weapons, such as a sniper rifle, and attachments, such as thermal scopes.  But you will also need Incognito to not glow in someone else’s thermal scope, an effect bordering on a cheat if the game didn’t encourage it.  Previous Call of Duty games provided default classes, five of them, to give a sample of each weapon class and variations in play style, but all I got was two full-auto assault rifles and one full-auto SMG, resulting in the same play experience.

The game does not give you a sniper rifle, LMG, shotgun, or any weapons from the new class of Marksman Rifles (which curiously do not feature any bolt-action rifles, so bolt-action fans can stick to World at War).  Now funnily enough, Carlin provided me a screenshot of such default classes, but I never could find them within the actual game, nor could friends who bought the game themselves, so now I’m not just earning squad points for fancy attachments or unlocking a perk early.  I am doing it to just try a weapon class, or to have more than three custom class slots (max of 6), and these upgrades don’t come cheap. Suddenly you don’t have many points left to work with, and that touted customization is out the window.   What is in the window is a camper.

Ghosts multiplayer levels are a little too large for their own good, but the spawning system often has people appearing right near you.  This results in a place large enough you want to sprint around, but unpredictable enough you might get caught dead by an unexpected enemy (so you had better have Ready Up as well).  I like the look of the levels, the feel of them, and the touches they have to keep them fresh: portions of walls that can be opened with an explosive, dropping platforms, shipping crates you can bust out of, and single use unique weapon pickups . But it really is an unpredictable death fest.

In previous Call of Duty titles my performance generally trended upwards, and was consistent across multiple matches against the same people.  Ghosts however is tantamount to a dice roll (even discounting the Gambler perk which is a dice roll, and Dead Eye which functions as one for damage), and this isn’t an experience unique to myself, or even the PC release.  A friend was playing it on a new console, and has given up on the game. After going 20-3 in one match, and then 9-49 the next, against the same people, he became flustered.  You can witness this impression among community members as well with YouTubers returning to earlier Call of Duty titles in their uploads (Black Ops 2, Modern Warfare, and World at War are making a resurgence on my Subscription list), and a dwindling player count.  To date, I have not been able to play a mode other than Team Deathmatch or Domination.  The population isn’t there.  Single digits for Blitz?  Double digits for Cranked or other game modes?

Couple this with out and out cheaters (bragging that Infinity Ward will not do anything about them) and the fact that the game doesn’t report to Steam who you’ve recently played with so you can report such abuse, and you have a game abandoned.  I frown upon developers who leave a game to wither on the vine a year after release, but a month?  It is a vicious cycle of bad support leading to low populations which justifies not trying to support it. Most games I have joined had at least two players complaining about the game in general, the performance, the lag, and the mechanics.  They regretted their purchase, and all other voices were in agreement.  The tone was consistently one of sighing loyalty, holding out hope that a patch will come which will take care of things. But considering that the game doesn’t cooperate with Steam, nor does it provide a connection bar on the scoreboard, let alone actual ping numbers, I wouldn’t wait for such a patch. This is a very bad experience for PC gamers.

Ghosts is the first multiplayer Call of Duty I’ve been reticent to play. It is unpolished, imbalanced, unsupported, not optimized, and the netcode doesn’t even seem up for the task. The single player has its failings, but the multiplayer is such a strong misstep that I suspect the franchise can’t afford another like it.  My advice to Infinity Ward and co: take action on reports of cheaters, report to Steam the users you have played with so they can help identify abusers, make Squad Point changes apply retroactively to accounts, adopt Black Ops 2’s style of assist recognition (if a dog takes more shots to kill than a human, recognize assists on that matter), make IEDs manually placed rather than tossed, and just plain drop Dead Silence and Amplify.  You have a game in which the mechanics fight each other.  When performing the grind, you should not feel like you are between the two gears.

Conclusion – Is It Worth Your Money?

I could say more, but I fear that would border on just ranting, something this game is capable of evoking.  Ghosts is a terrible multiplayer experience which could teach other developers some lessons. This is not the polish that got Call of Duty its current success, and it is already costing them dearly. For the multiplayer execution alone, Ghosts is not worth the money.  If you enjoy the Call of Duty style campaign and can get through a rough start, you might want to keep an eye out for a sale, because that portion is well executed once the game finds its momentum.