Game - Call of Duty: Ghosts (Xbox One)

Duty called, but I pretended I was out.

"What's the difference between a Taliban training camp and an Afghanistani primary school?"

"I don't know, I just fly the drone."

This is the video game version of that joke.

Odin wasn't known for his lightning-hurling proclivities but FF: The
Spirits Within had already taken Zeus. Twelve years ago.

In a series which, of late, could be accurately renamed Morally Questionable Drone Strikes, Infinity Ward, Raven, Neversoft and whatever other deranged mish-mash of former Activision employees is making Call of Duty this week have produced the ultimate long-range power fantasy. Set twenty minutes into the future, the Middle East has been destroyed (What? All of it?) by some sort of nuclear accident, and the oil-producing nations of South America have banded together to form a Federation - and, naturally, because they're an empire-building global superpower that isn't the US of A, they're immediately and inexplicably evil and begin invading and conquering other countries for their natural resources: I don't know if this is a breathtaking lack of self-awareness or a confused attempt at satire. But protagonist Logan and his brother and father running around the shifting and crumbling San Diego as it's destroyed by orbital bombardment at least looks very impressive, and is a nice showcase of the sort of destruction that the next generation of CoD can bring us. It's just the whole "making it all actually mean something" bit that Ghosts fruitlessly bashes its head against like a sparrow on a well-cleaned window.

To kick off the story, America has constructed the space-based superweapon from G.I. Joe: Retaliation that drops tungsten rods and can obliterate whole cities from complete safety at the press of a button. The implications of America building and having sole control of such a weapon are - I should hope - deeply unsettling, but don't worry: it's only a deterrent, and a necessary tool of freedom-preservation. However, when it's hijacked by the Federation in a genuinely-impressive space-based prologue segment that blends Gravity and Moonraker - which is sadly only used once more in the story - it suddenly becomes a dangerous totalitarian tool of sudden and unavoidable oppression that cannot be allowed to exist. This sudden and bizarre determination to paint America as the poor shy little victim who keeps getting wedgied and having its lunch money stolen by the big nasty world would be hilarious if it weren't played so wrong-headedly straight.

The titular Ghosts: the first video game franchise to be birthed
from what some guy in another game wore on his head.

US military grunt Logan Walker and his brother Hesh (what sort of name is that?), two brothers stamped out from the 'Generic White Guy Protagonist' machine, begin the game under the command of their father Elias, fighting the Federation alongside the rest of the rank-and-file, but soon find themselves inducted into the secretive, legendary 'Ghosts' unit - of which their father used to be a member - in order to bring the fight to the Federation and their mysterious military commander Rorke: a former Ghost. Personally, the problem with this kind of plot in a 'gritty' and 'realistic' (snigger) shooter is that there are no supermen. Give them the daftest codenames and the ponciest balaclavas you want, the Ghosts are still just guys, and calling you elite when you play them feels as ridiculous as it is. Logan doesn't run any faster or jump any higher or shoot any better when he's a Ghost than he does when he's a grunt, because all that's determined by the player, so what the hell's the point in trying to pretend that being a Ghost makes a blind blithering bit of difference to anything? The Ghosts don't have any more impressive technology or ruthless methods or special skills than the SAS or the Rangers or even the FSB from the other games. So what's the point of them?

After the orbital devastation, San Diego is looking a little ruff.

For a good while, Call of Duty was very good at avoiding the "America! EFF YEAH!" school of whizz-bang shooty-fun. The boots on the ground in Modern Warfare were very oo-rah and aggressively patriotic but generally seemed to have their hearts in the right place and it wasn't really their fault that their headlong charge into danger resulted in dramatic nuclear annihilation for them, a city and, shockingly at the time but setting a rather predictable trend for the series, the player character. Ultimately, it was left to the quiet and elite throat-slitters of the British SAS to quietly clean up the mess, but it wasn't "Britain! BLOODY HELL YES!" either because they were just a tad sociopathic about the whole thing.

Here, it's essentially America Vs Those Dirty Underhanded Brown People, except the enemy leader is of course former-Ghost Rorke, because even a french-fries-and-freedom hating coalition of foreign superpowers need whitey's help to win their wars for them. Rorke has all the hallmarks of a very effective villain: he's always several steps ahead of the heroes; he has a seemingly endless arsenal and army; he has a doomdsay weapon and a suitably villainous mode of transport; he's always doing cool, villainy things, and - in grand Call of Duty interactive cutscene tradition - tanks the most absurd injuries and keeps going.

This screenshot is so totally dull I can't even think of a decent
caption for it.

The thing is, Rorke is just too good. He's not too good in the way that Batman or Superman are just too good, but in the way that Resident Evil's Alice is just too good. His strength, resourcefulness and constant victories come not from genuinely effective villainy or important story stakes-raising, but from the simple fact that the writers unaccountably fell in love with their bland creation and refused to allow him ever to lose - like a child in the playground who keeps bringing out his 'everything-proof shield'. He feels like a Frankenstein's monster of the successful bits of other villains, at one point shamelessly ripping-off wholesale Bane's jaw-dropping plane hijacking from The Dark Knight Rises, with the added ridiculousness that player character Logan is still inside the hijacked plane when Rorke detaches the cables and drops it God-knows-how-many feet to the ground, and somehow survives.

Ghosts is at its best in the space and scuba sections that give
you a whole extra dimension of movement to consider when
picking your fights. Pity that's about fifteen minutes in a six
hour campaign.

Do you remember the sequence in Modern Warfare 2 when Soap, alongside Captain Price, stalks through a snowy alpine forest with a silenced sniper rifle, picking off patrols and guard dogs while avoiding detection? And do you remember the even better version of that in one of the Spec Ops missions that asked you to do the whole thing without Price's voice in your ear telling you who to shoot, and when, and when it was safe to move? Well, the ludicrous plane-drop leads into a wonderful sequence where, cut off and wounded, you have to proceed through a lush jungle to reconnect with your squad while avoiding Federation patrols who outnumber and outgun you in every conceivable way. You have a suspiciously Alien-like motion tracker to help spot incoming soldiers, but the making of the level is the cramped and brilliantly-lit jungle, in which you can practically taste the pulpy, orchid heat rolling over you out of your screen, and which is designed less like a level and more like, well, an actual jungle, with no linear paths and no landmarks or obvious bits of lighting and signposting to point you in the right way. So you creep forward slowly, stopping and looking around desperately whenever a little red dot blips on your tracker or a shrub rustles a few feet away, making your way painstakingly towards the green blob vaguely in the direction of your objective. It's a masterfully tense sequence - one of a sadly meagre few in the game - that offers something a little different from the typical run-and-gun of most levels.

Someone clearly got a bit confused when ordered to wear his
shell-suit in the combat zone.

As for the gameplay, well, what did you expect? It's Call of Duty. The shooting is, as ever, lightning-quick and the guns feel satisfyingly punchy and weighty bits of kit. You advance through the levels, pressing the left trigger to look down the sights at the seemingly-endless assortment of brown people the game spawns for you and pressing the right trigger to make them fall over until there aren't any more coming, with the now de rigeur breathing spaces where you crouch behind a stack of boxes and fiddle with a PDA to remotely snipe/bomb/dog-attack, which turn up just frequently enough to be predictable but just infrequently enough to be more of a gimmick than a bona fide game mechanic. There's a tank mission, and a slightly disjointed-feeling helicopter assault, a scuba bit with insta-kill sharks, an abseiling-down-the-side-of-a-building-while-shooting-through-the-windows bit that lets you catch a falling photocopier with your face, and one shining but brief moment in the penultimate mission where you go into space again, and then back down to terra firma for an ending containing the requisite number of vehicle crashes, cutscene injuries, scenes of stumbling blurrily around with blood on the screen, alternating LT and RT to crawl towards something and Pressing X to Not Die.

And then, to cap it all off, writer's pet Rorke emerges from the same submerged trainwreck you did, having spent several more minutes under than you did during your near-drowning experience but apparently none the worse for wear from that or the .44 slug you put in him, and abducts your helpless form to render the ending more or less utterly futile and make way for a sequel that a story this predictable, frustrating and, frankly, disconcertingly racist probably isn't ever going to get. Or at least shouldn't, if there's any justice in the world.

The evolution of the Call of Duty series can be marked out by the
sheer volume of superfluous bric-a-brac it's possible to have stuck
to your guns increasing with every instalment.

The first Call of Duty for a new console generation, Ghosts had the opportunity to truly do something new to the franchise, especially after the bloated extravagance of MW3 couldn't really think of anything to bring to the table other than far too much more of what MW2 had. At the very least it could have tried to think of something new to say about war. Instead, the usual flag-and-bald-eagle-waving, it's-not-evil-if-it's-us-doing-it patriotism nonsense gets trotted out in service of a short but meandering, surprisingly uneventful and certainly uninvolving storyline, with a pointless protagonist and his cardboard brother, and a villain who lacks even a tenth of the personality of a Shepherd or a Makarov but unaccountably has ten times the survivability so we'll probably have to deal with the dull git again at some point.

5.5/10 - Instead of resurrecting the franchise, the appropriately-subtitled Ghosts just lingers past its welcome and rattles the old chains some more.