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These wonderfully functional spaces are filled with busy-ness too-the cacophony of the flight deck (inexplicably wet, as if it had just been whipped form the top of an ocean-going vessel) loaded with working engineers and whining forklifts, or the focussed studiousness of the bridge, with its retinue of ceaselessly typing sonar operators bathed in screenlight, a bottle of water propped up in the corner of their stations. Many years ago I used to work on the HMS Belfast, a WW2 warship permanently docked in central London as a floating museum, and it is the engine rooms of this stout and storied warship that Infinite Warfare brought back to me, not the interior of a Millennium Falcon or USS Enterprise. Every surface is covered with tech, yet these are not the nonsensical greebles of Star Wars, but heating pipes, cable rails, fluorescent tube fittings. Everywhere you go on this ship (which is less of a space cruiser and more of an '80s aircraft carrier with all the external doors welded shut) you are accompanied by the groans of the hull, the hiss of pipes, the click-clack of mechanical keyboards. Once the game stations you on the deck of the Retribution this tactile, Top-Gun-in-space feel only increases.
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Holograms, AR and touch screens may be more convincing future interfaces, but nothing feels or sounds as real or as tactile as a monitor warming up, a toggle switch flicking back and forth or a vacuum seal locking in. Like Alien's iconic industrial spaceship, the focus here is less on “realistic” and more on “real”. Decked out with what sound like chunky CRT monitors, mechanical keyboards and enough toggle switches to outfit the bridge of the Nostromo, these jets are less futuristic sheen and more Top Gun in space. Just as it was Ridley Scott's famously detail-obsessed eye that led him to start Alien with a loving wander through all of his pristinely fashioned sets, so it is Infinite Warfare's love of chunky, believable tech that leads it to lavish the players attention on the literal nuts and bolts of the game.įrom the moment the game puts you in the cockpit of one of its Jackal multi-role fighters you begin to understand the drive behind it. Call of Duty has always had a slightly unsettling obsession with deadly military tech, but with Infinite Warfare this obsession mutates from weird gun-fetish to something that meshes beautifully with its science fiction world. The true star of the show is the tech that enables this pace. And in these two hours Infinite Warfare comes to life in the transitions it makes between the shooting, not the shooting itself. Momentum is everything in these first missions, and there are few games that can match the sense of headlong pace the game delivers. Walk-and-talk is the trick here, switching out cutscenes for mobile meetings that keep forward momentum and stay economical on the details. Unlike the prologue, this exhilarating charge doesn't dump lore on you, instead it elegantly lets you walk through it. This allows it to string together a continuous set of missions that seamlessly take you from a grand celebration, through an invasion, into orbit, into a chaotic space battle and then drifting into land on the Retribution. After the rote prologue, the game abandons the series' typical character switching, for example, instead keeping you firmly in the boots of one Commander Nick Reyes. But perhaps “not feeling like Call of Duty” is what allows Infinite Warfare to aspire to something else.