If
you can find a match (which is surprisingly difficult for such a big
game), the opportunity to play Call of Duty like you’re the Bionic Commando
makes Advanced Warfare’s second DLC pack,
Ascendance, just about worth the asking price. The campaign’s grappling gun has
been stitched into the multiplayer, which is an entertaining change of tune for
a game that’s already the oddball of the series—and if the rest of the pack is
business as usual, it’s business carried out with commendable panache.
The
grappling gun is available in one playlist, and confined at the time of writing
to the Ascendance maps. It replaces your custom exo ability (though you can
still dash, boost jump and slide as normal) and is a joy to wield. The gun can
be fired twice in succession and has a quick cooldown, which makes chaining
moves a cinch: you might launch yourself down an alley, boost-jump at the
corner to reorient, then grapple through a window to catch a sniper on the
trot. It’s fiddly at first—you’ll fetch up against plenty of intervening
objects—but satisfying to master.
Rope
trick
All
the Ascendance modes feel different for the grapple gun’s inclusion. It allows
for rapid flanking and rearguard actions when assaulting objectives, and makes
the tricked-out SMG wielder a true terror in vanilla deathmatch. But it’s
Uplink, I think, that changes the most. Given a certain amount of covering fire
and nerves of steel, ball-carriers are able to whip themselves through or over
defensive formations with insulting ease.
While
they hold up reasonably well without the grapple gun, the new maps are clearly
designed to give its potential full play. Set in the foothills of Mount
Rushmore, Site 244 is a lurid homage to the XCOM series that consists of three
wide lanes amid the wreckage of a crashed spaceship—the perfect place to
zipline, providing you don’t meet a bullet coming the other way. Climate is a
sun-kissed chrome oasis centring on a two-storey island that houses one of the
map’s Domination points, linked by bridges and surrounded by paths and high
platforms that are screened by rock formations. It’s one of the more idyllic
Call of Duty maps, at least till somebody trips the map streak and turns all
the groundwater to acid.
Perplex
is the most unusual, striking and the hardest to master of the lot, a chic,
towering jumble of apartment blocks (to which more are added when you activate
the map streak) that puts me bizarrely in mind of Q’Bert. In theory, victory
here is a question of height, but the angularity of the terrain makes it easy
to slide around the perimeter of an uphill fight by hugging the wall. Last and least
there’s Chop Shop, an underwhelming industrial map that consists of two
courtyards linked by galleries and a central chamber that can be locked down
pretty solidly, given a well-coordinated team.
Dead heat
Chapter
two of Advanced Warfare’s zombie career is a marked improvement on the first.
It takes place in and under a branch of Burgertown, queen of post-apocalyptic
fastfood joints, and is home to a handful of new zombie types, including
paunchy elites in Goliath suits. The Infection map has more visual character
than its predecessor, and also breaks down in more intriguing ways. There’s a
dark, part-flooded sewer that’s home to an anti-virus pod (and a surprisingly
helpful crocodile); tunnels where you’ll find the map’s exo suits, not that
this will help much if you’re cornered in the process; a warehouse full of
free-standing shelving units that’s of particular service in the advent of
zombie dogs; and a fuel depot where movement is least restricted, both for you
and your foes.
The
presence of NPCs you can find and defend in return for a weapons upgrade adds
another wrinkle of risk and reward, but for the most part it’s more of the
same. As with previous offerings, the key to survival is working out when it’s
worth a run on the traps, supply points, and upgrade stations and when to stick
to the areas that are easiest to defend. The consequences of getting knocked
down remain severe—there’s nothing quite so harrowing as having to reclaim lost
upgrades and abilities late in the day, when the map is overrun.
With
its grappling playlists, Ascendance reminds us that the best expansions are
those that expand your horizons—jolting you out of old habits. While no
gigantic leap forward, it’s a cut above the throng of map packs and worth a
shot if the game’s fundamentals are losing your interest. But there's a
big caveat: it only matters if you’re one of the few people still playing
Advanced Warfare on PC and can get a group together.
The
player population has dwindled dramatically since launch (peaking at under 5,000
for the last few days), and while there are often seem to be a few Exo Zombies
players available, the Ascendance competitive playlists are barren, even at
what should be peak hours in the evening. That in mind, if you’ve been absent
from Advanced Warfare and the recent DLC packs seem like a reason to return,
check to see if your friends are still playing first.
Source : PC Gamer
Requirement
Influenced by: XCOM,
Tarzan
Play it on: Intel Core i5-2500K, 8 GB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 760
Copy protection: Steam
Price: $15/£12
Play it on: Intel Core i5-2500K, 8 GB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 760
Copy protection: Steam
Price: $15/£12
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