I posted this in the other AW thread last night but might as well stick it in here too
So I've spent most of the day on this and have finished the campaign, played some exo survival and some multiplayer. Obviously it's early days on the multiplayer front but it's a huuuuuuuuuge improvement over Ghosts, honestly don't worry about that. The biggest improvement is the multiplayer (I liked Ghosts campaign and loved Extinction) but I enjoyed the campaign a lot more than Ghosts as well. I thought Sledgehammer Games did a pretty damned decent job with the campaign within the COD framework. That sounds like 'damning with faint praise' but it really isn't. They know how to pace the campaign, constantly change things up and give the player variety and even subvert the players expectations as well at times throughout the campaign. It won't change your mind if you don't like the COD gameplay but there's a good number of excellent setpieces which I really enjoyed. Personally I still think Black Ops 2 was a 'braver' game in that I admire Treyarch for trying to do a branching story and it's (admittedly not great) RTS style sections but it's obvious the guys and gals at SG's know how to put together a good, well polished campaign with great setpieces and tbh if I get that from a COD campaign I'm pretty happy.
The big thing of course is the Exosuit and what it brings to the gameplay which is quite a bit, especially campaign wise. I'm really interested to see how the ol COD faithful handle the verticality. Straight away I was double jumping, boosting, sliding etc (and still not getting many kills in multi ) But I saw a lot of people still running about not doing much of that and you could tell it would be frustrating for them. The TTK seems to be between Ghosts and Black Ops 2. If you're caught out and the player has bad aim then there's a chance you can boost out of sight but if they've got you firmly in their sights you get nailed. Hopefully people will learn to adapt but there is a classic playlist without Exo movement for those that want it, it does make me wonder how folks would handle that as the maps seem pretty much designed for the exo movement. I've only played multiplayer for an hour or two so it's just far too early to tell until everything is unlocked how much the exosuit can do in multi. I look forward to finding out though and it's obvious the Exosuit is adding a pretty new (and cool IMO) dynamic to the battlefield.
I only tried a little bit of Exosuit survival and it seems decent enough. You have three tiers of maps 1, 2 and 3 and you have to complete a number of rounds on each set of tier maps to progress to the next tier set of maps. It's the mode I spent the least time with so I don't have much to say about it at the minute tbh.
Another interesting aspect is the whole 'loot' system that they have in place. From what I've seen so far it seems to be cosmetic items as well as weapons with slightly different stats than the 'standard' model you unlock at whatever level. (example being an 'alternative' model has +1 extra mobility but -1 range or something like that). Now if you receive a weapon from a level you haven't reached it you can't use the weapon 'standard' or 'modified' BUT you can trash that item for XP that adds to your level overall. I just did that there now with a weapon I couldn't use (for level 32 and I'm 12) and it gave me some xp which helped take me from level 11 to 12.