Campaign proper done and dusted. I need to write a review, but overall thoughts:
PROS:
- Loved the more open battlefield design.
- Far greater sense of scale to conflicts and encounters.
- More emphasis on letting you actually deal with encounters versus horrific over scripting that plagued MW2/MW3.
- Back to ye ol massive unit numbers ala original Call of Duty.
- Fast pacing. Kept you moving through locations and encounters quickly, making for interesting flow of levels.
- The dash of various controllable drones and gimmicks was mostly cool.
- THE NUMBERS MASON.
- Probably the best weapon and effect sound design in the entire series. Guns sounded fantastic.
- The choice aspect was simple but I quite liked it. Wasn't invasive or silly.
- I get the feeling Treyarch really did legitimately want to give the series an overhaul, trying some new things that stray quite far from the very safe and traditional formula the series has followed this entire generation. It's still Call of Duty and not everything works (see strike missions), and I still think they could go further, but the promise for something a bit different is there.
CONS:
- Story was a total mess and pretty poorly told.
- Some fuck off encounter moments where the designers felt it necessary to stick two or more RPG dudes around a corner that instant fire the moment they see you. Definitively trial and error at times, and that should never be encouraged.
- Hated the jet sequence.
- Graphically the game ranged from quite nice to holy shit what the fuck. Like, at times, this was full on Call of Duty 2 level of dated shit. I blame Treyarch's decision to make the battlegrounds larger, longer, and heaver in combatants, while targeting current generation platform limitations. It's a trade off I'm okay with, given how much I enjoyed the gameplay, but it definitely made a huge impact on the graphics, and it's quite startling going from the technically middling though impressive and abundant assets, and attention to detail, in most of the series so far. Some areas of the game looked borderline PS2 level flat-lit lighting with dog shit textures and bad geometry. It was legitimately surprised at how bad some parts of the game looked, especially compared to how good other parts looked.
- Strike missions were pretty poor. I liked the adrenalin rush they gave, but I felt the whole overhead map semi-RTS aspect was poorly handled. I thought it was clumsy to control and poorly conceived. Directing units in first person worked much better, and I felt it was easier to just do the work myself while the AI acted as meat shields and extra offensive, just like any normal single player level.