This is a review for the single-player campaign, as I do not play well with others. Furthermore, the campaign is of such amazing quality that is well worth the price of admission.
It is rather amusing to see the game's overall reception shift from “Mixed” to “Very Positive” in recent years considering the game itself has changed very little. The only major variable appears to be the player base. Nevertheless, it will take a lot more than that to shift the overall "mixed" reviews left as a smoking crater of the review-bombing that the game endured upon release.
I played CoD: Infinite Warfare shortly after its release a decade ago and absolutely loved it. Despite what its naysayers claimed at the time, I thought the futuristic setting and single-player campaign were brilliant, and—more importantly—executed magnificently. Nearly ten years later, this experience has aged like a fine wine and could still comfortably compete with many major modern titles whilst remaining a superior product to every single indie FPS released since.
The campaign deserves far more credit than it received. Rather than simply transplanting the usual Call of Duty formula into space, Infinite Warfare built an appropriately grand military science-fiction (dare I say, Space Opera?) setting around it. The conflict between the UNSA and the Settlement Defense Front gives the story a surprisingly coherent political and military backdrop, while the scale of the war—from conventional firefights to dogfights in the vacuum of space—provides enough variety to keep the campaign from becoming monotonous. One cannot help but be reminded of other entertainment media like The Expanse, Battlestar Galactica, and Starship Troopers.
And then there are the characters. Reyes, Salter, Omar, E3N, and the rest of the crew manage to make the otherwise bombastic spectacle feel personal as they add emotional weight to the overall narrative. E3N deserves a special shoutout as one of the most memorable characters within the genre, let alone the franchise, and the relationship between the crew gives the campaign an human connection that one might not expect from a series better known for exploding buildings and shooty-shooty-boom-booms (of which this experience features many!).
The gameplay itself is robust and confident. The traditional boots-on-the-ground gunplay remains intact, but the addition of zero-gravity environments, grappling mechanics, space combat, and other plausible sci-fi tech provide the campaign considerably more breadth than its beleaguered reputation would suggest. Infinite Warfare serves as a fantastic sequel and natural progression to Advanced Warfare, another great title from the increasingly vanilla franchise.
Visually, Infinite Warfare has held up remarkably well. The futuristic environments, spacecraft, weaponry, and interfaces have a distinctly polished sci-fi aesthetic whilst also feeling lived in and used. The design excels without leaning too heavily into sterile “generic future” territory nor is a saturated with the nostalgic retro-futurism that has ironically become the standard of modern sci-fi titles. There is enough military hardware, industrial grime, and lived-in technology to make the setting feel like an actual continuation of our technological trajectory rather than a collection of chrome concept-art assets.
Most importantly, Infinite Warfare understands that Call of Duty's greatest strength has always been spectacle. The difference is that this time the spectacle happens to involve orbital warfare, spacecraft, Mars, asteroid bases, zero-gravity combat, and the occasional extremely large explosion. This game features some of the greatest in-game set pieces that i have ever encountered during my three decades of gaming.
The everlasting tragedy of this understated masterpiece is that Infinite Warfare arrived at precisely the wrong moment. Players had apparently reached their saturation point with futuristic Call of Duty (despite the fact that Advanced Warfare, the only other "futurustic" CoD, was an entirely different beast set during a future much closer and more recognizable to the present), and the reveal trailer became one of the most disliked videos in YouTube history before the game had even been released (Basically the 2016 Ghostbusters of gaming). Much of the criticism seemed less concerned with the quality of the campaign than with the simple fact that it was not the Call of Duty players wanted at that particular moment (ironically, they would get their generic wwII CoD a year later).
Nearly a decade later, that context makes the game considerably easier to appreciate. Removed from the expectations and backlash surrounding its release, Infinite Warfare stands as one of the franchise's greatest and most ambitious single-player campaign—and its most underrated.
Perhaps the greatest compliment one can give it is that, nearly ten years later, it still feels like a game that was ahead of its time rather than one that has been left behind by it.
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[b]sidenote (i decided to "digress" AFTER my review rather than in the middle of it):[/b]
I remember that CoD: IW was competing directly with Battlefield 1 in 2016—and lost that war (pun intended). At the time, the genre's fanbase had grown exhausted by CoD's dominance and was increasingly turned off by its willingness to take risks.
Ironically, only five years later, Battlefield would repeat the very mistake of its competitor with Battlefield 2042. Like CoD: IW, it polarized the fanbase and was met with mixed reviews. The difference is that Battlefield 2042 had no single-player campaign to redeem it in the years to come (which is what has happened with Infinite Warfare) which was an especially odd choice considering that every other Battlefield game features single player modes.
I attempted to play 2042 during one of its many free weekends—a seemingly desperate attempt to attract new players that, in my case, had precisely the opposite effect. I couldn't survive more than 15 seconds in a match. Worse, I couldn't even tell how I was dying, let alone how to escape it.
As it turns out, 2042 was riddled with bad-faith players (in much the same way as so many multiplayer games are, reinforcing precisely why I have so little interest in multiplayer gaming—and, increasingly, why the extraction-shooter genre seems determined to collapse in on itself), a horrendously flawed launch, unfocused direction, and lazy execution. Conversely, CoD: Infinite Warfare failed because folks were simply tired of CoD utilizing increasingly future tech etc. Conversely, i believed that is what set CoD apart as the superior franchise. Unfortunately, the failure of CoD:IW led to franchise reverting back to historical settings which imho are a dime a dozen and indistinguishable from other entries in other competing franchises - but alas, there are more sheep than wolves in this world.
