A decade down the line, Call of Duty has become a game for show-offs, with a daredevil move-set of wall-runs, boost-hops and knee-slides gleaned from study of eSports POTGs and YouTube killstreak videos. While erected around similar principles of readability and fluidity, Modern Warfare multiplayer is a game for opposing armies - the participants are slower, camouflage is often decisive, grenades find victims a little more easily and campers are a real terror. It's also a world away from Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, which has been controversially remastered as part of the Infinite Warfare package. It's the concept of performative masculinity at its most vicious and insecure - do or be done to, run or be run down, played out to perpetuity in a hail of plasma grenades, homing energy beams and spiralling air-to-surface missiles. You'll lay the odd ambush, of course, fleeing around a corner only to twirl on your heel and drop to prone, but to linger is generally to die. These pistols combine to make a nifty SMG. You can dual wield but only with certain guns. Wherever you are in an Infinite Warfare map - save for when playing the surprisingly restful new mode Frontline, a TDM variant which gives each side a fixed spawning area in which your lifebar is dramatically extended - there is almost always somebody coming up behind you. Yes, there is no possibility of getting lost (should you ever lose your bearings, maps are now divided into zones that are named on the HUD), but by the same token there is nowhere to hide. These are environments that instil a strange mixture of boldness and anxiety. I see Breakout, a mountaintop lock-up whose transparent cells gaze out over miles of snow, scree and cloud - the designer's joke perhaps being that a prison remains a prison, whether you're scurrying along the outside of the cell with rifle in hand or staring glumly through the glass. I see Frontier, with its two main corridors arranged cross-wise atop each other, its low ceilings nudged by free-falling corpses.
I see Frost, with its alcoves occupied by worker droids (whose ceaseless plodding I still occasionally mistake for hostile activity) and its euphoric wall-running routes, whirling you down the flank like a pinball along a rail. I see the bare vertebrae of an Infinite Warfare multiplayer map, a combat centrifuge in which every detail serves to situate and direct, propelling you onward and around as if by magnetism. Availability: Out now on PS4, Xbox One and PC.
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