Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare review A double jump gives you the ability to nimbly hop onto rooftops and through high windows, a lightning fast dodge turns you into a very swift moving target and falling from the sky can damage enemies enough to kill them. Anyone desperate for a return to the potential for calculated stealth and carefully planned flanking manoeuvres of Modern Warfare 1 and 2 might want to look elsewhere, here you feel more like a mechanical cricket than a human combatant. Yet, after many deaths and a couple of hours practise in the pursuit of self-improvement, the Exo Suit reveals itself to be something worth celebrating. So long as you can accept that Call of Duty, from here on out, is likely changed forever due to its inclusion. These abilities very much open up attacking options that have never before existed, giving you greater freedom in traversing the environment and catching opponents unawares. Anyone stubbornly refusing to engage with the Exo Suit won't last long; not only are they limiting the places they can visit, they're crippling their ability to avoid danger. Launching yourself onto a rooftop, sprinting along it, dropping down behind an unsuspecting foe and skewering them through the back provides the kind of morbid fulfilment that only online arenas of death facilitate legally. Such a thing is a common occurrence in Advanced Warfare. Underlying the fact that you can now move like The Flash, however, are the core tenants of combat that help this continue to feel very much like a Call of Duty outing. Forgot about those people claiming the Exo Suit sends the action into the realm of Destiny of Halo, they're wrong. Movement along the ground retains the trademark agility that the series has forever provided, allowing those with the fastest reflexes to shoot and hide with the efficiency of a pigeon taking aerial pot shots at commuters. Veterans of the series will be well aware of how differently it moves in comparison to its genre peers and that essence is retained here - especially satisfying when playing the 'Classic' online playlists, which ban the use of Exo Suits. Familiar, too, are the weapons. While naming conventions may have changed, and aesthetics become synced with Blade Runner and Aliens, their operation is left largely unchanged. Assault rifles continue to fire bullets rather particle beams and are split between fully automatic, burst fire and single shot. Similarly recognisable are shotguns, sniper rifles, machine guns and grenades. In the few examples of weapons that do shot lasers, the change is predominantly visual in nature. There might be a bright red stream originating from your gun and culminating in your victim's cerebellum, but the required motions and actions are identical to that of a 'regular' gun. Less well judged are the designs of the maps, seemingly crafted with incredible intensity of action in mind. While this neatly couples with the expanded abilities offered by the Exo Suit, it creates a non-stop flow of carnage that all but banishes opportunities for a careful, considered approach. It was the diversity of maps that provided much of the joy for Call of Duty's Modern Warfare highpoints, so it's disappointing to see such a backward step being taken. For instance, there are no maps promoting stealthy use of a sniper rifle or sneakily timed assaults with silenced weapons. Success hinges on your ability to make good use of your arsenal and gadgetry rather than intelligent movement as a team. This problem is more or less apparent depending on your choice of game mode, of which there are plenty. Aforementioned 'Classic' matches go some way to calming things down and giving you time to think, as does 'Hardcore' and the way it enforces you to play more sensibly given the lack of a radar and vastly reduced health. No matter what, though, a greater variety of arenas would be very welcome and it shouldn't come down to your chosen game mode to near-wholly dictate your pace of play. Hopefully this issue will be addressed through the four DLC multiplayer packs that have already been confirmed for 2015. Despite the map disappointments, however, Advanced Warfare's multiplayer is comfortably the most appealing and exhaustive to have been offered in years. Certainly, it's a huge improvement on the flaccid, dreary concoction that was last year's Call of Duty: Ghosts. What's here manages to just about accomplish that delicate balancing act of providing something fresh, without diminishing the historical appeal. Further, the new additions nicely set up the franchise for future improvements and modifications. If you've felt that Call of Duty has been getting more than a little tedious in recent years, as I certainly have, then Advanced Warfare might just convince that it's something worth taking notice of once again.