Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare Reckoning Review

"No Reckoning Here"

Multiplayer

This is the final DLC pack for Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare which finally completes this Call of Duty season pass offering. With Reckoning be prepared for four new maps and a new exo zombies level which can be read lower below. I was actually surprised when setting up this review that I had skipped the last DLC pack though honestly this whole year's Call of Duty offerings have been rather bland. That very tradition carries forth onto this last pack as we get four completely new maps, no remakes this time. First up we have Fracture which takes place in near one of the poles and has a snow theme to it. It also seems to be slightly based off another coastal map since the side of the area falls off over time in large chunks of ice which was neat. Other than that it's basically a straight map with two sides and walls cutting off a middle portion. There wasn't much space to move since it was narrow and had nothing particularly special to it.

The second map is Overload which takes place at a middle east hotel area and essentially is another straight on map. It does feature some side areas though the vast amount of combat takes place in the center area. The place is filled with a look of luxury and was actually one of the more interesting maps in this pack. The third map is Quarantinewhich is a center based map that has open walk areas around the outside. It's a bit of a zoo/animal enclosure since the center is a play environment which can have the floor taken out. I felt this map was probably the best out of the bunch, though still nothing signature about this one. Finally we have Swarm which seemed to be the most heavily weighted map and was the worse of the bunch. It features nasty sight lines which promote spawn killing form great lengths and a awkwardly designed middle section which felt cluttered. There was some neat verticality though it never truly worked efficiently.

Exo Zombies (Descent)

The entirely boring Exo Zombies comes to a conclusion with Descent which has you going head to head with Oz as a boss. This map takes place in an under-ocean facility of course created by Atlas Corporation. Oz, a character you originally played as earlier has become a zombie/human type character boss that's trying to kill you? The plot really hasn't made any sense the entire time though we're just going with it. The level itself was neat visually with some interesting room shapes though quite bland when moving through it. The rounds also seemed far easier than past exo zombies and the only difficult portions seemed to be when taking on the Oz boss fight area. I've really started to dislike zombies ever since they made them more story oriented instead of just being survival areas with strategies. This time the whole random teleport to fight a boss character was lame, that's there's to it. You're forced from whatever you may be doing into this arena to battle it out. Terrible idea and players online never were into it so we'd just give up most of the time after a couple battles against him. On a plus note, the new Trident weapon was really awesome.

The Conclusion

I don't know if my care or love of this franchise is quite where it was, but the quality of the DLC has definitely been going down these last two season passes. Sure we get four new maps and some sort of bonus area, but I'm not seeing anything special or sticking out from these. You should be fine with the maps already available for this title, but if you need to get it you will have extra maps to play on. That's about it with Reckoning, the zombies mode was the most disappointing for me since it had shown early promise with potential DLC development. I suppose I'll see you for the next season, but I'm really only interested in it at this point for the classic zombies of which I still have a passion for. With that, Advanced Warfare has been wrapped up.

Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare Review on Xbox One

Rating Overall: 5.0