The next instalment of Call of Duty comes out in the next few days, and takes a departure from the Modern Warfare series even though its still developed by Infinity Ward (or some of the original team). The new subseries is based around an elite group of soldiers called Ghosts, with name coming from a team left behind to defend a hospital who overcame substantial enemy numbers by attacking them using stealth and ‘ghost’ like skills.

The main story focuses on Logan and his brother attempting to fight back the ‘Federation’, a new superpower who has risen from the South American nations after the west lost its fuel supplies from the East. The story begins with an attack on a low orbit space weapon that is used to devastate the many cities across the world, while on the ground Logan fights his way out of his crumbling hometown.

Later missions take place through the oceans, the deserts and the jungles as CoD has you travelling all over the world trying to track down the games main protagonist Rourke – a former Ghost who has now turned to hunting them down.

Infinity Ward has borrowed heavily from every adrenalin rushing set piece in entertainment – from James Bond’s space fighting scenes to Transformers’ collapsing buildings. You could easily say this game is really stringing together of various action scenes with a loose story wrapped round them, the player is just thrown into them to live them out. This isn’t a bad thing, CoD has been around long enough to no longer really bring unique set pieces to the table (remember the Ghillies in the Mist level?). Instead Infinity Ward knows the multiplayer is where people will focus there time on. That’s probably why the dog Riley has more personality than the characters themselves.

Multiplayer-wise there is really a lot to do. Firstly Squads is similar to horde mode seen in Gears of War. Up to 4 players defend themselves against an onslaught of enemies as they keep upgrading their weapons to survive starting from just a pistol.

Extinction mode is the new Zombies mode. Players are tasked with drilling alien hives from an attacked town while trying to defend the drill from attacking creatures. Much like Zombies, you can buy different weapons and upgrades, as well as spend the money on kill streaks to either buff up the team or just kill monsters. While doing this you are rewarded with XP which allows you to assign different killstreaks, perks and weapons next time you play. Extinction mode also has a chance to see an ending rather than unlimited levels like Zombies.

Finally we have multiplayer. All the regular modes are included (although there is some clarification needed on Search & Destroy), as well as some new modes like Blitz – a capture the flag variant where you must reach the enemies zone to score a point after which you are teleported back to the start, Cranked – team deathmatch with a countdown timer in which you must get your next kill or die (unlucky campers), and Search and Rescue – like Search and Destroy but instead of one life, players can be revived.

Players now have the option to completely customise their character, from head to toe, if other games have been doing it for a long time why should Ghosts? As always there is a decent selection of guns, but with a new class called Marksman. This is essentially the middle ground between sniper and assault rifle – decent range single fire guns like the SVU sniper rifle and the FAL. Anyone with a rapid-fire pad will be hammering them.

The perks system has also been overhauled. Players now have ten perk slots, but each perk has a different slot value ranging from one to five. This offers unlimited customisations for your character about how you want them to work, either from running and gunning to silent and deadly. Again the killstreaks have the same option as Modern Warfare, from a support option for those who like to help the team, to standard chain kills for those who go it alone. Specialist is also back for those who want to really be a one man army!

Overall Ghosts is the same as the old Call of Duty games, average story line with epic set pieces, with a multiplayer that will be hammered till the next one is out.