Call of Duty – Infinite Warfare: Continuum DLC PS4 Review
Summary: With four fresh maps in which to hunt down your buddies and a rollicking foray into undead ass kicking, Continuum may falter in places but it is still an easy recommend for fans.
4.0
Stayin' Alive...
The latest DLC pack for Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare, Continuum, has just dropped and, although it doesn’t quite reach the heights of the superb previous offering, Sabotage, it still manages to offer up hours of solid gaming entertainment.
The biggest draw for me is always the newest instalment in the Zombie saga and this iteration, a kitschy Blaxploitation inspired effort featuring a guest appearance by genre legend Pam Grier, more than holds up to the previous standard.
Despite feeling smaller than the sprawling summer camp from Rave in the Redwoods, Shaolin Shuffle feels like a much more coherent map, with the Easter Eggs and myriad tasks to complete, whilst still incredibly convoluted, feeling slightly easier to manage and not quite so esoteric. Kung-Fu zombies, roller derby babess that explode upon impact and a spurned subterranean dweller dubbed the Rat King await players venturing into the debris littered streets of Seventies New York, and if you dug what the previous maps had to offer then you’ll definitely lose more than a few hours to escaping Willard Wyler’s latest masterpiece.
One thing that must be mentioned, however, is the sheer amount of glitches and exploits present in Shaolin Shuffle; I didn’t notice any issues with the multiplayer maps but Shaolin Shuffle is littered with ways to crawl off the map, gain infinite special attacks and safely sit back and mow down zombies as they funnel towards you.
These arguably add to the charm of the game, making certain tasks easier to complete, but it can also affect the stability of the game, with many rounds ending in the high thirties with teams committing suicide on the train tracks due to zombies no longer spawning in.
By far my favourite part of this new map is using the aforementioned special attacks by building up your chi attack power, be it via going all Black Belt Jones on a mofo or by lobbing shurikens at faces like a low rent Michael Dudikoff, before unleashing a devastating finishing attack that would give J.Robert Oppenheimer an inferiority complex… Damn, there were a lot of abtruse references in that last paragraph.
There are also four new maps to add to your multiplayer combat rotation, including Scrap, an intergalactic junkyard dotted with areas that allow you to invert gravity using magnets, allowing you to hang upside-down from cranes, which doesn’t exactly make aiming any easier but does make squeezing off a cheeky headshot all the more satisfying and it’s honestly just super fun to dick around with the physics.
Turista probably stands out as the best of Continuum’s maps, both from an aesthetc and gameplay perspective. Taking place within sci-fi resort that boasts waterfalls, scenic routes winding past remnants of an ancient fossilised behemoth and a futuristic Casino complete with robot croupiers. The way that the map is designed caters for mostly every playstyle, whether you get off on camping and popping off headshots from a distance or you’re more of a run-and-gun type, and ultimately Turista feels like the best balanced map overall.
Archive is a bit of a mixed bag; there are multiple hallways to use as choke points and the exhibition halls allow for some intense firefights but the placement of cover and general design just doesn’t feel as up to scratch as Turista does. Still, in my opinion it fares a bit better than Excess, which is apparently a reimagining of an earlier map Rust.
Objectively the weakest of the bunch, Excess would probably be a delight with a coordinated team but when most matches amount to everyone running around blindly firing upon anything that moves it just doesn’t feel like an exciting map, lacking any defining “wow” feature to make it stand out from the pack. It’s not that it’s a bad map – Indeed, this is an extremely solid DLC pack all around – It’s just that it feels a little uninspired when compared to Continuum‘s other offeirng..
Final Thought
With four fresh maps in which to hunt down your buddies and a rollicking foray into undead ass kicking, Continuum may falter in places but it is still an easy recommend for fans. A pulse-pounding funk injection of pure adrenaline, Shaolin Shuffle in particular ticks all the right boxes for me… I always knew that the soundtrack to the Apocalypse would be Disco.
I admittedly didn’t spend as much time on the multiplayer maps as I did on Shaolin Shuffle, but that’s more due to my preference for cooperative play than a comment on their quality, and overall they make for a decent package where any weaknesses on one map are often balanced out by the strengths on the others.
Infinity Ward have delivered another accomplished DLC pack that, again, whilst not quite hitting the lofty peaks of their previous effort, offers up hours of finely crafted rootin’ tootin’ shootin’ for the diehard CoD fan.
About the Author
Sean Warhurst Avid gamer. Cinephile. Considerate lover. Neither the word Protractor or Contractor accurately conveys my position on how I feel about Tractors.
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