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Editor's note: Ahead of our full review next week after we've had time to get to grips with the game's online component, here are Edwin's impressions of the single-player campaign.Among the first things you do in Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare is walk through a memorial, running your eyes over marble slabs engraved with the names of the fallen. As I later discovered, the soldiers so remembered are in fact Infinity Ward employees - senior animator Dustin Kimmich, character artist Sylvia Miller and art director Brian Horton among others. Playing footage of the scene back, I couldn't help but think of those "dearly departed" souls the artists had neglected to include. Studio co-founders Vince Zampella and Jason West, to name a couple off the top of my head. Steve Fukuda, lead designer of the very first Call of Duty back in 2003. Mohammad Alavi, the incorrigible dabbler behind the legendary "Crew Expendable" and "No Russian" missions.
If these former staffers are absent from the honour roll, following years of bitter litigation between Activision, West and Zampella over an exodus of staff to Respawn Entertainment, their legacy is indelible throughout the new game. It's there in the presence of a two-man sniper mission, cut from the same cloth as Alavi's "All Ghillied Up" - the backdrop may be an asteroid field rather than a radioactive wasteland, but every time your ally asks you to pick a target, it's as though you're back in Chernobyl with Captain MacMillan. It's there, too, in the revival of the UAV, Call of Duty's best-known and most effective killstreak - a reassuring sight alongside new (or at least, newly reimagined) toys like the richochet-friendly Claw energy rifle, the self-piloting R-C8 battle mech or the scuttling Seeker grenade. Above all, it's there in the game's unabashed love of interfacial technology and military procedure - a crackling cloud of HUD readouts, heatmaps and comms chatter, guiding you into and out of the folds of each level.
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