During the Sony E3 2016 press conference, Activision Blizzard showed gameplay from the single player campaign in the upcoming Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare featuring a prolonged space zero-gravity combat sequence.
I wouldn’t blame you for mistaking the footage for Titanfall 2, as it included both giant mechs and the ability to use a grappling line to snag enemies and bring them in for a melee kill — or in this case to remove their helmet and expose them to the vacuum of space.
Without dwelling too much on the scientific accuracy of the space combat shown (let’s just say Neil deGrasse Tyson is going to have a field day with this one), the gameplay shown was extremely impressive. In typical Call of Duty fashion, it was filled with scripted “wow” moments and massive explosions.
It starts out quietly enough, with a walkthrough of the bridge and loading bay of a space vessel which could come straight out of a Halo game. The player is then loaded into a fighter ship and catapulted into outer space, Battlestar Galactica-style, where we get our first prolonged look at vehicular combat in space.
After some space dogfighting and bombing runs on large enemy ships, all of which is very much unlike what you would expect in a Call of Duty game, the player’s craft lands, and we begin to get into familiar Call of Duty FPS territory. This is when the zero-gravity shooting begins, and where the grappling line takes a prominent role, as it is used to latch onto and move from platform to platform. We may have just reached peak grappling line, folks.
Once the player kills enough bad guys and causes some huge set pieces to go bye-bye, we see them hop into another fighter craft and retreat to safety just as an explosion fills the screen.
Overall, the game has very much of a sci-fi feel, and the space combat was much more dynamic than that featured in Call of Duty: Ghosts. Whether or not this gameplay demo will be enough to appease fans and erase some of the negative sentiment created by the announcement trailer last month remains to be seen.