He can push an upturned ice cream van down the street to provide cover for his allies.
He can cloak himself to blend in with foliage and become invisible to enemy soldiers (but not, crucially, seeker drones, which can see through the electromagnetic fakery). With the suit Mitchell can pull the doors from cars and use them as impromptu shields.
There’s the "exo climb", the "exo push", the boost jump, magnetic gloves, the ability to hover… all moves that transform Private Mitchell, the game’s protagonist whom players follow from green private across a decade-long storyline to hardened veteran. It starts with the exoskeleton (dubbed the "exo" in game) and the raft of new interactions that it brings. This is, according to Schofield, “the most radical change to Call of Duty you’ve ever felt on the controller.” The futuristic setting is Sledgehammer’s answer to the problem the accompanying scope for new technologies in the game brings with it more than just a fresh setting – it changes the way in which participants play the game. There is, however, a challenge for its wealthy custodians: how to maintain interest in a series that is becoming ever more familiar without alienating the gigantic fan-base (around 10 million players log in to play Call of Duty every day, more than six months after the most recent title’s release). Activision’s juggernaut series, released in annual instalments, boasts of being the highest grossing entertainment brand across all mediums. It is, nevertheless, a speculative realism that is designed to make Call of Duty a more interesting, relevant game in 2014. “Everything in the game is based on technology that we know will be out there,” he says. These visions are, according to Glen Schofield, one of the founders of Sledgehammer Games (the studio tasked with taking the Call of Duty series into the formula-freshening future) based in not in science fiction but reality. Not only can soldiers flick a switch and become invisible: kilometre-wide digital canopies mask chemical warehouses from Google satellites’ prying lenses. Soldiers can switch between incendiary, flash and other types of grenade with a squeeze of the thumb. Smart grenades hover in the air for a few seconds, pick out their targets before they launch toward them with a scream. Set 45 years into the future, soldiers wear exoskeletons which grant them superhuman strength, allowing them to carry great loads, to take lingering leaps into the air and to clamber up the side of buildings. But the ways in which war is waged have changed beyond recognition. In Call of Duty Advanced Warfare, war happens for the same reasons it always does: to exert power, to protect and expand territory.
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