One week after Call of Duty Advanced Warfare’s premiere: The issue with the debut trailer

We’ve all been pleasantly surprised with Kevin Spacey: Advanced Spacey. Echoing his Frank Underwood character, Spacey’s monologue given during the debut trailer for Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare have many hopeful for a meaningful and impactful single player campaign. There’s just one small problem: when we’re not shown pictures of Spacey’s character, we’re seeing the same old same old from Call of Duty.

I look back to last year’s Call of Duty: Ghosts for some of my fears. The glimpses shown off the game gave promise to a new single-player pacing. I was hoping for a slower, more methodical approach, one that juxtaposes the set pieces with enough downtime to breath.

Yeah, about that… we forgot that this is Call of Duty and that can’t exactly happen, which brings me to the Advanced Warfighter trailer. Sure, Kevin Spacey is nice, but we’re also seeing a lot of destruction, a lot of running, a lot of big bad bros, and a lot of death. In essence, it’s a lot of what we’ve already seen from the past, what, decade of Call of Duty?

I’m tired of battling through iconic locations that have been destroyed, a trope in gaming that seemingly never end. It was fun the first few times but now comes off as a lazy excuse for shock value. I’m tired of sprinting around maps and mindlessly killing people for nonsensical reasons; If I wanted to do that, I’d just play multiplayer.

The point is that sure, it’s exciting to see such a beloved actor make the jump into a franchise that desperately needs a breath of fresh air. But Kevin Spacey alone can’t make Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare a great game that brings in that fresh air. It needs gameplay to back it up. Based off the (admittedly incredibly short) glimpses of that gameplay, it looks like more of the same.