Dr. Money and the Boy With No Penis

Shotguns and Snipers dominate this meta, because the strongest of them will 1-bodyshot-kill under the right circumstances. At the right distance, your chances to instantly gib your enemy are 100%, provided you have the aim and reaction time. Having whatever’s in front of you INSTANTLY die, the moment you click your mouse, is the best possible thing to have in a multiplayer game. Any gun that lets you do this under any circumstance is what you want, and Snipers and Shotguns are the kings of this. At a short range, a pump shotgun will yield and instant kill on a bodyshot. At a long range (or any range really, but the hip-fire spread usually makes it impossible), the Sniper Rifles dominate this.

Then you have Assault Rifles, which are, most of the time, useless. They’re a jack of all trades, but even in the best possible circumstances take maybe a full second to kill someone, no matter the distance. Or maybe it’s half of a second, or maybe it’s even a tenth of a second, doesn’t matter; any amount of time more than INSTANT is automatically worse in a game of odds.

So you have Snipers and Shotguns as the black and white of your meta. CoD has failed at this a lot since CoD4 (WaW wasn’t that bad, but it was weird). The increased focus on midrange weapons, gadgets, and killstreak rewards (man did they screw those up) muddied up the basic black and white balance. Tactical gameplay wasn’t really encouraged and run n’ gun gameplay wasn’t really rewarding. 

You pretty much had to take it one step at a time and luck out that you chose the right strategy for the situation. Midrange, full auto weapons, mixed in with the game’s dodgy netcode, made every death feel unfair. So much has to be computed in such a small amount of time (thanks to that super fast TTK) that CoD’s shitty P2P networking can barely keep up with it.

Now Blops 3 comes along and it at least gets SOMETHING right, in that it really focuses on the run n’ gun gameplay, whereas CoD4 discouraged it in favor of tactical gameplay (to an extent, duh). They’re no longer focusing on that ugly middle ground that CoD’s networking can’t handle. Now you’re strongly rewarded for running and gunning and shooting from the hip with all sorts of parkour shit and really strong, really prominent short ranged weapons (SMGs finally find a niche because they have a lot more hip fire accuracy from the get-go instead of NEEDING a laser sight to hit anything, so they’re a more reliable low-mid range step up from the Shottys, instead of a shittier class of AR).

And god damn does it feel good to play, if not a little clunky, so I’d say it’s like a clunkier Titanfall (Titanfall is pretty much perfection in the FPS parkour category, it flows really well and allows for some wiggle room, but it still retains that super tight Source engine movement and it just feels totally effortless), and poor Titanfall, it’s fucking dead because they charged full fucking price for it. 

So CoD12 (jesus christ it really is the twelfth one, that’s like some cartoon shit) is about the best we got in the “fast FPS” category next to Dirty Bomb (which is boring as hell) and Overwatch (which is unreleased as hell) for now, I mean for games that are still alive. Blops 3 probably won’t be alive for long though, because PC gamers are repulsed by this series (which is 1000% understandable), but it’s kind of a shame because they did about as good a job as they could this year, since the feature creep in the next few games is gonna be a disgusting clusterfuck.

So if you have like $40 bucks lying around, and you’re pining for a really good “fast” shooter with a couple of extra gizmos and dumb ricer shit you love, this isn’t the worst one I’ve ever played. At least give the thing a chance instead of automatically hating CoD on principle. Yes the last ones were bad but they didn’t fuck up as bad this time. Judge games based on their own merits you ignorant fucks.