There’s a mission early in Infinite Warfare’s campaign in which you assault the moon. Most shooters would think assaulting the moon a grandiose enough premise for 30 minutes of popping virtual heads. But in Operation Port Armour, assaulting the moon is merely the start. After clearing the Lunar Gateway of SDF soldiers (which you can do by blowing out the spaceport’s windows, sucking your foes out into space), you then board your Jackal fighter craft and jump into lunar orbit for an extended dogfight with SDF fighters launching from a nearby Destroyer.
But the mission doesn’t end there. Once the enemy fighters are down (or up – it is space after all), you disembark your Jackal for a Zero-G assault on the Destroyer itself, floating along its hull before blasting a hole in the bridge and clearing out the remaining crew from the inside. All this is delivered in one seamless sequence, from leaving the vehicle bay of the capital ship Retribution to blowing the final SDF soldiers out of the Destroyer’s airlock.
Operation Port Armour is probably the best individual Call of Duty mission since Modern Warfare’s ‘All Ghillied Up’, and one of several reasons why Infinite Warfare is my favourite Call of Duty of the last decade. Call of Duty spent years struggling to escape the shadow of 2007’s landmark FPS, with results ranging from the madness of Black Ops to the misery of Ghosts. In Infinite Warfare, Infinity Ward delivered a bold and imaginative sci-fi adventure that innovated in ways the series hadn’t seen before, and thanks to the surprisingly negative response to those innovations, also hasn’t seen since.
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Infinite Warfare takes place in 2187, presenting players with an Expanse-like vision of the future. Humanity has reached beyond Earth but not the sun, colonising Mars and establishing frontier-like outposts on distant moons such as Europa and Titan. The spread of humanity has given rise to new political factions and tensions beyond Earth’s atmosphere, culminating in the formation of the Settlement Defence Force, or SDF.