In Infinite Warfare physics is not a rulebook to be religiously followed, but a generative system, one that allows Infinity Ward to imagine what solutions and systems of offence and defence combat in a vacuum might entail and have fun making them as weighty and satisfying as possible. There's a love throughout, not of scientific accuracy usually associated with вЂњhardвЂќ sci-fi, but of engaging with the physical and technical weight of war in space. The missions themselves also flicker with the drama of shock depressurisation, ridiculous transforming weapons, and jumping from ship to void, to interior and back out again, with all the crunching tech those transitions entail. And yet they don't waste this space, using it for a quick back-and-forth between you and your wingwoman which sets up the mission ahead better than any briefing, showing that the game's economic approach to space doesn't just apply to the ship design. The launch sequence, an exquisitely detailed process focused on the drama and texture of hydraulic lifts, airlocks and shimmering interfaces filled with obscure calculations, tells you all you need to know about where developer Infinity Ward's priorities were. Every mission you take, for example, the game has you launch your Jackal from the Retribution.

Yes, I was pleased to find the game's hub to be as wonderful as I had imagined, but it was the way this weighty, tech-obsessed feel bled out into the rest of the game that really got me. Every surface is covered with tech, yet these are not the nonsensical greebles of Star Wars, but heating pipes, cable rails, fluorescent tube fittings. Everywhere you go on this ship (which is less of a space cruiser and more of an '80s aircraft carrier with all the external doors welded shut) you are accompanied by the groans of the hull, the hiss of pipes, the click-clack of mechanical keyboards. Once the game stations you on the deck of the Retribution this tactile, Top-Gun-in-space feel only increases. Holograms, AR and touch screens may be more convincing future interfaces, but nothing feels or sounds as real or as tactile as a monitor warming up, a toggle switch flicking back and forth or a vacuum seal locking in. Like Alien's iconic industrial spaceship, the focus here is less on вЂњrealisticвЂќ and more on вЂњrealвЂќ. Decked out with what sound like chunky CRT monitors, mechanical keyboards and enough toggle switches to outfit the bridge of the Nostromo, these jets are less futuristic sheen and more Top Gun in space. Just as it was Ridley Scott's famously detail-obsessed eye that led him to start Alien with a loving wander through all of his pristinely fashioned sets, so it is Infinite Warfare's love of chunky, believable tech that leads it to lavish the players attention on the literal nuts and bolts of the game.ДЇrom the moment the game puts you in the cockpit of one of its Jackal multi-role fighters you begin to understand the drive behind it. Call of Duty has always had a slightly unsettling obsession with deadly military tech, but with Infinite Warfare this obsession mutates from weird gun-fetish to something that meshes beautifully with its science fiction world. The true star of the show is the tech that enables this pace. And in these two hours Infinite Warfare comes to life in the transitions it makes between the shooting, not the shooting itself.

Momentum is everything in these first missions, and there are few games that can match the sense of headlong pace the game delivers. Walk-and-talk is the trick here, switching out cutscenes for mobile meetings that keep forward momentum and stay economical on the details. Unlike the prologue, this exhilarating charge doesn't dump lore on you, instead it elegantly lets you walk through it.

This allows it to string together a continuous set of missions that seamlessly take you from a grand celebration, through an invasion, into orbit, into a chaotic space battle and then drifting into land on the Retribution. After the rote prologue, the game abandons the series' typical character switching, for example, instead keeping you firmly in the boots of one Commander Nick Reyes. But perhaps вЂњnot feeling like Call of DutyвЂќ is what allows Infinite Warfare to aspire to something else.

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