With such a well-rehearsed recipe to follow, there's more room here for innovation than there is for improvement. There are plenty who would love to see Call of Duty dragged through the mud for its lack of new ideas, but the game itself is too confidently constructed, too generous with its pleasures, to deserve any lasting vitriol. This is a ferocious and satisfying game that knows exactly what players expect, and delivers on that promise with bullish confidence.

Its greatest weakness is an outmoded single-player campaign that feels more threadbare each time it gets wheeled out, the limitations of its structure only occasionally masked by ever-escalating scenes of bombastic mayhem. It's thrilling and familiar in equal measure - but never, ever boring.

Comparisons to Battlefield 3 are expected, but played back-to-back, also fairly futile. Where multiplayer is concerned, the two are far more different than their surface similarities would suggest. Where COD wins out is in its coherence.