Alternate history certainly repeats.
Call of Duty: Ghosts is as competent of a wheel-spin as you could hope for. The CoD series had been teetering on the brink of stagnation for a while, and Ghosts is really where the wind appears to have come out of the sails a little bit. The single-player campaign is perhaps the most inventive part of the package, offering the kinds of ridiculous set-pieces that the series does extremely well. Huge space missiles, levels that switch between the perspectives of an invading force and the air support that assists them, it's all good stuff but nothing too mind blowing. Inside of these set-pieces the actual action breaks down to the same loop of shoot, take cover, repeat that the series has been doing for a decade, but it's still fun and the bombastic nature of the campaign does a lot to carry it. The story is laughably silly, but overall the single player mode is a short but fun time. The same can't really be said of the multiplayer aspects of the game. There are many different modes included alongside the main campaign, variants on the horde mode, base defense and classic team deathmatch of course, but they're all just a little too familiar. Virtually every aspect of Ghosts feels like routine. The gameplay of the Call of Duty series has become such a pervasive de facto multiplayer standard that Ghosts really needed to do a little more than provide yet another version of the same game the series has been trotting out since Modern Warfare. The game also has the least amount of polish that the series has seen in a while, with more bugs and general jankiness showing up than expected. Despite all of this, it's still a fast and fun game, none of it is atrociously bad, it's all just a little lacking in spark.