Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare Exo-Survival Review

Horde and survival modes within the Call of Duty franchise is nothing new - the first of which was introduced in World at War back in 2008. What Advanced Warfare does however, is slightly change up the “traditional” format.

As somebody who regularly purchases Call of Duty titles purely for their ‘zombie modes’, myself and few friends were slightly disappointed to hear that this mode will not be returning in the base game, and instead was replaced with “Exo Survival”. Still, we bit our tongue, bought the game, and hopped into a game with all four of us.

Straight off the bat, the most noticeable change to this horde mode is that there’s no zombies. Replacing them are armed soldiers who will appear in waves (similar to previous zombie modes), and are armed to the teeth with the latest weaponry Call of Duty has to offer. Once you and your team have killed that wave, you will have a 45 second break to re-arm and upgrade.

In previous titles, this has meant that you run to a mystery box and gamble 950 points for a gun which can, on some levels, be upgraded by placing it in the Pack-a-Punch machine. In Exo Survival, after each round, you earn Upgrade Points (UPs). You then spend these UPs to purchase different guns, attachments, and enhancements for both your primary weapon, secondary, and Exo suit. That’s right, you get to use your Exo suit - the unique selling point for Advanced Warfare - within Exo Survival.

Once the break timer runs out, your next wave will begin. For the most part, you have to hold up somewhere and kill on-coming waves of enemies, be that foot soldiers, heavy machine gunners, dogs, drones, or Goliaths (mech warriors). There are, however, some objective-based rounds such as collecting dog tags or disarming bombs, whilst still defending from the oncoming hordes. Completing these objectives will grant you an extra UP. Failing to complete them will result in you losing your 45 second break period, and receiving a “debuff”. This is usually a System Hack which removes your Head Up Display (HUD) and makes it harder to get kills on your enemies.

Looking back at other survival modes in previous Call of Duty titles, you are usually restricted to a few special maps, with more unlocked via DLC later down the line. Well, in Advanced Warfare, you can play Exo Survival on any of the Multiplayer maps. This means that, at launch, there are 13 different maps to play this game mode on - a huge improvement from the usual three or four. These 13 maps are split into “Tiers”. To start with, you are given access to Tier One maps and, to unlock the next Tier, you must get a certain amount of ‘round wins’ in this Tier. This works the same for Tiers Three and Four as well. At present, we are not sure how DLC will affect this, but a Zombie mode addition to Exo Survival has been announced for the first DLC pack.

For the most part, Exo Survival is a very enjoyable game mode and brings something fresh to the somewhat stale franchise. Unfortunately, I do have quite a large gripe and that is that, after a certain amount of time, the game gets rather easy. As I mentioned earlier, we had four players and on numerous occasions, we found ourselves just killing wave after wave. Every 25 rounds, the map “flips” (going to Round 12) which, apparently, makes the enemies a lot harder. If anything, we found them even easier at this stage. By the middle of our first flip, all of our team had pretty much upgraded everything to the max and we just sat in a corner taking out wave after wave. In the later Tiers, it does get more challenging, but I fear it may face the same problems we found of difficulty.

Overall, the Exo Survival mode is a great addition to Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, but I would have liked to see the addition of a zombie option without DLC. The difficulty of the mode does leave a lot to be desired, but in about an hour or so bursts, it’s a lot of fun. If you haven’t yet, I strongly advice you get a group of four together and give this a mode a go!