Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare has been a fantastic return for the mega-selling first-person-shooter franchise. In my review I heaped praised upon both the campaign mode and the fun multiplayer options, mainly because of the excellent shift in style afforded by the exoskeleton. All in all, it’s the best Call of Duty game in years. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t room for improvement. There are still ways in which Call of Duty could blow away the competition and here are seven ways they could do it.

Campaign Co-Op

For years, Call of Duty games have had AI companions bossing you about through the campaign modes and we’d give our left foot to dump them for a human partner in splitscreen or online co-op. Frankly, the lack of co-op makes the series seem a little behind the times. COD has nailed multiplayer, the campaigns are fun, but this is the missing jewel in the crown. Fingers crossed for next year.

Multiplayer Vehicles

The maps lack the sheer size of rival Battlefield’s but if they upscaled them and added vehicles, COD might have a shot at stealing some of EA’s thunder. With so many glitches and bugs in B4’s launch, we’re surprised Activision hasn’t made a move here to be honest.

Smooth Boost Dodge Controls

Pressing L3 inwards and pushing the stick in a direction at the same time is incredibly awkward to control. To be fair, the controller is packed with features in Advanced Warfare, but if they can rejig things to get the dodge feature assigned to a shoulder button, we’re sure it’ll become a more intuitive feature.

Time Travel Story

Hear us out here. A return to the World War II shooter is long overdue for the series and developers have hinted that they’d quite like a crack at it too. The only problem there is that Sledgehammer have done a great job with the futuristic setting and the powerful exoskeleton, so much so, we want more! So, we’ll settle for a ridiculous storyline that sees us playing in the future with new toys the one minute and in WWII with classic-era weapons the next. Yes, we admit this is more than a bit greedy.

Weapon Stat Previews

The amount of weapons to choose from during the campaign is dizzying and until you’ve put a few hours in, you’ve no idea what each one you pry from a dead enemy’s hands is going to be like. How about a mini stats preview screen that pops up when you stand over an item. We’re looking for something similar to games like Darksiders II or Diablo III. For example, we’d like to see fire-rate, damage, range and clip size before we pick up anything.

Pick Own Gadget Loadout in Campaign

The Short Version: Give us the grapple launcher in every level, we love that thing. Zooming around levels and grabbing enemies from a distance was great fun during the later stages of the campaign of Advanced Warfare and we’d love to be able to enjoy using it throughout next time. Items like controlled descent and various boost jump strengths would also be handy to choose from, even if there’s a limitation on how many cool gadgets we could take into a mission.

Fatter Levels

The glass corridor has long been a Call of Duty trademark, but Advanced Warfare showed signs of improvement by adding a larger degree of verticality via the boost jumps/grappel lines, allowing us to use higher vantage points in some more open areas. There’s a difficult balance to reach as the tight environments allow the developers to script in some excellent set pieces, but now the new tools have been introduced, we think the time is right to let us explore a bit more if Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare 2 gets the green light.

How about it readers? Do you like our suggestions for improvements to make Call of Duty better? Or are you quite happy with things as they are? Naturally, we’d love to hear any cool ideas you might have for the franchise.