Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare's final four competitive multiplayer maps continue to prove that the franchise is in excellent hands when it's Sledgehammer's turn. Map design is tight and diverse, with several opportunities for creative use of your Exo. And of course, there are the environmental gimmicks. Those glorious, glorious environmental gimmicks.
Overload is my favorite, precisely for the reasons that others will absolutely loathe it. Set in an opulent unnamed city in the Middle East, teams duke it out amidst the glitz and glamour of a fine hotel. A fine, deadly hotel. You see, while planters and helipads might ostensibly provide some cover, you have to watch your step. Halfway through the match, the hotel's plasma lights begin to glow; shooting them unleashes a deadly burst of electricity. Read: instakill.
Fracture shares its name with an early Titanfall map, but it couldn't be any different. This map takes place in a polar ice facility. As the title implies, the ground doesn't remain stable throughout each match; after all, the facility is located on a sinking ice cap. You'd think the engineers would do their due diligence on foundation work. I can only hope Atlas got a good deal.
Swarm is a map located in a Korean suburb. It's mostly conventional, though it definitely allows some creativity in getting around the streets and through the series of buildings that line them. Opportunities for close quarters combat abound in this map; just make sure you shoot a grenade behind the bar if you absolutely must enter that particular room. You'll thank me later. If you perform well in Swarm, you get to command a swarm of assault drones.
Quarantine is kind of a disturbing map. It's mostly what you think it is; an island that is the site of an outbreak. An unknown contagion has ravaged the place, and whatever efforts to contain or understand it have clearly failed. So you make war in and around what appears to be an animal experimentation laboratory (don't worry, while you can hear them, you won't see them or hurt them). The abandoned motif mixes with the technological aesthetic to come up with something unsettling. Or at least it would be if you had the chance to relax and soak it all in.
