2016 has been one of the best years for single-player shooter campaigns of the past decade. We’ve seen Doom, Titanfall 2, Gears of War 4, Battlefield 1, Deus Ex: Mankind Divided… and they're all better than Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare’s campaign.

. It acts like it wants to be a serious sci-fi story without giving up the dream of also being Star Wars. This is at its worst when you're shooting early on, because the ballistic weapons you start out with do too little damage to people in space.

This is a problem, because one of the few things Call of Duty can typically be counted on to deliver is the feel of a good shooter. Low time-to-kill (TTK) is one of the factors that creates the signature pace of the series, but Infinite Warfare messes with that. Too many enemies are armoured, increasing that TTK and forcing you to wait behind cover as you wear them down, slowing things dramatically. A cover-leaning system allows you to duck out without fully exposing yourself, but you still take a significant amount of damage as you acquire targets and shoot them – once to remove their helmet and again to put them down. On higher difficulties, it's safer to just wait behind cover until you’re regenerated and then charge back into action than to risk being beaned while leaning, rendering the cover system moot.

There's a wealth of weaponry and gadgetry available, but it's drip-fed to you at an unsatisfying pace throughout the campaign....
As the story continues and your weapons get better, these problems solve themselves. Those energy weapons shred through the robots which litter the rear half of the campaign, and the pace picks up again as you careen towards the ending. Sadly, at five-and-a-half hours long, Infinite Warfare is just starting to feel good when it ends. In the final act, the action plays at a pace and tempo that few games can manage the way Call of Duty does. But prior to that final third, it feels like it's going on forever.

There just isn't five-and-a-half hours worth of game in it. Compare it to last year's Call of Duty: Black Ops 3, or even last week's Titanfall 2 and it seems ludicrous. Both have campaigns that are longer, but neither feels like they’re dragging along. They lack the flat spots peppered through the first two-thirds of Infinite Warfare, and both feature highly varied gameplay from moment to moment. Infinite Warfare, by contrast, is largely the same three gameplay loops repeated. You're either flying a Jackal (your dogfighting spaceship), shooting in corridors, or shooting in zero-G.
Part of the pacing problem comes from the fact that a significant portion of your time is spent treading water as you meander through the bridge of the Retribution. At the end of a mission you walk to the bridge – a 30-metre trek which exists to give you the option to watch a news story about a mission you just completed – and after you select your next mission, you walk yourself back down to the hangar bay. You stand on an elevator and engage in idle chitchat – it's reminiscent of Mass Effect's elevators, in that it's tedious and it's obviously hiding a loading screen behind the scenes.

I did the maths, and there was roughly 28 minutes of walking to and from mission briefings and standing on elevators. When the other five hours are high-octane explosive action, half an hour of shipside downtime is extremely noticeable. It's filler, designed to pad out a single-player run that is lacking in real substance.