Patchy moustaches and a new Call of Duty title: November has offered up little more than this in recent years.

While we never tire of hilarious facial hair, first-person shooters are another matter completely. So prevalent is the genre, with little in the way of innovation, catatonic boredom is my usual response to yet another military assault in the Middle East with Hootch, Dave and Fibble, or whatever your comrades in arms happen to be called.

Call of Duty, however, is the shining sausage in an otherwise pointless butchers.
It starts with an Elbow-soaked cinematic that staples your emotional involvement right to its forehead.

It's also a futuristic little number, but not in a rocket-holidays-to-Ganymede kind of way. It's 2025, and the improvements in warfare are mild and exciting, but more importantly, believable. You'll mess about with nano-gloves and flying fox-style wings very early on, and I don't care if physics spits in their face, it all seems rather plausible to me.

General play is, as one might expect, all pulled from the Large and Ungainly Bible of First-Person Runny Shooty Hidey. If you expected otherwise, you're a fool. It's all about the story with FPS titles, and CoD does a juicy tale.