Parents' Guide to Call of Duty: Ghosts

Call of Duty: Ghosts looks amazing, especially played on Xbox One and PlayStation 4. But it's not the game's graphics that impress so much as its depth and breadth of play. The campaign may be short and feature scenarios that strain belief (like zero-gravity space gunfights wherein you can get hit by bullets without decompressing), but most players will finish it in one or two nights and then spend weeks or months playing online multiplayer, which offers plenty of substantive evolutions that range from better-balanced combat rewards that don't drastically tip the odds in one team's direction to visually spectacular events that completely alter entire maps in seconds.

If traditional multiplayer doesn't interest you, there's Squads. Squads offers several new ways to play, like Safeguard, a mission type that has players defending against waves of increasingly skilled, computer-controlled enemies. And Extermination mode, with its class-based play that forces players to rely on each other to perform specific roles -- such as healer or resupplier -- may be the best cooperative experience yet produced in a Call of Duty game. That said, it would have been nice had the developers figured out a way to make online play a bit less off-putting for new players. Rookies with little experience likely will be creamed relentlessly for weeks or even months until their reflexes are honed and they become intimately familiar with the maps, weapons, and character-upgrade systems. Newbies can enjoy themselves a little playing against the game's computer-controlled bots until they've got the skills necessary for online play.