A Look Inside: Brady Games’ Advanced Warfare Guide

Games are awesome, but sometimes a little difficult. It can be hard to find the one requirement to top off your achievements, or to really tell the difference between different weapons. We recently got an opportunity to go hands-on with Brady Games’ strategy guide for the recently released Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, and it definitely opened my eyes to modern guide making. This is a more relaxed look; no scores or pros/cons lists here, just an overview of the product and whether it delivers.

To start out, we were looking at the hardcover Limited Edition, which came with some patches featuring the Atlas and Sentinel logos, as well as the game logo. I’m not much of a stitcher, but I’m sure anyone looking to go dressed as Jonathan Irons at their next con will definitely enjoy these. The guide itself is pretty well-made; I had few qualms outside a few pages that were a little more stuck-together than they should be, which caused me one or two unfortunate tears.

The guide includes sections for all three game modes: singleplayer, multiplayer and co-op survival. The singleplayer sections detail a basic walkthrough of every map, though for a Call of Duty game that seems a bit unnecessary. Most missions require a mix of mechanics and reactions, neither of which a guide can really provide. The real singleplayer value comes in the inclusion of a list of achievements and trophies, as well as intel locations. Finding all these can be a pain, and having them clearly laid out makes running through each mission in a completionist manner pretty easy.

For the multiplayer portion, Brady has really outdone themselves in the weapon descriptions. Graphs depicting shots-to-kill, damage ratios and hit-scan on every base weapon in multiplayer are fantastic. They did their research, and this is the kind of info that hardcore multiplayer addicts go crawling the web for. There’s also a basic overview of all the maps, along with objective layouts and spawn points — those looking to climb rankings will be pouring over these pages for days.

The co-op survival section is nice, but could’ve used a few strategies for each map. Players will definitely want to get to the final levels of Riot to see the zombies section, and so it would help to give them some successful strategies for surviving some of the more difficult co-op maps.

As a whole, the guide is a solid handbook for anyone looking for a physical grab-and-read source of info on Advanced Warfare. The inclusion of an e-guide with purchase is cool too, for those who’d rather read on their computer or tablet. I will, however, say that it’s definitely for the hardcore and absorbed — if you’re just a typical player looking to blow off steam on multiplayer, you won’t gain much from reading this besides a couple “Huh, that’s cool!” moments. We recommend Brady Games’ Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare guide for the hardcore, but not for the average gamer.

 

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