For veteran and returning players, here are a few quick notes on major new features and changes in Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare.
Walking and Running
Your normal form of movement is, simply, walking. While walking, you make a small amount of noise, move at a slow pace, and can quickly bring up your weapon to ADS or fire instantly from the hip.
Sprinting allows you to move more quickly, at the cost of lowering your weapon and increasing the amount of noise you make.
Sprinting everywhere is extremely dangerous. Alert enemy players pay careful attention to sounds, and if you are sprinting in enemy territory, they will hear you.
The other problem with having your gun lowered is an all but guaranteed trip to the grave if you round a corner sprinting and run into someone who is walking, or worse, already has their sights up and aimed in your direction.
The Gung-Ho perk allows you to hip fire while sprinting, which cuts some of the penalty, and the Dead Silence perk removes your footsteps. The two, together, can help you overcome the penalties of sprinting.
When you’re in “friendly” territory and surrounded by teammates, it’s generally safe to sprint, but once you get close to the middle of the map, or near objectives, slow down. You might take an extra few seconds to walk to a target location, but that’s better than another ten spent running back from your spawn point because you sprinted into an ambush.
Jumping and Thrust Jumping
Jumping by itself isn’t of much use in combat. It’s primarily useful for moving around the map itself. You can jump into windows or onto walls.
Thrust jumping, on the other hand, allows you to use your Rigs’ thrusters to double jump and hold the Jump button to gain more height or distance.
Learning to use your thrusters is critically important. Jumping over enemy players who are waiting at corner cover, onto wall run points, onto elevated terrain: all are important.
In particular, jumping in combat can throw off enemy aim, and at certain distances (particularly up close), can cause your enemy to completely lose track of you.
It’s possible to jump and then thrust jump backwards over an enemy who ambushes you from behind, and if they aren’t very quick to respond, you can turn what should have been an easy kill into a reversal.
Jumping around corners is also extremely useful. Players tend to cover terrain at player height on the ground, so if you come around the corner in the air on a random arc, it’s much harder for an enemy to track you.
Jumping over a known enemy who is behind cover is also effective. If you’re close enough to their location when you emerge from cover, you’re likely moving too fast, relative to their position, for them to track you accurately, giving you a decisive edge when you open fire from above.
In CQC, thrust jumping tends to favor SMGs and shotguns, but some ARs with the proper attachments are still quite effective. LMGs and snipers are generally less effective at aerial combat, with pistols falling somewhere in the middle, depending on the specific model and its attachments.
Wall Running
Wall running is performed simply by jumping or thrust jumping onto any flat wall.
Most walls can be used to wall run, and many maps have areas that can only be crossed safely with a wall run.
There are also optional routes around the far edges of maps that can be reached with a combination of thrust jumps and wall runs. Explore the edges of the levels in a custom match and experiment.
Most of these alternate routes are a bit slower and a bit more exposed, and therefore dangerous to use. Some of them, though, are hidden from normal sight lines, and most of them allow you to attack from an unexpected angle. This can be very useful if the normal wall run approaches are being covered.
You can still aim and fire while wall running, but meeting another enemy player mid-run on the wall tends to be a coin-flip firefight, exactly the type you don’t want to get into with regularity.
If you expect traffic on a common wall run point, you’re better off posting up behind nearby cover and picking off the enemies as they try to approach, rather than risking a direct confrontation during the wall run itself.
Mantling
Mantling is simply pulling yourself up and over obstacles. This can be into windows, onto boxes, or onto rooftops.
Mantling is performed automatically. All you need to do is jump or thrust jump toward a surface you can grab, and your soldier automatically pulls you up and over the obstruction.
Sliding
Sliding is a very useful defensive and evasive move, and it can be used offensively with shotguns and SMGs quite effectively.
You can perform a slide by holding the Crouch button while sprinting. It is also possible to slide after landing from a jump or thrust jump.
Slides give you a sudden boost of momentum in the direction of the slide, and they lower your visible profile, making you a harder target to hit, particularly at a distance, and doubly so if you are sliding at a hard angle to the left or right of a hostile shooter’s screen.
For aggressive play, sliding with shotguns and SMGs allows you to rapidly close into lethal distance while disrupting enemy aim at short range.
In general, thrust jumping over enemies in CQC is a safer move, but there are situations where sliding can allow you to surprise and ambush enemies with your quick movement.
There are also times when you don’t want to jump, for fear of exposing yourself to more distant shooters. Sliding lets you use available hard cover nearby, and keeps you out of the line of sight of enemies who aren’t part of the immediate short-range firefight.
Crouch and Prone
You can crouch by tapping the Crouch button, or go prone by holding it when you aren’t sprinting.
Crouching and being prone both improve your accuracy a bit, but they also slow your movement to the point where evasive mobility is basically impossible.
Use crouching to lower your profile when behind low cover, and use prone to either hide completely behind cover, or to lay an ambush.
A prone ambush is a do or die tactic. If you pull it off, you can kill one or more enemies before they even notice you, but if you don’t kill them immediately, odds are very good you’re dead, because you can’t do much in the way of dodging while prone.
Crouch and prone are both useful tools for briefly hiding when performing a reload.
