Another year, another instalment of Call of Duty, and it's business as usual for gaming's most successful war machine. Ghosts doesn't reinvent the wheel, but it does offer millions of sofa-based soldiers a great-looking wheel to play with. A spectacular, explosion-filled game that takes the slick FPS action under the sea, into tanks and helicopters, down skyscrapers and even into space…

The single-player campaign boasts the space battles, a playable attack dog called Riley and a faintly preposterous storyline of the near future. America is under attack from the sinister Federation, a collection of South American states that has taken on the good ol' US of A for no adequately explained reason. So a plucky little (yet curiously well-equipped) force of Yankee super-soldiers takes the fight back to their geopolitically incorrect foes. Cue a series of somewhat linear yet fantastically impressive set-pieces.

But multiplayer is why COD is still the biggest gaming franchise in the world, despite GTA V's recent record-breaking antics, and it certainly delivers. New, bigger maps and plenty of new modes and features add a range of gimmicks to the core experience of having your posterior handed to you on a plate by 12-year-olds of all nations.

There are seven new competitive modes to try, and while some do little more than change the pattern on that plate, others such as "cranked" really up the ante, by giving you a speed boost after each kill but starting a countdown during which you must land another shot… or explode.

Co-op multiplayer also gets a shake up, with the thumb-punishing "extinction" mode in which four players protect a drill from wave upon wave of aliens. Just like the rest of COD: Ghosts, it's relentless, noisy, slightly refreshed and a lot of fun.