The COD series tends to get a bad reception and it’s fairly easy to see where the hate comes from. Activision prices the game at £50 for the cheapest edition and then throw in an extra £12 quid for DLC. They remake the same game every year and the mechanics certainly don’t lend themselves to competitive or even balanced play.

But there is something that the series itself, independent of the business practices surrounding it, offers and that’s the a particularly fast paced and pick up put down multiplayer experience that works best when you aren’t playing with anyone you know. While I would play battlefield if I was playing with a couple of friends it loses a lot of its appeal when being played on your own.

Given that quite a lot of the time you simply can’t play games at the same time as your friends this is a particularly strong selling point, which is only enhanced by the unlock system in multiplayer. Whilst this distorts the balance even further it does offer the same sort of compulsion you see In ARPGs and MMOs. Does anyone have the same experience with COD:XYZ? Or does anyone have alternative games for people looking for this experience without throwing hundreds of pounds at Activision?

(Full disclosure: I haven’t played a battlefield game on the PC since BF:2142 and I haven’t played a COD game on the PC ever. Poor uni student and all that.)

Team Fortress 2, now that it is free. But it is heavily team based. If your team is bad, you'd be bad too.

Killing Floor is my favorite multiplayer shooter by far. Shooting zeds though, instead of each other. Pretty good community most of the time.

Both of those games are pretty good, and TF2 would probably be my choice if I was going to pick a game to play solo multiplayer. Killing floor is excellent although like the BF series you really need to be playing with people you know to get the most out of it. I'm a little surprised that there aren't more multiplayer games with such a clear emphasis on individual multiplayer play as the COD series.