The Discrepancy in Infinite Warfare Reviews and What It Means

Call of Duty:  Infi­nite War­fare cur­rent­ly has an 80/100 on Meta­crit­ic.  A lit­tle bit of dig­ging reveals the rea­son why.  After read­ing a major­i­ty of the reviews for the game, it’s pret­ty obvi­ous that every bit of praise, and there­fore every pos­i­tive score, is for the game’s sin­gle play­er campaign. 
If you’re a Call of Duty play­er, you know that that is not the rea­son peo­ple buy into the series.  Since MW3, nobody has giv­en a shit about Call of Duty’s sto­ry.  They’re all poor­ly writ­ten stand­alone sto­ries that try to get you invest­ed and get it over with in less than 7 hours so you can get on to the mul­ti­play­er, where (since Advanced War­fare) you can be hap­pi­ly micro­trans­ac­tioned to death.  The pub­lish­er is more involved in the devel­op­ment of the games than the devel­op­ers them­selves, forc­ing them to waste time mak­ing sure that RNG has a place instead of mak­ing sure servers are stable. 
Per­son­al­ly, I don’t have the game.  I played the beta, and what I learned from that alone was enough to remove any trace of inter­est I might have felt for this lat­est entry in the CoD series.  This is the first time I have not been on Call of Duty at launch, and I’m glad I made that call.  The user review score is a 3.3/10.  Of the 744 play­ers that have offered their opin­ion, 492 are unfa­vor­able.  The gen­er­al opin­ion seems to be that this game is not what the peo­ple want­ed.  But to go by the New York Dai­ly News review, for exam­ple, “It all adds up to the finest Call of Duty game yet”.
Call of Duty has final­ly shown it’s true face — a cash grab series meant to milk those of us who once cared about it.  Mean­while, the ‘impar­tial’ jour­nal­ists who pro­vide the game with such high praise have shown theirs by bas­ing their reviews on a seg­ment of the game they know is irrel­e­vant in order to please their masters.