Gamers who pre-ordered Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare get the Day One Edition today, while everyone else must wait until tomorrow to grab theirs.

Naturally, a bunch of overseas media have got their hands on the game early and have already started submitting their review scores, and by the looks of it Advanced Warfare is – at the very least – better than last year’s Ghost. That’s good news for someone like me, who thoroughly enjoyed Ghost’s bombast and spectacle and easily forgave its single-player campaign’s 6-hour run-time.

Here are some of the scores awarded to the new game from some of the biggest names in the biz:

Polygon has given it a 9 out of 10, saying “its major additions to Call of Duty’s multiplayer, from basic mechanics to its deeply addictive progression system, might be enough to chase away bad memories of Ghosts”

Gamespot finishes off its 8/10 review with “Yet for all its predictability, Advanced Warfare is a deluge of action-film bravado, and it’s difficult to not be carried away by its tidal forces.”

Videogamer.com says “Mixing futuristic tech with established fundamentals, Sledgehammer has created the first truly impressive Call of Duty in years”, and has awarded the game an 8/10 score.

Gameinformer gives it a 9/10, and says “With serious tweaks to some elements of core gameplay, Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare feels like its own special surge forward while maintaining the gunplay that makes the series fantastic.”

Those are some pretty good scores, perhaps proof that Activision’s three-year development cycle per new Call of Duty game is paying off. Advanced Warfare is developer Sledgehammer Games’ first full COD game, having only co-developed 2011’s Modern Warfare 3 with Raven Software, and apparently those three years were put to good use.

It also bodes well for the new movement system that comes courtesy of the game’s futuristic exoskeletons that will have players using environments in all-new ways.

We’re attending an Advanced Warfare LAN tonight to kick the game off good and proper in South Africa, and will have our own review of the game up as soon as we can.

[Source – Polygon, Gamespot, Videogamer, Gameinformer, Image – Polygon]