http://xboxahoy.com/time-to-kill-recoil Seventh episode of 'Time To Kill', a series devoted to the inner workings and mechanics of Call of Duty's multiplayer. Some weapons kick like a mule, and others stay rock steady. In this episode, we're covering recoil. Outside of damage, recoil is one of the key differentiating factors in weapon balance - guns with higher damage, magazine capacity, or rapid handling characteristics are more likely to have a greater degree of kick, in an effort to preserve performance parity across the weapon selection. Recoil manifests itself as a disturbance in your aim when firing your weapon - every shot fired will temporarily alter your point of aim, which may mean successive shots will land away from your intended mark. The amount of recoil a weapon has dictates the overall accuracy of automatic fire - some weapons are able to put an entire magazine in a single target, whereas others might struggle to hit the broad side of a barn at any sort of distance. The recoil mechanics in Call of Duty are relatively complex, with quite a few different statistics governing the amount of weapon kick - and while you can simplify a weapon's performance to a simple statement such as 'low recoil', or 'high recoil' - to truly get an idea of a weapon's characteristics you need to break down the recoil into its component parts. First of all, your shots will always land at precisely the indicated point of your sights - there's no random spread while aiming, nor does any recoil affect alter this. What recoil will do is move the location of your sights when firing - and thus alter the position of any successive shot fired. There are two key elements to this movement - one called ViewKick, and another factor called GunKick. The former has usually been the principal element of recoil's kick in Call of Duty - it's only in MW3 where GunKick has become more of a factor. ViewKick affects your aim by simply moving your viewport - it's a temporary mod