CALLL OF DUTY: Y: MODERN ERN WARFARE FARE
More military shooting from the masters of the genre
YOU KNOW WHAT you’re getting when CallofDuty goes back to its “roots” in the fourth game. You get three years of Infinity Ward’s full attention, with additional help from High Moon, Beenox, Raven, and Sledgehammer. It had better be good—and luckily it is.
While we get yet another plot about American intervention in a Russian invasion of a fictional country somewhere in that space where Turkey meets Iraq, it’s also a game of beautifully recreated moonlit alleyways, night-time walks in the forest, abandoned motorbikes, and a battered PC case with the single best rendering of a Molex power connector we’ve yet seen. Its use of darkness is sublime, enabling you to be the terror in the night before deftly turning the tables.
It sees the return of Captain Price who, amusingly, has the same facial hair as the protagonist of DiscoElysium, but few of his other hang-ups. Price is ruthless and clinical, tossing hostages padlocked into suicide vests off ledges, rather than have their explosion kill innocents, and rocking the most ridiculous night vision goggles. He’s a good man to have on your side, even if you do spend a lot of time following him around. In fact, there’s a lot of following in general, including a standout part in which, as a small girl, you follow your brother through war-torn streets.
Such breaks from the COD norm never last for long, but then nothing does. For a glorious two minutes, you launch remotecontrol planes laden with explosives into Russian helicopters. There’s a short reprise of DeathFromAbove, in which you use a helicopter to splatter soldiers who were making your life hard just moments ago. There’s the requisite sniping level in which you must take bullet drop and wind speed into account, but it’s over the moment you use your rifle to hammer bullets into the engine blocks of trucks.
It keeps up this pace, from thunderous assaults on aircraft hangars that wouldn’t have been out of place in 2017’s WWII, just with different guns, to midnight house clearances that couldn’t come from anywhere else. It’s a game that knows its identity, on its own and as part of a serieswithin-a-series. It pulls the same trick
InfiniteWarfare managed, of standing out in an otherwise samey genre, but does it while being ostensibly the same as other games, not by taking Jon Snow to space. It even manages Half
Life2’s trick of directing your gaze where the devs want you to look, an otherwise unremarkable trek down a zig-zag staircase showing events outside timed perfectly with your descent.
The new engine is part of that distinctiveness. Even without ray tracing, it looks good. The lighting, in particular, deserves heavy praise, justifying the decision to set so much of the game in the dark. Character models are sharp and believable, their mo-capped movements fluent. The hair-rendering technology produces such great beards and stubble that a female resistance leader seems strange for her lack of whiskers. Performance is good, too, with 4K not out of the reach of RTX 2060s and upward.
The best CallofDuty for a long time? Probably. But also a rattling good story, with multiplayer that will keep you coming back for years.