Call of Duty: Modern Warfare
A new high bar for the series, despite it feeling dated.
This latest sequel/reboot has sold itself as a return to the setting that “started it all”. It’s a snappy marketing line and it’s not entirely misleading. The warfare is once again modern and Captain Price is your squad dad. Yet it’s Modern Warfare’s moments of unfamiliarity that impress me – rebuilt weapon handling, new modes, and characters that aren’t the cookiecutter operatives we’ve seen in the last decade.
Unfortunately this evolution is only halfrealised in multiplayer. Here the relics of 2007 clash with fresh ideas. Modern Warfare aspires to be grounded and tactical while also giving you the power to pilot your own heavy gunship, and it doesn’t work. It’s easy to forget about that complaint in the heat of a match, because Modern Warfare’s action is exceptional. Weapons explode with concussive energy and rattle with recoil until the magazine is spent. Reload animations bask in the moment with motioncaptured flare that celebrates a kill and snaps back into place for the next fight.
But despite an aesthetic turn toward reality, Team Deathmatch and other core modes remain cyclical meat grinders of kill-die-respawn-kill where the only skill check is the first to click on a head. Oh, and whoever scores the first killstreak. I hate killstreaks. In my years away from the series, I haven’t missed getting carpet bombed by a $90 million jet while minding my own business. Killstreaks hand more power to players already topping the scoreboard, turning the rest of us into ants under a magnifying glass. And when the roles reverse, the pride of a long killstreak is devalued. I got 30 kills, yay, but really I got 20. The rest are empty ant kills.
The superiority of killstreaks also cheapens Modern Warfare’s new Field Upgrades – smallscale tools that add a bit of strategy to a standard loadout. Field Upgrades allow for tiny moments of real teamwork, a feat for CoD’s typically selfish playstyle.
Gunfight, Modern Warfare’s new 2v2 round-based elimination mode, is my bastion away from that chaos. Gunfight ditches killstreaks and ratchets up intensity with 40-second rounds and no health regeneration. Every round is a burst of improvised strategy as both teams adapt to randomised identical loadouts. It’s simple and amazing. Within the campaign Infinity Ward has scaled back on thrill rides. It shoots for the variety of distinctive missions that Call of Duty 4 set trends with, avoiding on-rails murder fests in favour of missions about cautious infiltration where walking is the default move speed.
Modern Warfare sets the bar high for firstperson gun feel. Gunfight is a standout mode that proves to me Call of Duty can slow down and the sky won’t fall.