Call of Duty: Modern Warfare
A new high bar for the series, despite parts of 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 half-realised 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 motion-captured flare that celebrates a kill and snaps back into place for the next fight.
Facing the lethal end of Modern Warfare’s weapons is often petrifying. Bullet impacts are loud, disorienting thuds. Near-miss bullets slice through oxygen with the deafening echoes of a military sim. The classic hit marker ‘thwoops’ are now blunt strikes that form a supersonic flurry of blows, closing on the intoxicating coin flip ‘ding’ that says I’ve won the firefight.
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 – small-scale tools like a recon drone or ammo cache that add a bit of strategy to a standard loadout.
REBOOTS ON THE GROUND
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.
One stressful section has Garrick guiding a civilian through an enemylittered office by cycling through security cameras. Going Dark is a lone wolf stealth mission with nonlinear objectives. The stealth mechanics are light, but just deep enough to avoid gimmick territory.
Modern Warfare sets the bar high for first-person gun feel. Gunfight is a standout mode that proves to me Call of Duty can slow down and the sky won’t fall. Modern Warfare is a promising platform for new ideas, but the sentiment will carry little weight if Activision shoves it aside and we’re talking about Black Ops 5 in 2020.