Call of Duty: Modern Warfare puts the franchise back where it needs to be. You get a wonderful campaign, team-oriented spec ops, and a variety of multiplayer options that cater to those who love large and small scale warfare.
Back to business. That is the short sentence to describe Call of Duty: Modern Warfare. No gimmicks. No fluff. No Battle Royale.
Just. Back. To. Business.
Last year’s Call of Duty had some people divided. While the Fortnite Battle Royale craze was in its zenith, and lucrative for Epic Games (whether it wanted it or not), the left turn into an ‘all in’ bet with Battle Royale driving Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 was risky. Ultimately, it might have turned out well, but it had a drop-off around the start of the new year. One of the biggest gripes was that a campaign was not included in BOPS4, and rightfully so.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare looks to bring everything back, and then some. It re-established the game campaign, which is a healthy five hours, and put together a cornucopia of multi-player modes that certainly will contain a bit of something for everyone. On top of that, Infinity Ward also threw in a co-op mode that is tough as nails and will probably be streaming everywhere once this game launches tomorrow.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare is a far more complete and soundly built beauty that reminds you how much fun CoD can truly be when everyone stays focused on development. Let’s get right into this puppy.
Campaign
The campaign mode is stupid fun and well-thought through. You play as and with a variety of characters, within different stages of their lives. The story revolves around a maniacal leader called The Wolf. He is a terrorist that is hellbent on restoring his Russian invaded and broken world back to its proper order — no matter the cost. His tale fills in about half of the game which jumps around different locations such as London, an embassy, and even into a large sniper-friendly desert. His story is tragic, brutal (especially, the night ops mission), and understandable in a sense. He’s a good character in the game, even if he is the main bad guy.
Your protagonist going against the Wolf is broken into several characters, each playing a different role and adding to the story in their own way. While not a main character, Captain John Price (fan favorite — and fake award winner for best Gary Oldman impression) is brought back to the forefront and is a side character that supports every mission in some way. We get a bit more dimension to his character, thanks to the story pushing and developing it along, which provides some perspective on future involvement in future MW games. Anyway, side character aside, the game does focus heavily on Farah Ahmed Karim, a female rebel that is prepared to sacrifice herself for her people and for her fallen family at the hands of Russian troops. You get to play as her through a few missions and get to see her impact on the story, which is well-developed and quite significant. I wish that they had featured her a bit more in the story and let gamers take control over her through most of the campaign. She is an interesting person with a unique background.
One of the coolest people (with a badass mustache) to play as during the game is Alex ‘Echo 3-1’. You will play as his character the majority of the time in the game, as he helps out Farah gain ground on her enemies, as well as track down a terrorist in Price’s backyard. He is one of the tougher characters in the game and one that seems a bit lost in the mix, as he represents America in a CIA capacity, though we never tread on American soil (maybe that is future games). Regardless, he is a certified badass that the story includes properly.
The last remaining character you get to partake in during MW is Kyle Garrick, a new recruit that Price is grooming. Garrick has a lot of choices to make in the campaign, some impactful to the story (so pay attention). He’s raw in nature, but lethal when given proper instruction. He’s a good addition to the campaign and to the Call of Duty character family. As I stated a few sentences ago, he has some choices to make, so be sure to pay attention.
As I stated earlier, the campaign lasts about five hours total. It’s every bit of a cinematic experience as you would expect from a Call of Duty game. Just when you think characters are ahead of the enemies, there is always something there to push them back. And the ending is incredibly dramatic, as it hits peak intensity right in the middle of a bevy of insanity. The usage of the characters, how they progress the storyline from moment to moment helps make it all happen. The narrative designer(s) should get raises for bringing the campaign back to expectations. I would watch this as a movie if it were a movie. Well, it’s basically a movie.
Having said all of that, Infinity Ward does a commendable job of keeping the content fresh with a variety of different ways to progress the game. Some of it works really well, some of it doesn’t. For example, there is a moment in the campaign where you get a powerful sniper rifle to take enemies out from afar (not giving too much away here). The rifle requires you to use notches on the scope to curve your bullets due to high winds. The game does its best job in this moment of emulating a sniper rifle, like what you would find in a Battlefield game. The difference is that Call of Duty: Modern Warfare actually provides you with instruction on how to line-up the enemies in the scope. I’m not sure I’ve seen a BF game do this with its player, rather it just assumed we were master snipers. Anyway, that was a neat moment that is actually quite fun, and intense towards the end. The sniper rifle range essentially changes up the game a bit and calms it down, while still keeping that gunplay in play. It’s a balanced feel for the game and a natural transition from its run/gun moments.
The opposite of that is a not so neat moment during a stage (not saying which) where you’re required to help a civilian out of a building using cameras on the wall and the ‘R2’ button as a space locator for the civilian to sprint to as terrorists invade the building. Is it interesting gameplay? It is, if not only for creativity purposes. Does it slow down the gameplay? Good lord, yes. It actually kills the momentum that you’ve run with during most of the game in exchange for slow-moving suspense. While I do like the drama intentions, the gameplay pretty much comes to a halt and you’re left wanting the civilian to leave the building as quickly as possible in order to return to the FPS experience. Again, I commend IW on their ‘shake up the gameplay’ mentality, but good lord, not this way. It just slows it down.
Getting back to the good, the campaign also features some great moments, such as stopping a terrorist invasion in a cityscape. This not only allows you to hone in on your sniping skills but allows you to use flares to light up the night and bring to light enemy targets. It’s a nice rush, especially when the enemies start pouring in from different locations on the map, that really makes you happy that a campaign has returned to the mix. There is also a stage where you find yourself in a cave. This stage actually is a lot more creepy than it is intense. There are some jump scares and horror moments in this brief experience. I’m not going to give too much away with that level.
Overall, the campaign is amazingly fun. It has a lot going for it and delivers 95% of the time. The story of Farah is well-crafted, if not disturbing at times. The addition of Price and Alex helps push the campaign along and keep it cool, as well as the addition of the newbie Kyle. The narrative designer(s) did a superb job of juggling multiple storylines together and making sense of them by the end. Everyone had a role and a place, no one felt odd.
Do you want action? Check. Do you want drama? Got it. Did you want a campaign back in your Call of Duty? It does it in style.
Co-op/Special Ops
The last night of reviewing this game brought out spec ops to the mix. It’s a four-player co-op experience that is absolutely insane. You’re essentially given a series of progressive goals in the game that gradually become more and more difficult. The ‘difficult’ part of that sentence is that the game throws wave after wave of enemies at your group. To put this in perspective, Infinity Ward warned us before we started the gameplay that enemy advancement during stage progression was going to intensify and multiply as each checkpoint was reached. Us being gamers figured that they were overplaying enemy count, but we were incredibly wrong.
The first mission played was called Operation Headhunter. This spec ops mission had us gather clues from around a giant map that would eventually lead us to download data and destroying servers. Ultimately, this gameplay would lead us to a character that we would either have to capture or eliminate, but my team never made it that far. A few things about spec ops:
1. You have to work as a team for anything to be accomplished — this was a problem for my team. One of us, myself included, would get separated from teammates and find ourselves in a compromising position. This either meant one of us would be pinned down or would be straight-up killed. If you get killed in the game, you can be revived by a teammate or die and return in 40-60 seconds.
2. You have to communicate — While this does relate to #1, and should have been included in the first ‘things’, I didn’t want to understate this portion of spec ops. Communication deserves to be its own thing and have its own number. If you don’t communicate in this gameplay, then you’re going to have a rough time. It won’t be fun at all. Calling out enemy location, or calling out that you’re down again thanks to a Juggernaut, is vital for the team’s success. There are so many enemies and so many ways to die, so you have to keep your team informed of everything, as well as vice-versa.
3. Huge tracks of land — the maps rival Battlefield map girth. They’re big, they’re easy to get lost in, and they’re easy to find cover in. The maps give you a chance to succeed in every possible way. The maps that we played, including the Headhunter maps, gave us flat terrain that had multi-tiered buildings. Infinity Ward seemed to give players a lot of choices on how you can use maps, which is fantastic for this type of gameplay. If you can’t do #1/#2, the maps might become a hindrance, so be cautious about how you use them. Now, the maps do have some help to keep that girth down a bit with accessible vehicles you can drive around. The vehicles get you quickly from point A to B, which is great but also can be destroyed and take you with them. For example, during Operation Kuvalda, the second spec ops map I played, you get sent to a base set in a snowy mountain surrounding. There are guard towers and high-powered golf carts to use. The carts, as I found out about 10 seconds into the match, love to be blown up by enemy RPGs, which instantly makes you dead. I also found out that guard towers are indestructible, even against helicopters, so use them to your advantage. Anyway, IW does its best to give you options when it comes to maps. You can approach the battle a lot of ways, including parachuting to a rooftop and slowly killing troops without them killing you. Plenty of choices.
4. Pick and choose your weapons/defense carefully — You can pick up containers that carry in them airstrikes, ammo, armor, and other interesting items during spec ops. You can only carry three at a time. Depending on what class of character you are during the game, by the way, someone should always be a medic, choosing what to carry will also ensure how long you will survive in spec ops. These items are laying everywhere in each mission and, as stated above, will determine how long you survive in the game. You can also pick up enemy weapons/ammo as well. It’s all part of the spec ops strategy.
Advice aside, I enjoyed spec ops quite a bit in the limited amount of time I had with it. Had I been a better teammate and took the game a bit more serious, then my team might have thrived and progressed more. We had a lot of problems communicating with each other and learning the best strategies to take on. Looking back on it, the game mode has a lot of moving parts to it. All of which is complicated, yet complimentary of the overall gameplay that Call of Duty: Modern Warfare brings to the table. If you like the zombies mode, then you’ll probably thoroughly enjoy this one — sans the zombies.
Multiplayer (MP for short)
Multiplayer has a variety to it this year. It has a small and intimate setting with gunfight only (2v2), core gameplay modes (6v6) that everyone is used to by now on medium-sized maps, and Battlefield-esque modes called Ground War (32v32) — huge tracks of land. The two I played the most were Gunfight and Ground War.
Gunfight Only — This is a more intimate MP match. If you aren’t familiar with it, it puts random guns in your inventory (per round) and you play against two other players. The maps are small so that you’re forced to find each other, and the guns are sometimes not guns, which makes the entire experience fun. I played about 6+ matches of this while reviewing it and it was amusing. I know a lot of pro MPers enjoy this type of game, but I need more elbow room on my maps. I do think that this type of MP mode is great for getting proper communication going between teammates. That will definitely prepare you for spec ops and bigger maps. The mode is fun, though, but again you have to enjoy the intimate map sizes.
Ground War — Yes, there is some inkling of Battlefield here, but that’s okay. One of the bigger complaints I’ve had with the CoD franchise in the last few years is how the maps just feel so tight and uncomfortable. Moving around small maps means there are certain guaranteed choke points that you simply can’t work around. Ground War opens up CoD and puts you on a map that gives you plenty of opportunities to find hiding spots. The chokepoints aren’t as defined, which is great when you’re trying to help out your teammates the best way you can. One of the more prideful moments of GW is how the buildings are multi-tiered, which means you can go up 15 floors of a building before making it to a rooftop. Again, this opens up the map, releases stereotypical choke points in CoD’s history, and makes it feel like online warfare. In addition, this mode also provides you with ground and air vehicles to make the dynamic of the game a bit more complicated. The fast and furious pace of Call of Duty still exists in this game mode, so you’re getting that on top of the girth. In my opinion, this is the best selling point of the game, and the game as a whole is really good.
The typical modes of capture, team deathmatch and so on/so forth still exist within this body of MP work, so you won’t be short of those options within the above modes. One of the newer modes is called ‘Realism’ and it turns off monitoring your teammates and enemies, makes shot location a lot deadlier, and just gives you a realistic version of warfare. It adds a layer of challenge to the MP process, which is a simple switch that equals out to a lot of fun for no good reason other than said challenge. Turning off those options in a mode was genius in bringing more fun to multiplayer.
Another mode worth mentioning is the night ops mode. Here you’re using night vision goggles to play MP. When you mix this mode with realism, the only way you can identify players hanging around areas is through their laser beams on their guns. It’s a creepy and surreal mode that is worth a go or two (or many). Anyway, learn how to spot laser beams quickly in the game mode to achieve the most success. Also learn not to hold your gun in a ready position, so that lasers don’t give you away. It’s a small balance that equals out to big payoff, if you can perfect it.
Speaking of payoffs, upgrading your loadouts, killstreaks and field upgrades is much easier than usual. Earning them is equally as easy and makes sense, as you progress quickly in the game, these things become more accessible. They are also explained a bit easier when you’re shuffling through menus, which I can dig. I’m old, I need reminders how things go in games, and the system that Infinity Ward put together simplified it all. I like the layout and how quickly things can get switched out and actually improved.
I really enjoyed the MP experience in Modern Warfare. It was fun, simple, and it felt like there were plenty of options to choose from, depending on what type of MP gamer you are. The more selections, the better the experience can be.
Presentation
One of the best parts of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare was the presentation of the game. Sure you get some pretty cutscenes, but for once the actual gameplay might visually outshine the cutscenes. We reviewed this on a PlayStation 4 Pro and found that textures were detailed, lighting was spot on, especially when light bled through windows and forest areas during the nighttime, and dust particles were outstanding. I never thought I would be impressed with dust particles in a game, but I was with Modern Warfare. There were several times during the campaign and during the multiplayer where I was just in awe of how pretty the game looked. It has been a long time since I have visually enjoyed a game, especially in the Call of Duty franchise. Infinity Ward, with whatever engine they have chosen to use for this one, did a superb job of making every bit of this presentation top notch. And yes, this includes the audio as well. With the right headset, you can get true direction out of sound effects from enemies. It’s amazing how well the audio helped me during gameplay, both MP and campaign.
Conclusion
Overall, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare puts the franchise back where it needs to be. You get a wonderful campaign, team-oriented spec ops, and a variety of multiplayer options that cater to those who love large and small scale warfare.
