SPOILER-FREE REVIEW
A significant evolution for its parent franchise, Modern Warfare’s thrilling campaign and polished multiplayer make it the best Call of Duty in years, even if mediocre maps and overly tough Spec Ops need refining.
Hyped but still sceptical. That’s how we reacted when the news broke that Call of Duty would be returning to Modern Warfare after all these years. To us, it’s been a long while since the franchise managed to release anything other than mediocre duds. The good news is that Modern Warfare is a game that possesses a distinct identity and feels fresh, despite being the 16th entry in a long running FPS franchise. In fact, it’s the best Call of Duty game in recent memory. It’s frequently thrilling, gritty and technically impressive; in essence it offers everything a fan of the franchise could have asked for, but with a few small but important caveats.
The Campaign
A slick military thriller with a few shortcomings, this might just be Call of Duty’s best campaign in years.
We know what you’re about to say: nobody buys Call of Duty for the campaign. Previous Call of Duty campaigns were largely ultra-patriotic power fantasies involving heroic Westerners dramatically leaping into the fray and mowing down minorities. We reached peak silliness with Ghosts, the point where each of us found ourselves wondering how anyone could not only put up with this nonsense, but also claim to enjoy it.
Modern Warfare discards that within the first ten seconds in favour of something more mature, cinematic, and ultimately far more engaging. The original game absolutely nailed the jump from the Second World War to the modern day, and it’s absolutely fair to say that 2019’s Modern Warfare achieves the same level of success when it comes to remaking the title for today. From beginning to end, it delivers fantastic set-piece missions that draw on Hollywood’s military thrillers to attract your attention. Standouts include an embassy siege inspired by Michael Bay’s 13 Days and an SAS raid on a house in the suburbs of London, which creates a hair-raising electric tension.
The story missions are usually shorter than in previous games, concentrating the tension and allowing for smarter, more polished sequences. As a whole, it’s emblematic of this game’s new approach to depicting warfare. Often, there’s a heavy emphasis on avoiding collateral damage but it’s never easy when the lines between civilian and combatant are blurred. Sweeping through a hospital surrounded by dying enemy militants in the full knowledge that others are hiding amongst their comrades waiting to strike is genuinely discomforting. The same can be said of sweeping through a house for terrorists in night vision, and seeing a terrified woman threatening you with a gun while protecting a small child. Do you shoot? Most of the time the decision is left to you, a startling development for a franchise whose previous entries generally involved shooting everybody.
Is it controversial? We’d say there are moments that could be regarded as such. Modern Warfare delivers controversy with a cautious kind of respect, fully aware that even one wrong move could spark a media storm. The game implicitly allows you to choose where you draw the line when it comes to participating in moral ambiguity, and ultimately that’s really what this story is about. In any case, we never felt as if we were engaging in anything similar to Modern Warfare 2’s notorious ‘No Russian’ mission. However, the events it depicts are by no means less horrifying. Perhaps we’ve become so inured to the atrocities in Syria for example that seeing them unfolding before your eyes in a video game has less impact. Still, to say it has no effect would be incorrect.
Unfortunately, the story still isn’t something that you could describe as being particularly intelligent at its core, even if it is most definitely a step in the right direction. Its characters, while decent, wouldn’t necessarily be described as interesting. Nevertheless, the campaign is a thrilling piece of work and its best moments were more than enough for me to forgive the rare occasions it flubbed something.
The Multiplayer
Intense, impressively complex and very entertaining, Modern Warfare’s multiplayer benefits from a little extra grit, but suffers from mediocre map design.
Online, Modern Warfare is a slightly different beast. The grit and strong core gameplay remain, but maturity and self-imposed seriousness quickly disappear. The game offers plenty of the combat that fans of the franchise come looking for, even if it runs at a much more measured pace than in previous entries. Generally, what this game offers is excellence. Classic modes like Team Deathmatch and Free-for-All return, practically identical to their previous perfect iterations, and are therefore almost-perfect. New modes like Gunfight, where teams of two go head-to-head with random weapon loadouts over a series of rounds, serve as a great palate cleanser when we get tired of playing the game’s staple offerings.
There’s been a lot of talk about Ground War, the new 32v32 mode. Playing it, we’re not sure why. In Ground War, your task is to capture control points while also trying to get kills to contribute to your team’s score. The bigger teams, large maps and vehicles make it a chaotic mess that paradoxically feels less dangerous or intense. It’s fun because the core gameplay happens to be strong, not because it offers a unique experience. The presence of the control points adds surface-level strategy, if you can call running to whatever point your team captured and then carelessly left undefended “strategy”. It feels almost identical to Battlefield’s Conquest mode and to be honest, we’re not buying new games to play clones. But at the very least, it’s technically impressive. The maps exist at a greater scale, and the environmental variety means there’s room for everyone to use whatever loadout they like to full effect.
The real stars of the game is the new realism mode. In these, the realism setting is switched on, removing the HUD entirely, and dropping players onto maps for team deathmatch games. Initially, there were two: Realism Team Deathmatch and NVG, where everyone relies on night vision to see, but with the latest update, NVG appears to have been merged into Realism TDM. The realism added by the removal of the HUD turns ordinary team deathmatch games into tense hunts that usually feel far more balanced than other modes. In the realism mode, night maps transform the game into something different. Night vision obscures part of your peripheral vision, forcing you to rely more on the game’s impressive audio design, and disables most scopes in favour of a high-power laser attachment for aiming. Because everyone has night vision equipped, you can actually see other people’s aiming lasers, lending the razor sharp focus of the campaign’s house raid mission to the game’s online multiplayer. You have to be more careful when aiming, and thermal optics attachments become a potentially invaluable advantage.
Perhaps most importantly, these modes feel more strategic, original and innovative than the large-scale chaos of Ground War. This is where the multiplayer portion of the game benefits the most from the gritty realistic focus of the campaign. As night maps are still rare outside this mode, Realism is the best way to experience them. The infrequency of their appearances in normal quick play modes is frustrating in itself, given that they offer some of the best online gameplay this game actually has to offer.
Customisation is also a huge part in this game’s favour. The game’s loadouts are incredibly in-depth. Compared to previous games there are fewer choices for each weapon class, but each of those guns has dozens of different attachments that you can unlock by levelling up your gun. There are sights, extended magazines, gun barrels, muzzles, stocks. The list goes on. Two players might both be using an M4A1 for example, but because of customisation could actually be using two drastically different rifles. We spent almost as much time tweaking our guns and trying out new attachments as we did playing matches to unlock them.
In combat, killstreaks return alongside field upgrades, a new feature which lets you choose different equipment, from Stopping Power rounds to deployable cover. These are hugely useful and can mean the difference between life and death when used tactically. There are a couple of related snags however. There’s no place to test different weapon builds other than simply playing online. On top of that, because you frequently unlock new weapons, the choice between trying out a new rifle with no experience and sticking with your old guns because they have better attachments becomes a minor source of frustration.
Speaking of frustration, Modern Warfare’s maps vary widely in quality. All of them are complex, and have nooks and crannies that only become obvious to the observant, so they can feel cramped, forcing close-quarters combat. Success means learning the maps and recognising hotspots of activity. It also happens to encourage more camping than is typical for a Call of Duty game. The best maps like Rammaza feature a good mix of open ground and tighter spaces, so matches don’t automatically descend into shotgun-sniper fests. However, bad maps can be truly awful. On Euphrates Bridge for example, the team that controls the bridge running through the middle dominates, crushing the other side with sniper rifles. For that reason, it’s earned the ire of many players, judging by the rapid pace people leave a lobby about to play it. The map voting system from previous games hasn’t been included in Modern Warfare, so other than simply leaving a lobby, there’s no way to avoid mediocre maps.
The fairly limited selection of maps at the moment means that we can see them growing stale quickly. But the impressive depth of the game’s customisation systems and the strength of its core gameplay means that Modern Warfare’s multiplayer is still well worth playing.
Spec Ops
Potentially game-changing, but intense difficulty makes it hard to be sure.
We wish we could say more about Spec Ops. Out of all three of this game’s modes, it’s the one that we’ve spent the least time playing, although that’s not for a lack of trying. This part of the game introduces lengthy co-op missions for teams of four with few checkpoints and infinitely spawning enemies, requiring plenty of teamwork and coordination. The idea is to present a team of players with a considerable challenge, and to be fair, Spec Ops does do that. However, in an ideal situation, it’d be slightly less difficult to tackle, especially in public matches online.
The infinitely spawning enemies and length make Spec Ops intensely difficult and inaccessible to the point that we were unable to make any real headway. It’s far too easy to get cornered in one area because enemies spawn randomly in every direction, making it hard to keep track of them. Eventually, calling out enemy positions and killing enemies faster than they spawn in becomes an impossible task, you’re swamped by heavy machine gun fire, and any fun you might draw from the experience rapidly disappears. We had some success allowing one of our team to die on purpose so they could respawn in and parachute to a higher position to lay down cover fire, but it’s arguable that players shouldn’t be forced to cheat the system to win. It’s highly unlikely anyone at Infinity Ward envisioned players winning this way.
In Conclusion
One thing worth highlighting is the highly realistic feel of the whole game, best showcased by the gritty campaign story, sound and the online realistic game modes. Despite the shortcomings we’ve mentioned, including a map set that varies in quality overall and new game modes that don’t quite live up to their full potential, the robust gameplay mechanics and lack of glitches are what tie the whole game together into one package that’s well worth spending your money on overall.
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