Call of Duty is one
of the video game industries most polarizing series. The games are played by
both the extremely hardcore competitive gamer type and the most casual "I
only play COD and Madden" frat bro type. For that reason Call of Duty holds
a truly unique and nearly bulletproof position in the video game industry
having only been toppled from the best selling game of the year twice since
2009: in 2013 by Grand Theft Auto 5, and 2018 by Red Dead Redemption 2. But
like every other icon of pop culture it seems as though the best days of Call
of Duty are in the rear view mirror. Call of Duty has been an annualized
franchise longer than most; and in the past few years the campaign offerings
have begun to lean on nostalgia. Modern Warfare 2019 attempts to ride the
audiences nostalgia for its namesakes trilogy in the same way 2017's World War
2 did with the world war 2 shooter genre, but the combination of the
familiarity of its gameplay and proximity to its predecessor makes for an
aggressively mediocre COD experience.
Welcome welcome
welcome everyone welcome back to LegalSpeak a ColdNorth Production. I'm
TheLawMorris and this is the video essay series in which I get to talk about
the games I've been playing and what I think of the medium as a whole. I was
supposed to be talking about Gears 5 this week but then someone told me to
check out the new Modern Warfare game because the campaign was "the best
campaign since the original Modern Warfare trilogy" so here we are.
Another year and another Call of Duty, let's talk about Modern Warfare.
Spoiler alert: I
will be discussing what some might consider some major spoilers for Modern
Warfare 2019 so if you haven't played it and you're going to you should mute
the video but make sure to leave it playing so that my watch time goes up. Also
a quick disclaimer: this video is about the Call of Duty campaign. I don’t play
Call of Duty for the multiplayer so hopefully that’s not what you came here for
or else you should prepare yourself for disappointment. Let's get to it.
To be clear: I
absolutely don’t think Modern Warfare 2019 is a bad game. It's perfectly
competent in some areas and down right good in others. I don’t want to sound to
negative on the game so lets get started with what this game does right.
Weapons are fantastic, there are so many different weapons and different
combinations that can be used to completely change the way a combat scenario is
approached. If you want to hang back and pick your enemies off one by one
that’s great you can use Hadir's Sniper Rifle for that. If running in guns
blazing Terminator style is more your thing pick up the mini gun and go to
town. Both of these approaches can be applied to the exact same scenario. And
if you're just looking for the most brutal challenge the game has to offer then
crank up the difficulty and choose a well measured and reliable mid range
weapon. Every different gun type looks, sounds, and feels wholly unique making
the game feel more customizable to the individual players play style. Never in
any other game have I so thoroughly enjoyed using so many different AK-47's in
so many different ways. Guns are punchy, offer a wide variety, and incredibly
well realized. Weaponry is definitely at an all time high for my experience
with the series.
While some levels
throughout the game struggled a lot (one in particular but we'll get to that
later) the levels that I was always looking forward to were those of the
stealth variety. Infinity Ward's focus on one to one real world scaling makes
the stealth raid and infiltration levels of the game feel incredibly real and
claustrophobic. One shot one kill sequences full of enemies bursting out of
hiding places, utilizing creative vantage points like under a bed or behind a
toilet, and waiting to hear your footsteps to try to shoot through a door make
for some of the most memorable and enjoyable Call of Duty gameplay I've had in
years. Combine all that with graphics and animations so stunning that under the
cover of night vision I genuinely believe a person could be tricked into
thinking it were actual combat footage and what you’ve got is the best levels
in the game. It's just to bad there are only a handful of these levels.
Along with the
weapons, graphics, and stealth sequences one of the main stand outs of the game
were a few of the characters. Farah, Hadir, and Kyle were all fine and of
course Captain Price was just as charming and badass as he ever is, but the
real stand out character in the game was Alex. Alex was charming, loyal,
humble, handsome, and most importantly believable. It's been since Soap
Mctavish that I've looked forward this much to getting to play as a Call of
Duty character. Alex's contribution to the story through his loyalty to Price
and by proxy Farah and Hadir makes him exactly what a playable character in a
game like Call of Duty should be: a badass soldier with an infectious
personality for the player to inhabit for five to eight hours. It's amazing but
there is finally another Call of Duty character that's as likable if not more
so than Captain Price.
Don’t mistake my
praise for these aspects of the game as a ringing endorsement of its overall
quality though. After all was said and done I was left with the feeling of
having just finished what I could generously describe as a just okay game.
While there were some stand out features throughout, the rest of the game felt
like a standard paint by numbers Call of Duty experience. Not that that’s an
inherently bad game just one without any feeling of heart or soul put into it,
one lacking that tender love and care found in earlier titles like COD 2, the
first two Modern Warfare games, and World at War.
When I wasn’t
raiding a house in a perfectly curated stealth level the game was essentially
the standard Call of Duty tunnel shaped shooting gallery. Not that that’s a bad
thing but in 2019 competing with the likes of Control, Resident Evil 2, and
even Gears 5 it just comes off as uninspired. Level design feels derivative of
previous COD games, so much so in some cases that the only way I would be able
to pick out which levels came from this game in a line up would be the
graphical prowess. The attempts at variation in gameplay are well paced but
when it comes to having the player do anything other than the classic Call of
Duty run and gun nearly every single sequence fell flat. Painting targets for a
drone strike didn’t feel as awesome and powerful as it should have, sniping
from a very long range was degraded by small flags right next to every single
enemy apparently being the only way to convey wind direction and speed, and
thank god there was only one instance of guiding a prohibitively stupid AI through
an office via CCTV cameras. And to top this all off the check point system was
so overbearing it nearly led to me having to restart a level from scratch on
multiple occasions.
Putting it frankly I
would be shocked if I ever found out that Activision had even for one second
been holding their breath waiting for a Call of Duty game to win an award for
best writing or story telling. When it comes to stories the best that can be asked
for from a COD game is something like the personal emotion of WW2 or the
intrigue and thrill of Black Ops…neither of which can be found in Modern
Warfare. The games story becomes a convoluted mess of vague double crossing and
even triple crossing all in an ill defined attempt at adding some sort of moral
compass aspect into the narrative. Like Tom Clancy stories Call of Duty should
focus on simply refining what they are: a military thriller, and leave the
drama and sub textual messaging to other games.
So we've covered the
good, the just okay, and the even somewhat bad. But unfortunately for Modern
Warfare 2019 the writers seemed to think that episode of Happy Days featuring
Fonzi jumping over a shark was wicked cool so naturally they decided to jump the
shark themselves. An entire level of the game is played from the perspective of
Farah when she was a child. In theory I actually really liked this idea and I
think from the right developer given the proper story build this could have
been a really cool sequence but instead it came off as something akin to Tommy
Wiseau setting out to write Oscar bait. The story beats explored in this
particular level feel rushed. The fantastic one to one scaling I was praising
from earlier in the game is either temporarily completely abandoned or the
developers have never even seen a child in their lives as Farah should be at
the very youngest 5 years old and she appears to be at most two feet tall and
can compact her body to be literally just a head sitting in a corner when the
gameplay calls for her to hide. And apparently prying the lock held to the door
with what is clearly a flathead screw off the door frame with a flathead screw
driver is much more realistically possible for a five year old than simply
unscrewing it. The Farah level takes what was up to that point an okay game and
changes course directly into bad game territory only to be salvaged in nearly
the final hour by the fantastic "Going Dark" level.
As a sub series
Modern Warfare has somewhat made a name for itself through the utilization of
disturbing imagery. This trend began in Modern Warfare 2 with the infamous
"No Russian" level and was continued in Modern Warfare 3 in both the
opening fight on Wall Street and the car bombing in Paris. While these scenes
and levels were disturbing and in the case of "No Russian" caused
quite a bit of controversy they did contribute to the story in a meaningful and
well thought out way. Modern Warfare 2019 attempts to follow this trend early
in the game with the attack on Piccadilly Circus seeing the extremely
recognizable landmark location come under fire by terrorists and watching
civilians run for safety as they are gunned down in the street. This so close
to home imagery seems to be included for nothing but shock value. I'm not
opposed to disturbing imagery in video games but where Modern Warfare 2019
differs from Modern Warfare 2 and 3 is in its feeling of being earned. Not
earned as in the developers earning the right to use imagery like this in their
game but more in the way that they had written a story in which the airport
scene was a pivotal story beat and the wall street and Paris invasion scenes
were the result of a slow crescendo spanning two games. Modern Warfare 2019
slapping the player in the face with the Piccadilly Circus moment in the second
level isn't earned through writing or build it's just a means of advertising
through controversy. And given the revelation that this game is a prequel to
the original Modern Warfare this scene makes even less sense as it devalues
those moments of terror and uncertainty as people are attacked in places they
would never have expected and have always been presumed safe.
Though it provided
some major highs and a seriously low low at the end of the day Modern Warfare
was counting on nostalgia. WW2 succeeded in entertaining me by bringing me back
to the early 2000's when World War 2 shooters were a dime a dozen and every year
there was a new game trying to bring that Spielberg magic into a new medium.
But what WW2 had going for it that Modern Warfare 2019 does not is time. The
World War 2 shooter genre died in 2006 compared to the most recent game in the
Modern Warfare series having been released in 2011 just eight years ago. This
year's Call of Duty campaign was fine but leaned a bit to heavily on the clout
granted by its namesake and as a result in my opinion wound up being a mediocre
game not worthy of the Modern Warfare name.
Which Call of Duty
campaign is your favorite and if you played this years what did you think of
it? Let me know in the comments down below. Don’t forget to subscribe and click
that bell icon for notifications of when our video essays and podcasts are posted
every week! You can see everything we do all in one spot over at
ColdNorthPro.com, I'll be back next week talking about Gears 5 for real this
time so until then just go play some games!
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