I'll be honest, I was apprehensive at best about the newest installment of the Call of Duty franchise. Rumors circulating about loot box shenanigans, Spec Ops being put behind a pay wall (allegedly), and a few other concerning posts on Reddit had me wondering whether I should cancel my pre-order. But the thing I stuck around for was the Campaign.
And man did it deliver. But not in the way that I thought it would.
To get this out of the way early, the Campaign for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (2019) is the best Call of Duty Campaign since the original installment. I know, bold statement. So let's dive right in.
The Cinematic Experience
This should come as a surprise to almost no one, but Modern Warfare is a stunning game to watch. Benefiting from Nvidia's new Ray-Tracing technology (RTX), the set pieces are jaw-droppingly beautiful. To be fair, I played this game on PC on a 1440p monitor at around 120 frames per second which is not how most will see it on console. But even at 1080p 60 frames per second (which I dialed the game down to so I could be objective) this game's visuals will not disappoint any gamers I know.
And while this may be a “given” for AAA games, it should still be mentioned in their praise. What's more is that I had relatively no screen tearing or artifacting during my playthrough whatsoever (I had a cutscene freeze on me once but in fairness the shaders were not fully installed yet either). On the subject of the cutscenes, they were incredibly well done. I was pleased to learn that Activision used Motion Capture to do the cutscenes in this game which is readily apparent once it gets underway. Did they need to do it? No, and I'm sure it cost them good money to. But it shows, and was definitely worth the extra few pennies.
A Greyer Battlefield Than Ever Before
When Modern Warfare 2 released in 2009, the “No Russian” mission was as close as anyone ever got to examining the morally grey implications of war no longer being waged on a traditional battlefield. Modern Warfare (2019) takes this idea and punches it to the max.
This idea is cemented early with the player in the second mission of the Campaign. You play as a cop on the streets of London attempting to stop an imminent terrorist attack on the city's center. After requesting to shut down the street to help find the attackers, a voice over the radio from MI-5 denies your request, stating they don't want to distress the general public unnecessarily. A few moments later and you've identified the insurgents in their van. But it's too late. As you approach, the van takes off into an intersection and detonates, killing hundreds in the blink of an eye.
What follows is a sobering trudge through downtown London to fend off the rest of the attack. People scream as men armed with assault rifles open fire onto crowded streets, bombs detonating every few moments as the police scramble to contain the situation. The entire scene was pure unadulterated horror and grounded me in a game series where people getting blown up are a dime a dozen.
The game has plenty of other moments just like this one. One of my favorites was attempting to extract a High Value Target from a hospital in a war-torn third world nation. As we approached our target, we entered the ICU after a harrying gun battle that spanned multiple floors. Teeth on edge, my team and I slowly walked past gurney after gurney of civilians sprawled out, waiting for medical assistance…except for one in the far corner, who had a 1911 under their pillow.
The underlying theme that became abundantly clear to me shook me to my core; This is someone's home.
Its such a simple idea and yet one that I have never felt so purely as Modern Warfare has conveyed it. War has changed. Gone are the days of battlefields devoid of real people, populated by soldiers and war machines. War today takes place in people's back yards, outside their coffee shops, in their city streets…and, again shown flawlessly by Modern Warfare, it happens in a moment's notice.
We’re Here to Help…Aren’t We?
Almost every video game has you play as the good guy. You’re the hero. Here to save the day from the nasty, unrelenting villain that promises to tear the world apart unless you stop them. Virtually every Call of Duty game since the franchise’s inception has followed this narrative path. You’re an elite squad of crack commandos who are gonna stop *insert bad guy/terrorist organization here* from blowing up a nuke in New York or from stealing the President’s daughter or from stopping a domino effect of political assassinations that will inevitably spark World War 3 (no joke, these are the legitimate plot devices used in the most popular shooter campaigns I can remember).
Not in this game. While it is true that you play as members of an elite task force, and that you are indeed attempting to thwart the plans of insurgent organizations, your presence on the battlefield have serious ramifications that this game at least tries to examine.
Let’s take the embassy mission for example. After extracting a High Value Target, you take him to the US Embassy to hold him until support can arrive to extract you from the hot zone. Of course, the members of the organization that you took this person from want him back; and they aren’t afraid to shed blood to do so. What results is an all-out assault on the embassy (a la Benghazi), resulting in numerous civilian casualties. Cars smash into gates and run over members of the embassy staff, pencil pushers wearing Armani suits are beaten and tortured for intel before being executed; all right before your very eyes.
But you have an objective. Protect the target and make sure he gets out alive. This was enough to get me to shrug off the cascade of death that surrounded me for a few minutes. That was until the player was introduced to The Butcher.
As we approached the safe room holding our prized target, we entered a screening room that sat adjacent to a waiting lobby of sorts on the other side. Between the two was a sheet of ballistic glass, pockmarked by bullets and shrapnel from the recent fray. On the other side, a man stood. He looked up and made eye contact with me. “Open this door!! Give us the Wolf!!” I certainly wasn’t about to comply to a terrorist, and my companion Captain Price backed me up, telling me to focus on getting past the security door.
Then The Butcher grabbed a father and his young son from the chaos. Kicking the father to his knees, he held the child with his off hand, while placing the barrel of a revolver against the back of his current hostage. “Open it. Or I kill them.” I had been here before too. I knew better than to open it, he would just kill the man anyway. There would be no point. It didn’t matter anyway. With a flash of the revolver, the man was dead. The Butcher looked up at me as the man’s son fell to the ground, pleading for his father to wake up. “You stupid westerners. You think you have changed anything? The deaths of these people are on your hands.” A second shot rang out as he executed the child at his feet.
His words rattled in my head for the remainder of the mission. I had just played mission after mission blazing through the homes of thousands of innocent people, bringing bloodshed in my wake. And while The Butcher was a truly evil man, I couldn’t shake the feeling that there was truth to his words. Had we really affected any change? Was the world safer because we had acted? Or had we simply ensured the deaths of every innocent man, woman and child who happened to be in the wake of our primary objective?
To be fair, Activision does pull this punch towards the end of the campaign which, without spoiling fully, ends with your elite task force finally leading a triumphant victory to end a decidedly evil tyranny. But it is absolutely a step in the right direction. The last game where I truly questioned my actions as the player was The Last of Us, a game that many regard as one of the greatest games of all time. While Modern Warfare doesn’t quite hit that mark, they certainly get points for making me ask that question of myself in the middle of a heated gunfight.
Explosive Action That Feels Oh So Good
Let me take a step off the moral high horse for a moment and discuss the overall game feel and mechanics.
They. Are. Awesome.
First and foremost, I really like what they have done with the gunplay in this game. All of the weapons feel beefy and punchy. The recoil mechanic is spot on and makes me feel much more like I’m shooting a Glock 19 and less like I’m shooting a pea shooter. Furthermore, the sounds of the weapons are phenomenal. Burst firing with an M4A1 feels nice and tight, with each individual bullet registering in my headphones, rather than it feeling like I’m jostling the button on a crappy chainsaw. The Kar98K sounds beastly and makes a satisfying metallic clink every time the bolt is racked to chamber a new round.
To add to this, the set pieces and animations are gorgeous. Nothing feels smoother than pumping six rounds through a dry wall sheet only to then see the door to that room slowly slide open as the body of my target slumps to the floor. Enemies die in believable ways, sometimes in ways that make you cringe from their life-like death animations. There’s a sickening satisfaction that comes from popping a round into an enemies head and watching them fall backwards in near slow motion. Explosions sound deafening at close range and rattle my brain with the impressive bass every time.
The particle effects are nailed as well, with the splashes of dirt and mud being kicked up by frag grenades and IEDs looking well-polished. I was truly impressed by the little details that would be easy to overlook, but whose presence makes the immersion rock solid. Shooting light bulbs in the stealth missions is incredibly satisfying, both in audio and visual quality. After some close examination, you can actually see little pieces of glass shatter in each direction, and the sound of the bulbs shattering is very believable. In terms of audio, the ballistics are very much on par. If enemies land bullets close to you, they whiz by with a startling crack. If you fire into a piece of cover, you can hear the bullets ricochet off in various directions. Overall, the sound and visuals of this game are masterfully done and are on par with every other Call of Duty we’ve seen in the past decade.
Final Verdict
So now you’ve heard what I think. Some will likely disagree with the praise that I have given this game. A decent portion of those people are likely Modern Warfare 2 fanboys who only want a fresh reboot of their favorite game from 2009 with a fancy new shader pack slapped on top.
But for those who are looking for a fresh change to a franchise that has been desperately in need of some new ideas, you should look no further. Modern Warfare (2019) has left its early life notions of “fighting the good fight” at the door and has replaced them with a far more mature look at war in the modern theater. And that is enough for me to give it a recommendation. Give Modern Warfare (2019) a shot. You won’t be disappointed.