now playing — modern warfare 1/2

played on playstation 5

There’s been no more ubiquitous series over the last twenty-years of gaming than Call of Duty. What started off as a direct competitor to Medal of Honor, found it’s own identity with smooth control and cutting edge technology. Call of Duty was always successful but it wasn’t until Call of Duty 4 that it took off into a full-blown cultural phenomenon, and has stayed at the top of the sales charts ever since.

I distinctly remember being on the school but that year, 2007, and the hype surrounding Call of Duty 4 was just enormous…I think partially eclipsing Halo 3 because it wasn’t limited to just one console. Online multiplayer with voice chat was now available for both Xbox and PlayStation, and the culmination of all these factors made the perfect storm. Call of Duty has been the top selling game every year since then, with the rare exception of Grand Theft Auto games topping them.

I don’t know what had me inspired to go back and play these two campaigns…maybe it was watching Zero Dark Thirty and just being in the mood to get to the middle east and shoot an M4 carbine, or put on some night-vision goggles. They were both short and breezy, so let me just talk about these two campaigns briefly.

Call of Duty 4 is a classic shooter campaign. Not only was the technology just top-notch for the era, there are so many memorable moments, set-pieces, levels, and characters. It’s short, but it has an absolute breakneck pace, and knows how to ramp up and slow down the action to keep you moving forward and comfortable. After a brief tutorial (with the memorable obstacle course), you are infiltrating a cargo-ship ala Metal Gear Solid 2 in a colossal thunderstorm…one hell of an opening level. After this, as with many Call of Duty games, your perspective shifts to another character, but in this case not a hero, you are now in the shoes of a president about to be ousted and executed from his own country by radicals — this is where the opening credits play out, and it ends with your own execution. This moment serves to setup the story, and underline the care and creativity the proceedings will be rendered with…this is not just another military shooter.

The first half of the game has you swapping between Soap MacTavish, an british SAS officer, and Sgt Paul Jackson, a USA Marine. The British missions are usually more quiet and focused on infiltration and subterfuge, and the American missions are predictably “Oo-rah” affairs with tanks, javelin missiles, and other mid-00s American warfare staples. A memorable mission early on is one where your SAS unit is shot out of a helicopter, and you spend the rest of the level hiding from enemy footsoldiers and choppers. Then, once your air support arrives, you take control of the gunship and rain hell upon everyone that was chasing you. It’s a fantastic juxtaposition of the pure chaos of the ground combat, and how easy it is to just glass dozens of enemies from beyond the clouds. Not only is it fun from a gameplay perspective, but it reveals something about the nature of modern combat.

At about the halfway point, the primary villain detonates a nuke in the middle-east and blows up your American soldier. You’ll spend the rest of the game playing as Soap, in effort to chase down his supplier, a russian nationalist with ties to the Chernobyl accident. This is all outlined in a flashback mission called “All Ghillied Up”, which has been the game’s most enduring sequence. It’s a slow stealth and sniper style mission where you are tasked with silently taking down groups of enemies on your way to assassinate this leader. Again, it does a lot to breakup the pacing of the action, which devolves into a Michael Bay movie in the third act…and I mean that in the nicest way possible. The third act is devoid of a slow-down moment, but that’s okay.

Modern Warfare 2 is a great campaign as well, but it’s just a little lesser than CoD4 in my opinion. There are many great missions and memorable moments, but the pacing is I think a little weaker, in that there are fewer slower missions, and you spend much more time cranked up to 11…particularly an early sequence in the Brazilian favela. The snow mission is an early standout, and I love the late game sequence that involves an EMP going off and having to deal with your electronics not working…but overall I think this campaign is a tiny bit less memorable than it’s predecessor. I will say that the graphics are much more vibrant and colorful in the sequel, which is surprising, seeing as that it launched in 2009, at the absolute height of the “brown game” trend. The settings in CoD4 seem to follow the story, but I feel that in MW2 the story kind of revolved around what locations they wanted to visit, and the game has a more varied visual as a result. For instance, there is not a good story justification for going to Sao Paolo in Brazil, but it makes for a vibrant and colorful setting for some gunfights.

Something else to be appreciated about these games is their length. Each can be completed in about five hours, and I think that’s about what the gameplay supports. There is no leveling-up, or RPG mechanics to be found…there are no branching paths or multiple exit/entry points to levels, to further experiment. They present the challenge, you blow through them, and then you are done before you know it…onto the multiplayer suite, where most everyone spend the majority of their time.