I started playing Call of Duty back in 2003, when its name meant something; when it followed heroes of World War II who fought honorably. In 2007, I saw it transition into something new and incredible with Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. And I stopped playing the series regularly after Modern Warfare 2, when leadership changes made CoD into something less quality-driven and more of a generic annualized product. Now we have a new game titled Modern Warfare, hoping to recapture that magic moment in 2007 when the face of gaming was changed forever.
(I’m not all that into CoD multiplayer, and I haven’t played the Spec Ops missions yet, so this will just be about the campaign. Also, for clarity’s sake, I’m referring to this game as Modern Warfare, while the original Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare will be called CoD4.)
If there’s one word I would use to describe Modern Warfare, it’s “restraint.”
Even in the classic Call of Duty games, the mantra was “every level is D-day.” Every level had to, at some point, reach a level of over-the-top intensity. CoD4 added more stealth missions to the formula, but the high points of the campaigns were even more Hollywood-bombastic than before. “Michael Bay-esque,” they were often called. And, of course, the modern CoD games have largely been obscenely over-the-top. With this new game, however, the emphasis is almost more on what’s not happening than what is. Instead of insane car chases with massive explosions, more often than not, Modern Warfare’s characters stealthily move room to room through a dark house wearing night vision goggles, silenced weapons at the ready. Instead of the famous slow-mo door breaching gimmick, now breaching happens “realistically,” in real time. You can either open a door like a normal person or smash it open—or just shoot through it, if you like. I stumbled upon a neat trick myself during my playthrough: you can carve holes in doors with gunfire, then toss grenades inside. It’s pretty great.
Despite the changes, however, there is still a massive CoD4 influence on Modern Warfare. The whole game seems to live under the shadow of the Chernobyl sequence from CoD4, comprised of the two missions “All Ghillied Up” and “One Shot, One Kill.” This is, of course, a great place from which to draw inspiration, so it’s not like it’s a bad thing. There are definite moments of “oh, we’re doing X thing, just like in CoD4.” It’s the one big element that keeps Modern Warfare from being truly great. Gameplay-wise, it’s like listening to a fantastic cover of a great song. It would have been a miracle for MW to outdo CoD4 at being CoD4, and the fact that it doesn’t and yet remains still pretty good is impressive.
Of course, while on one hand Modern Warfare is less Hollywood than its predecessors, in other ways it’s far more cinematic. Classic CoD always focused squarely on the missions themselves, with little context surrounding them. CoD4 added more story beats during the missions themselves, but still largely kept the focus only on giving those missions proper motivation and context. One could be forgiven for ignoring the story entirely and just focusing on the gameplay alone.
Modern Warfare, on the other hand, has full 24-frames-per-second film-quality cinematics in-between missions. The cinematography is legitimately impressive; the lighting feels like it was actually shot by a professional film crew rather than the glossy texture CoD is known for. (The cutscenes are pre-rendered, so this is a compliment aimed at the artists behind the scenes, not the game’s tech.) During these cutscenes, MW feels more like a military intrigue film than a game—which is less immersive, perhaps, but not necessarily bad. I feel like I know the main cast from Modern Warfare better than the cast from any other CoD game, and I like them. They’re legitimately interesting.
Despite the fact that Modern Warfare is in many ways a derivative attempt to reclaim the past, I actually found it oddly refreshing. In 2019, too many games are designed to keep players playing for as long as possible, stretching the gameplay experience too thin. I played Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey for over 70 hours and still didn’t finish it, just because at some point the same gameplay loops stopped being fun. By contrast, Modern Warfare almost feels like a throwback to game design from the 2000s: it’s a straightforward, relatively short, ultra-high-polish game with a decent story and good gameplay. It’s exactly what I want.
To be fair, most other modern Call of Duty games also have campaigns of this type, but they tend to not have the simple focus that Modern Warfare does. They feel like movie trailers designed to blow your mind without even a hint of subtlety.
I’m not planning on giving scores in any reviews I write here, but I will say that I really liked my time with this game. The fact that I could play my way through a fun game in a weekend, put it down and be satisfied with it is a feeling I wish I could find more often in today’s gaming world.
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