The Call of Duty event seems more and more like a dying game. Fewer major studios are interested in making a single-player shooter that takes six hours or so to complete the story.
I often find the Call of Duty event interesting simply because it continues to exist. They always offer lavish tech displays for collections that struggle to stay relevant each year. For the team that made them, the event is a reminder that Call of Duty is more than its air-sucking, dialogue-led multiplayer.
Call of Duty events have always been fun, even if they’re out of ideas.
Modern Warfare 2On the one hand, his campaign is a pretty standard global shooter with enough zeal and military jargon to almost be its own genre.
However, having done it almost twice, I’ve been amazed at how much more it offers than I thought (and could!). In many ways, this is the most creative and bold campaign we’ve seen from the series. If you look at it purely from a gaming perspective.
Modern Warfare 2’s missions, for the most part, trade the expected spectacle and bombastic approach to a more intimate but open-ended approach. The focus of these events is not apocalyptic disasters, but smaller, more credible threats. You’ll be placed in the positions of different members of Task Force 141, depending on which of them happen to be in the area, and it’s easier to deal with any escalation that happens this time around.
Sharing its name with one of Call of Duty’s most iconic games (and campaigns) will no doubt be compared to the classics. But Infinity Ward doesn’t seem to be bothered by the pressure of those “Modern Warfare 2” letters plastered all over the marketing. The game is happy to cite quotes from the past, or wink and nod to certain moments, but it’s quickly going beyond the fascinating new stuff, especially in 2022.
Almost every second mission changes the script in some way, starting with the standard style (sniping in a ghillie suit, a full-scale building cleanup, etc.) and then switching gears to play with experimental ideas or show off surprising new mechanics to use.
What doesn’t change this time is the backpack, which is actually your mobile inventory. For more standard missions, it carries lethal and tactical grenades, which you usually need to swap with each other. Here you are free to decide which is better for your current situation and equip it. For example, a task requires you to clean up multiple warehouses yourself.
You can choose to plant the C4 on the door, or climb up and throw the gas grenade into the air duct.While you’re there, you might want to take a few pictures through the sunroof, or pull out your heartbeat sensor to track the enemy’s location Do walk into. You are given leeway to do the unexpected – the exact opposite of what CoD has always been about.
Built on the same backpack system, some missions will force you to play The Last of Us, slowly crawling and scavenging around the house – using household items to make improvised incendiary bombs, smoke grenades, exploding mousetraps and sharp objects To pick the door and lock the crate. Sometimes it’s quiet enough that you have time to find clues on how to crack an unlocked safe.
Discovery is part of the joy, and the game tends to show restraint; little mention is made of the different paths you can take or the potential items you can craft. Again, it’s very non-CoD.
On a mission like this, I wanted to find a suppression weapon. I did it and this is how I succeeded. Others only rely on stealth, and even have achievements without using guns. Feel free to improvise and if you don’t explore enough areas you might not even come across certain crafting recipes.
These missions always pair you with a partner, but instead of having them tail you (or by convention you tail them), they provide assistance over the radio. There are more camaraderie and character-building moments here than any other Call of Duty I can think of. That’s how much of the game’s narrative is told, apparently taking cues from outside of Activision’s work. The game also gets better because of it.
Despite its delivery ambitions, Modern Warfare 2’s narrative ends up being its most puzzling, both in terms of how it flows and what it decides to follow after its 2019 reboot. In itself, this is another story about a brown Arabic-speaking guy from the Middle East who is carrying out terrorist attacks in the West. Squads must travel between different parts of the world, including one or two mandatory missions in Europe, to prevent disaster. Just as they came by rote.
However, as a sequel to Modern Warfare 2019, it oddly avoids dealing with the events, consequences, and world states established by the end of that game.You don’t need to know the two key drivers of the game’s groundbreaking narrative left to lead a new studio to realize it something Changes have taken place during this period.
The current captain of the ship looks basically like a container of characters, events, locations and very advanced topics – but not how it all fits together. So what we ended up with was a game that did bring back some familiar faces and used established factions where necessary, but without the context of the first game.
For example, Farah is actually the protagonist of the 2019 reboot. She is a freedom fighter who, with the help of Price and others, leads her ill-equipped people against the invading Russian army. Farah’s relationship with Price/America ranges from personal to symbiotic; she needs the elite weapons and training of the squad, who rely on her access to capture targets.
Much of the narrative (including the ending) follows Farah’s struggles, and flashbacks help flesh out her character.Modern Warfare 2 relegates Farah to a cameo role, giving her the full one Appears in one of the more experimental missions in the game – almost as if the writers couldn’t place her anywhere else in the game, so that’s where she ends up.
By ditching this potentially flawed lineage, Modern Warfare 2 instead relies on a more prosaic series of events with predictable twists. The characters, locations, and motivations may vary, but the storyline here could easily come from any modern Call of Duty event.
Modern Warfare 2’s campaign is a mix of modern mechanics, updated characters, and callbacks to classic missions and villains. By the end, the campaign ended up saying very little substance. While its predecessor did, it at least had the guts to try.
Still, it’s Call of Duty’s most interesting campaign on a purely mechanical level, and it bodes well for a future beyond the annual six-hour campaign. If it’s allowed to exist as a new STALKER or Fallout, it might reach even greater heights – I hope we get some form of that from Infinity Ward.
Modern Warfare 2 is coming to PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S on October 28. Here’s everything you can expect at launch.
Test version: PC. Code provided by the publisher.