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If you were to be extremely charitable, I can see why some people would look at Call of Duty Modern
Warfare 2 (2022’s Modern Warfare 2, that is) and think that it might be… going for something.
In what surprisingly little talk I’ve seen regarding this latest instalment’s campaign in the
lead up to its release, the one thing I have seen discussed most widely, Call of Duty’s controversy
de jour, is a mission whereby you are tasked with quote “de-escalating” tensions by… aiming
your gun at civilians, in their homes you’ve just barged into in the middle of the night.
It is absurd, daft, yes, but could this also be deliberate on the game’s part? This is,
after all, the second instalment in the modern Modern Warfare saga, where beyond simply playing
on nostalgia with all of your favourite characters returning from the series’ glory days (like that
guy… with the mask… or that Scottish dude I guess, whose new voice actor, coincidentally,
I’m convinced is actually English, thanks to the way he straight-face delivers lines like “steamin’
bloody goddamn jesus,” as if that’s something anyone other than Groundskeeper Willie would
actually say, let alone in that cadence, but all that’s another story), said beloved characters
find themselves on the new, grittier battlefield, a muddled mess of interdependent factions where
the lines between good guy and bad are blurred. You know, perhaps, this use of the specific
term “de-escalation” is a means of these characters excusing their shady, often
downright illegal actions by dressing them up in more friendly, bureaucratic language; you know,
the kind of thing you could put on a report after the fact—we “de-escalated a highly tense situation
in which hostiles were armed”; a clever subversion of objective design – you’re muddying the terms,
breaking the rules just like these characters are; a reminder that you’re no more honourable
than the people you’re going up against here… …is what I would be saying if the game still
didn’t try its absolute best to make your crew out to be the unquestioned heroes of this supposedly
anti-war moral soup. Ya know, for all its talk of needing to bend the rules to get the job done,
Modern Warfare 2 carries on its predecessor’s insistence that the Iranians (similar to the
Russians in the last game) don’t get game overs for killing civilians like you do.
I mean really, the game is borderline incoherent. Price, Soap, Ghost and crew are the good guys
because they bend the rules to get the job done… but not like the other guys bend the rules to get
their job done… and your higher ups insist on adhering to the rules which makes them the bad
guys… except when they explicitly break the rules which also makes them the bad guys… but when your
higher up gets kidnapped she’s suddenly a good guy, a “friend in need,” despite her being one of
the bad guys in the last game for holding Price back from being able to break the rules to get
the job done, which he did anyway by emotionally tormenting that woman and child, among many, many
other stupid things, because in Modern Warfare’s eyes, the ends always justify the means, right?
And the thing is, said muddling of the story makes it feel kind of odd when you’re listening to these
characters (that, to be clear, the game still thinks are heroes) hoot and holler, pat themselves
on the back, as you’re, say, blindly firing on a school from a bomber above – despite, I
should say, the characters being so adamant about buildings being off limits in the last mission,
as there might be civilians in there or that said buildings aren’t part of the mission (those pesky
rules of engagement!) – rules, I should say, that are roundly dismissed by all members of
all factions as getting in the way of actual progress… God, this game is an absolute mess.
And yes, I know, I know, I’m doing it again - I’m doing exactly what I advised against in my video
on the last Modern Warfare game—I’m taking Call of Duty seriously on its own daft terms instead of
just riding the rollercoaster of intense shootouts and explosive setpieces. And that’s something I
am absolutely willing to do, mind – I’ve played and enjoyed a ton of these campaigns, I love big
dumb video game action as much as the next guy. But that’s just it – Call of Duty is extremely
dumb. I understand 2020’s Black Ops Cold War wasn’t everyone’s cup of tea,
but it knew what it was, narratively speaking. And in that knowledge, that throwing away of
any inkling that this is a story you should be taking seriously, it allowed for some of the
most genuinely exciting, inventive gameplay set pieces I think I’ve experienced in one of these
things. It could go completely off the rails, because it didn’t impose those rails on itself.
Ironically, for a game all about the necessity of breaking the rules, Modern Warfare 2’s
insistence on being comparatively grounded and representing the gritty realities of modern
conflict, means that its moments of bombast can’t live up to the scale,
the audacity of what came before. It simply won’t allow itself to be a bit silly, to be the most
fun it could be – it has a serious story to tell. That is to say, I think that this game’s biggest
sin of all is that, for the most part, its missions are just so nothingy, so reliant on
surface level nostalgia. For example, it’s as if, early on, the dev team saw the fervour surrounding
Clean House from 2019’s game – the mission where you slowly ascend a block of flats, methodically
clearing out hostiles and likely scarring a few children along the way – and said “well,
why don’t we just do that again,” with the cramped residential interiors you’re often confined
to early on losing the impact they once had. It turns what was once a tense, uncomfortable
change of scene and raising of the stakes, into several glorified games of whack-a-mole
across increasingly samey environments; waiting to be shot so you can take out
each individual citizen without the worry that you’re going to get the aforementioned game over.
Further, what you’re actually doing in most of these missions seems to lag behind even Call
of Duty’s usual propensity for stop and pop, “click on the enemies until they stop firing”
style gameplay – with the increased reliance on throwing multiple heavily armoured enemies at
you resulting in many moments where it felt safer to simply spend my time hanging back
looking through a scope than actually getting in about the action; with the moments that would
otherwise bring some variety to proceedings – the harbour stealth mission, the Amsterdam heist,
etc – are all over in such a flash, that it only serves to heighten the monotony of the regular
missions you so unceremoniously crash back into. Which makes it all the more surprising when,
about halfway through the game and seemingly out of nowhere,
Modern Warfare 2 manages to drop a mission that left me wondering if I was playing the same game
I had been for the last two hours – it’s truly shocking how good this level is by comparison;
really showing the potential of what this franchise can actually achieve when it focuses
on gameplay rather than its trite narrative. See, if there’s one thing that Recon By Fire
proves almost immediately it’s that, when done well, there’s something curiously compelling about
sniper missions in otherwise frantic shooters. When everything quietens down to this extent,
there’s a sneaky glee to getting the jump on enemies who will never know your presence,
working your way through an entire battlefield of hostiles, as your
partner coldly calculates their remaining time on this earth in notches on a scope.
But thanks to your relative vulnerability in close quarters combat, you become something of a
glass cannon should you get spotted; allowing the designers the chance to take what would normally
be the most boring parts of a game like this (achingly slow movement and equipment management,
for example) and imbue them with a surprising level of tension; turning these moments of
quiet into taut games of risk and reward. Recon By Fire encompasses every bit of this
design philosophy, even starting off with a funny little bait and switch before opening up
to a fairly massive area of operations compared to the cramped interiors of prior levels – with
each stage of your progression through this battle, from making the long journey to the
compounds themselves to getting inside and clearing them out, featuring a relatively
dense suite of options with which to approach. You can take the direct route, with the alerted
enemies resorting to mortar fire, meaning you have to frantically reposition with every shot
taken. Or, you can take Price’s advice, lining up every shot exactly to account
for bullet drop – slowly but surely clearing the perimeter before moving in and deciding whether
you want to take the front door to remove the threat, break in through the skylight,
or send some tear gas through the vents to force the enemies outside – that, or most likely,
an on-the-fly combination of all of the above. None of this is reaching immersive sim levels of
pliability by any means, but it goes above and beyond anything you’ve done up to that point in
the game; reminding you that, for its reputation as a borderline on-rails cinematic shooter,
Call of Duty can place trust in its players when it wants to. The dynamic ebb and flow of tension
in this mission is not only impressive in its own right – it’s driven by your own choices.
But then there’s that moment – in amongst all the fun you’re having turning over these warehouses
looking for intel, enjoying the mechanical freedom you’re afforded in finally being allowed to think
outside the box, not having to worry so much about restrictions resulting in an instant
game over… you come across a set of barracks, where someone has simply framed a nice photo.
And if you’re anything like me, you start to ask - is this one of the people I killed? Or is it
their family they won’t be able to go back to anymore? In reality this is likely just
a placeholder – probably one of the development team as a little inside joke or something – but
its mere placement among the bodies of all these soldiers we’ve been systematically mowing through,
managed to get these questions going in my head without one word of dialogue;
got me questioning my character, my team’s coldness to the massacres we were committing.
Even if your character has been acting in the so-called national interest, even if these
fodder enemies are doing something bad, it’s hard to really argue you’ve been doing anything truly,
objectively good, in dropping down from above and riddling these people with bullets, no matter how
cold, how unsettlingly jovial your partner might be towards the whole thing. And with that one
detail alone, whaddayaknow - maybe conflict isn’t a such a good, fun thing after all. You’ve got a
clearer distillation of something approaching a sentiment critical of war, than anything found
in the multiple cutscenes you have to sit through, all while still allowing you to engage in tense,
dynamic gameplay driven by your own decisions. This, in my eyes, is the game actually
capitalising on nostalgia in a meaningful way—recalling the suspense and excitement
of what many fans consider one of the best Call of Duty missions period (in
its invocation of All Ghillied Up), but you’re also nodding subtly towards the consequences,
the human cost of war, that marked the narrative strengths of the franchise at its peak; that at
the very least hinted at the potential for this series to say something beyond sheer explosive
mayhem with more than a little jingoism on top. And it’s a similar case with the mission Alone,
where you’re outnumbered and outgunned, sneaking through these labyrinthine streets, whose cramped
appearance belies a winding network of alleyways and potential routes for you to explore; foraging
for resources in people’s houses to engage in a rudimentary crafting system, unlocking options
you may not have experimented with otherwise. And what’s more, the atmosphere in these houses
is downright scary, as you plunge yourself into almost complete darkness among the countless,
lifeless bodies of civilians your pursuer has brutalised in their search. You broke the rules,
and it resulted in this. Or hell, maybe it was always destined to happen—with a system
this thoroughly corrupt, this rotten, how could you have expected anyone but the most sadistic
of individuals to thrive in it? The same individuals you’ve been cutting deals with;
working with; calling members of your team? Again though, I would say that if this wasn’t
Modern Warfare 2; where these fan favourite characters are, of course,
spared such self-reflection, because they’re totally in the right here, obviously – the
dialogue playing out (as you try your best not to trip up over these bodies, I remind you) being
used more as a bonding exercise between Soap and Ghost than at all questioning their role in this
carnage. But at this stage, I don’t care—Modern Warfare 2’s story is obviously nonsense,
but from a gameplay perspective, here we have two of the most engaging missions
across the entire franchise. I will take it! But then I remember that the mission sandwiched
between these highlights, rescuing the kidnapped higher up I talked about earlier, is perhaps the
worst mission I’ve ever played in one of these games to date – one that clearly attempts to ape
the bombast of similar car-jumping chase sequences in Uncharted, but whose utter,
prolonged mundanity is matched only by its astounding technical shoddiness; as you largely
just watch things happen around you without even music to get your pulse pumping a bit, or you
just leisurely cruise past cars with physics so janky it begins to feel like a PS2 game.
Again, throughout all of this, I couldn’t help but think “if this was Black Ops Cold War, we’d be
spewing grenades and punching people mid-car jump – we’d take that APC and ramp it off a massive
cliff, right into the sunroof of the jeep carrying our target, rather than just… abandon it. Sure,
the resulting carnage might not be as gritty or as dark or as reflective of the realities of modern
combat, but god, would that be such a bad thing?” Hell, I even made the argument in a prior video
that Cold War’s prioritising of gameplay over trite moralising, more honestly highlighted
the brutality, the violent sociopathy of the characters performing this wildly illegal,
over-the-top stuff - the president authorising it all – serving, intentionally or otherwise,
as a more pointed critique of the mechanisms of power driving conflict, than anything found in
Modern Warfare 2, whose overall sentiment is as nonsensical as it is deeply hypocritical.
Come to think of it, is any of this more subdued gameplay any more “realistic”, due to the game’s
more serious view of its own narrative and tone? That aforementioned APC for example,
the biggest threat in the level it’s a part of, has such a predictable pattern of firing a line
of shots your way, then having three perfectly spaced mines kinda float from it, in a way that
doesn’t so much resemble the oppressive piece of powerful military hardware they’re going for,
as much as it does a Crash Bandicoot boss. I mean, you’re even treated to what is an
old Dara O’Briain bit brought to life, where the game literally sits your character down and, at
gunpoint, quizzes you on how much attention you’ve been paying to the details of this bullshit story.
I would say it sure marks a step up from surviving waterboarding by dodging the water and pressing
F to pay respects to breathing, or awarding this recently orphaned, panicked kid an achievement for
suddenly becoming a crackshot and taking out two guards with one shot, but I also don’t think it’s
possible for a bar to sink any lower than that. In short, the more quote-unquote “grounded”
elements of this new Modern Warfare series, end up feeling more nakedly video game-y than they ever
have done. In its narrative’s failed attempts to convince us of the grim, dark nature of war
while simultaneously convincing us we’re totally playing as the good guys, the only thing Modern
Warfare has left up its sleeve is to tell us “gaze, stupefied, upon the big dumb explosions
you may or may not be causing. Stop and point at the thing until thing isn’t there anymore.”
Sometimes you’re stopping in a slightly different way or telling someone else to stop and point,
but you’re still just clicking, until the credits roll, I guess—waiting for the thing to not be
there anymore. And if there’s a more apt way of describing just how empty Modern Warfare 2 feels
to me, despite a couple of gameplay highlights that manage to shine through the debris,
I don’t know what it is. ---
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