Call of Duty: Modern Warfare review – Campaign is back to the series’ best and Multiplayer is thrilling but not perfect
THERE'S a new Call of Duty out, and it's got excited gamers wearing their thumbs to the bone.
We've been playing Call of Duty: Modern Warfare for two weeks now, and feel it's one of the best in the series for over a decade.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare - what is it?
Like previous Call of Duty games, Modern Warfare is a first person shooter in which you take the role of various military grunts.
This year's entry is a reboot of the whole Modern Warfare strand of the franchise, which confusingly kicked off in 2007 with a game also titled Call of Duty: Modern Warfare.
The new version's being developed by Infinity Ward, who made the first two Call of Duty games as well as the first Modern Warfare and its direct sequels.
The game promises players "an incredibly raw, gritty, provocative narrative".
"Call of Duty: Modern Warfare pushes boundaries and breaks rules the way only Modern Warfare can," according to Activision.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare campaign review – by Harry Pettit
When it comes to campaign, Modern Warfare gets back to what the series does best.
The team at Infinity Ward have stripped away all the futuristic nonsense that has plagued previous titles and set the game in a more modern setting.
For most of it, you fight through a fictional Middle Eastern country called Urzikstan in a bid to stop a chemical weapons plot.
You largely play as CIA operative Alex, voiced by American actor Chad Michael Collins, and SAS hard-man Kyle Garrick, played by Elliot Knight, who starred as the title character in Sinbad.
You also run and gun a bit as Freedom fighter Farah Karim (Claudia Doumit), but more on that later.
So, to get this out of the way, I'm a massive Call of Duty fan who has found himself increasingly let down by the series over the past five years.
The addition of various supernatural powers and futuristic high-tech gadgetry just didn't do it for me, and i ended up skipping the past couple games altogether.
I was therefore pleasantly surprised at how much I enjoyed hammering through Call of Duty: Modern Warfare's campaign.
The story is cinematic and engaging, with great performances from all of the main cast.
It moved along at a nice pace and never felt boring, though I must admit there were several points where I didn't really know what was going on.
By the end of the game, in fact, I couldn't even remember which baddy we were going after – but that doesn't matter too much when you're having fun with a minigun.
In terms of gameplay, I thought Infinity Ward stacked the missions nicely between stealth and run-and-gun.
You find yourself blasting through a UN building at one moment and then quietly taking enemies out in a house in North London the next.
For me Call of Duty campaigns hang on their memorable moments – often the periods of quiet between all the running and gunning.
Think back to the original Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, released in 2007.
Some of its most memorable moments involved silently lying in a field of bodies in All Ghillied Up, or nonchalantly picking off enemies from a bomb-laden aircraft in Death From Above.
Other games in the series had campaigns so drab I can't remember a single thing about them.
Well fear not, the latest Modern Warfare has plenty of memorable moments that are sure to go down among fans as some of the best in the series.
Without giving away too much, a mission as a young Farah in which you battle your way out of a town invaded by Russian soldiers is incredible tense and moving.
Another in which you're handed a cannon-like sniper rifle may even top All Ghillied Up as my favourite Call of Duty mission of all time.
It's not all good though – a sequence that has you directing an unarmed civilian through a UN building full of terrorists was a bit of a snooze-fest.
I'm playing a Call of Duty game to gun my way through hoards of heavily-armed foes, not hold the hand of some wimpering pleb as she shimmies around a fax machine.
Before we get to my final verdict, I want to give a quick shout out to the graphics.
My word, this game is gorgeous. I played on a bog standard Xbox One and had to do a double take during a couple cutscenes to make sure I wasn't watching a film.
The lighting is stunning, the character's faces appear lifelike, and you really believe you're locked in combat during some of the really tense sequences.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare campaign – final verdict
Modern Warfare's campaign has truly lived up to the hype and is one of my favourites for many years.
The gameplay is intense and fun, the graphics are superb and the story is just about interesting enough to hold your attention.
If you've enjoyed any Call of Duty campaign in the past, it's certainly worth giving Modern Warfare's a go – it's up there with the very best.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare multiplayer review – by Sean Keach
We’re 16 games deep into a franchise now strange and very distant from its simple shooter origins.
These days, Call of Duty matches are played through gunships, dogs and explosive RC cars. What happened to just shooting people?
Now Infinity Ward is trying to recapture the spirit that made 2007’s Modern Warfare so incredible. So far, so good.
Gone are the annoying loot-boxes and bizarre sci-fi weaponry.
We’ve gone back in time to the present (wait, what?) to the great benefit of match pacing.
The familiar and realistic gear puts more emphasis on your choice of gun, and how you modify it.
There’s an in-depth and deeply customisable “gunsmith” feature where you modify your weapons, and that’s where most of the theory-crafting comes in.
It reminds me of the original Modern Warfare, which wasn’t nearly as customisable – but was nevertheless all about your weapon choice.
Killstreaks have also been brought back to normality, and they’re much less overpowering.
A devious camper won’t run away with the game because of them.
And aside from vehicles on the jumbo Ground War maps, you’re largely forced to navigate around maps slowly. Again, a big improvement.
The 2v2 Gunfight mode is great (random weapons, no respawns, first to six wins) – and works on local play, so will surely be a hit.
Visually, the maps are stunning. Infinity Ward has created detailed and believable maps powered by a phenomenal graphics engine. In 4K on a big screen, you’re whisked away into a genuinely immersive battlefield.
There are also cool active entries to the map: you ride in on a tank or chopper, rather than spawning statically.
Sound has improved too: the guns have rattling and banging that sounds far more realistic. You get used to it after a while, but at first it’s a little terrifying.
That said, I have a few niggling complaints about multiplayer generally.
Shotguns are simply too overpowered. They’re realistic – in life, shotguns cause carnage over surprisingly long distances.
But it’s just not sensible to have a short- and medium-range one-shot-kill weapon in Call of Duty, because it makes it impossible to compete even with an SMG.
Shotguns should be effective over short distances only, and you should feel exposed using it in open spaces – like in Halo.
The standard multiplayer maps also generally lack sweeping lines of sight.
For the original Modern Warfare games, maps had an excellent balance of close, medium and long-distance sightlines. It made sniping as practical as SMG run-and-gunning on almost every map.
Only a few maps match that level of openness, which is a shame. But more are in the pipeline, so I have hope.
Ground War maps are just too big generally. They have the opposite problem: unless you’re sniping, it’s a massive pain.
You can genuinely spend two minutes running without encountering an enemy, only to be immediately slaughtered.
For a game where you die fast, maps that force long periods of uptime without combat make for a dreadful combination.
Moving Dead Silence from a permanent perk to a recharging power-up was a controversial move.
It makes you think about your movements more.
But it also fosters a habit of having people waiting around for the freedom to move – in a game historically built on fast-paced gameplay.
I also think a return to a combat knife that you don’t need to switch to (like CoD 4) would be brilliant.
Melee combat is rubbish and largely pointless in Modern Warfare, so why even bother?
Some of the maps are terribly designed, too.
Piccadilly looks great, but the circular design forces places to camp around the edges, and creates frustrating spawn-points that can easily be camped for huge killstreaks.
And the call-outs are similarly useless “Enemy by the buses” offers no valuable information on a map filled with buses.
These are all minor niggles of course – the game is as fun as it's ever been.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare multiplayer – final verdict
Overall, Call of Duty Modern Warfare is still one of the best multiplayer shooters you can play today.
The matches are fast and fun, the load-out customisations offer plenty of grinding and theorycrafting, and the game is visually stunning.
But it’s not perfect and needs refinement.
Of course, the beauty of modern gaming is that this is completely possible – through software updates.
Modern Warfare will get slicker over time, and most (but not all) of my gripes can be easily remedied by a patch.
Call of Duty games have a magic formula that is largely down to map size and match pacing.
This gets closer to balancing those delicate parts perfectly, and it’s as addictive as ever.
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Are you going to jump straight into the campaign, or enjoy some multiplayer action instead? Let us know in the comments!
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