Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (2019)

So right at the moment when I thought I was done with Call of Duty games, they find some way to draw me back in with their BS. First it was the mech suits and Kevin Spacey, before he was creepy, then there was a short period where it didn't impress me, but that was quickly remedied with a return to form with Call of Duty World War 2 (which I never finished, but that's on me), and now its a further return to form with Modern Warfare.

And to be fair, its not like these games fooled me. Despite the stigma behind these games that they're only played by middle schoolers who wanna be hardcore, there is a creative team behind the campaigns that do manage to knock out some interesting stories and while there have been some disappointing ones like Ghost, Infinite Warfare, and even the one that had no story just multiplayer, there is still enough to make things interesting and Modern Warfare does a pretty decent job at making the franchise somewhat relevant. But there is plenty to talk about.

I'll mainly be talking about the campaign. I'm not an expert when it comes to commenting on Gameplay, and the Multiplayer from my account is very much the same as its been in the past. Spec Ops I haven't played through, but as far as I'm concerned, the story is in the campaign and that's what I'm going to talk about.

Modern Warfare takes place in 2019. In the first mission you play as a CIA officer named Alex (voiced and mo capped by Chad Michael Collins) in a covert mission in Russia to capture dangerous chemical weapons. However, the gas is intercepted by a group of terrorists and suddenly the number one priority of Alex and his handler Kate Laswell (voiced and mo capped by Rya Kihlstedt) is to recapture the gas before it is used against Western targets.

To do this, they recruit the help of a familiar face, Captain Price of the SAS (voiced and mo capped Barry Sloane). Price ends up recruiting SAS Sergeant Kyle Garrick (voiced and mo capped by Elliot Knight) and they along with Alex go on an international campaign fighting terrorists, Russians, and other hostile forces in a pretty typical but entertaining campaign. The campaign is largely divided between Price and Garrick hunting down leads of a terrorist group in Europe, while Alex teams up with an insurgent freedom fighter group in the fictional country of Urzikstan and their leader Farah Karim (voiced and mo capped by Claudia Doumit). Eventually the four of them come together and make up the elite force that stars in this campaign.

The way this Call of Duty distinguishes itself is its recreation of historic/modern battles and events cleverly integrated into its story. The attack on the US diplomatic facilities in Benghazi Libya, the Bin Laden raid, and recreations of the civil war in Syria all make appearances in the campaign and its kind of chilling how realistic and well done they are.

I had a thought while I was playing that if you compare this game with Jack Ryan, you see very similar tactics of integrating real events with fictional stories. The way in which Modern Warfare is better at this is that it recreates events instead of basing their entire story on current events. The Bin Laden raid is going to resonate more in five years than a flash point crisis in Venezuela and Call of Duty isn't making their whole story surround that event, they just recreate it for their own purposes.

Furthermore, the old Modern Warfare games used to take inspiration from old action films like The Rock, Black Hawk Down, etc. I think at a certain point those movies started to run out of movies to snag scenes from and instead would just up the ante and eventually that ante went too high. Modern Warfare is able to take things to a more realistic level and build from there with that gritty realism.

One problem I would note with the realism is that it makes these encounters so realistic that they're done within minutes and it really shortens the game as a whole. It blends into a larger point of how brief this game is. I probably knocked it out in a regular weekend and while the levels were good, it seems like a lot was put into very few levels instead of a drawn out game. Again, its not the worst note to have, especially since the levels feel very real. But I just wish there had been more.

Another point of praise for this game is just how gorgeous it looks. The motion capture in the cut scenes are gorgeous. The transition from cut scenes to gameplay visuals, while noticeable is still pretty well done, and the realism is done very well to make you feel like you're in a war zone instead of just feeling like you're in a Call of Duty game.

The acting is pretty good too so I do have to hand it to the actors involved along with the writing. It's not the most ground breaking story Call of Duty has done, but its entertaining enough to keep me invested for a couple of play throughs.

But as it pertains to the story, I do have a little bit of a bone to pick with this game.

When this game came out, I don't think it was really clear if this was a continuation of the Modern Warfare franchise started in 2007, at least to me. But without going into the specifics of the end of the game, its made pretty clear that this is instead a reboot of the franchise but not in the way you'd expect.

The end of the game builds up for a sequel but in a way that seems to be a re-imagining of the Modern Warfare franchise instead of a full on reboot and that is a little disappointing.

While I can appreciate the unique approach of re-imagining familiar characters and events but doing them in a different way and how it utilizes both nostalgia and new ideas, I do think its a little bit of an excuse not to force writers and developers to create new ideas. I get that maintaining a brand can be profitable but there's a side of this approach that feels lazy to me. The difficult thing would be to make new characters and scenarios that garner the same feelings we had towards characters like Captain Price, Soap MacTavish, and others from the original trilogy, but instead they're just taking out the same toys from the toy chest and just making them do different things set to modern scenarios and responses. Seems lazy to me.

 Now to be fair, I haven't played Spec Ops and I don't know how much re-imagining of the original trilogy is happening in that rather than what would happen in a potential sequel down the road. If you've played through Spec Ops, feel free to comment, I'm just noting the unsettled feeling I had when the ending scenes of the game felt more like a wink and a nod rather than a definitive ending. And at the end of the day, I think that's when the popularity of Call of Duty ends for me. When they aren't trying and instead just fall back on the fact that people will spend money on a Call of Duty game just because the brand has been going strong for so long regardless of the quality, that's when I start to lose interest. I think effort was put into this game and its story, I just hope they're not creating a path where they can fall back on convenience and just reinvent the wheel rather than crank out something new.

But overall, I had a really fun time with Modern Warfare. I've played through the campaign twice now and its still a fun game to come back to every once in a while for Spec Ops, replaying the campaign, and yes, even that fabled multiplayer that I won't pretend to have an educated opinion on. If you liked the original Modern Warfare trilogy, you'll like this return to form and hopefully we can all see this franchise continue to do new things. Is it a perfect game? No. But it does seem like its trying at least a little bit.

But those are my thoughts. What did you think of Modern Warfare? Are you already sick of the Call of Duty train? What do you look for in a Call of Duty game or any game for that matter when the franchise has gone on this long? Comment and Discuss below! You can also send me your thoughts on Twitter @MovieSymposium as well as send me your requests for video games, movies, and TV shows I should review on this blog. If you follow me on Twitter, you can get updates on future movie news and reviews coming out in the future.

Thanks for Reading!