Modern Warfare (2019)

An interrogation of thoughts on the latest in the Call of Duty Franchise.

Rebooting the Modern Warfare series, 2019’s reset of the original trilogy details a joint operation between American, British and Urzikstan forces as they attempt to repel Russian forces invading the fictional lands.

Fresh off completing the campaign today, I follow various other outlets who’ve made their stances clear with regards to the rather toothless story presented to the player.

Now, the major flaw is undoubtedly the complete mishandling of actual, historical events and the blasé manner in which they’re shown. Urzikstan is a stand in for Syria, a setting deemed too risky by the developers however both factions from the country and massacres/atrocities are all safe to pass. Shifting responsibility for the events on “The Highway of Death” to the Russian forces it’s understandable that the game was banned in territories and has caused such serious uproar post release. Speaking more on some of the controversial elements, it seems at times to just be “edgy” for the sake of it, look no further than ‘Clean House’ for example. As good as that mission plays, it is very open to critique and rightly so, throwing in civilians to play in an attempt to give that “realism” which is never truly achieved in these games. The righteousness approach is utterly pointless and despite claims of presenting all viewpoints theres genuinely no roundedness, you have the shared POV of the ‘Allies’ in Farah, Price & Garrick and Alex, which is as far as character goes and their perspective is even more shallow, “Russians are bad”.

There’s more problems which I could go further into but the links provided below do a far better job than I could in this short time where I‘m doing little more than just venting. On the pros, the gameplay is exactly what the series needed, purporting to be a realistic experience, this is probably as close to that as you’ll get on the current generation consoles and software. Gunplay is exceptional, with flawless sound design and the added minor feature of weapons mounting it is rather immersive when playing and graphically is excellent standard. Though with that does come the cliche hollywood action cinema aspects with ridiculous use of RPG’s in close quarters in “Old Friends” or practically non Consequential use of White Phosphorus. Character is an interesting matter, put to screen via Performance Capture (P Cap) using relative unknowns, the textures of the models and again, graphical fidelity is spectacular to say the least and though the narrative has nothing to say on the nature of and impact of war in ways that Apocalypse Now (d. Francis Ford Coppola, 1979) or Spec Ops: The Line (2012) [Again outlined in the linked videos below] excel in but I’d be lying if I didn’t say that certain cutscenes weren‘t compelling and heightened by the fantastic detail on show.

Irritatingly however my experience with the game as a whole was massively affected by the complete reliance of multiplayer gameplay, illustrated none more so by the current update titled ‘Warzone’. Personally I‘m more inclined to play a game solely for the story purposes and this was a total nightmare whenever booting up, being redirected to a menu to purchase online subscriptions, adding a few minutes to the process of starting the game. Once dealt with you’d still then have to repeat the whole process of signing in and opting to play offline which became extremely tedious and thankfully it was only a brief campaign and didn’t become a grating experience. Today especially though everything seemed locked off, not even local multiplayer was accessible and frankly I have no interest in doing constant updates or keeping up with trends and honestly the concept of the new multiplayer is completely unattractive and speaks volumes for the mess of shooters in the gaming industry today.

Briefly, I was engaged and compelled enough To see it through, plus the future of the franchise is interesting which is in a way reigniting an old flame of interest I had fir the original and I’ll certainly keep my eyes on what follows up

In addition to that conclusion I can’t recommend the two links enough for more in depth critique and evaluation

Links/References:

https://youtu.be/RYCazCER8tw https://youtu.be/SvRFTcPSqzY