3/5 ★ – IronPackfan's review of Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare.

Yeah this is a weird one. On one hand, the visuals are the best I’ve seen in the COD games I’ve played (minus some significant rendering problems on smoke and fire assets). This is easily the most cinematic campaign I’ve played from the series. I liked having the character you play as on screen and actually having dialogue instead of just being the goggles of the story and having nothing to say like in the original MW trilogy. I liked the character dynamics and how everyone interacted in this story. Farah and Alex were great newbies. Farah was a very compelling character in my opinion. On the other hand, this feels so weird. I mean instead of making a fourth Modern Warfare game, using different characters, or God forbid making a new story, they make this. A technical remake while also being a completely separate thing. I imagine the pitch meeting for this was something like: “Hey I’ve got an idea for a new game. Yeah it’s gonna have this one female character named Farah who’s a freedom fighter with her team and her brother. Also she has a deeply personal connection to the main antagonist, Barkov.” “Oh that’s cool, but slight problem. This sounds like a new idea and we here at Call of Duty don’t believe in that, so is there any chance we could add in some previously existing characters to peak interest?” “Sure who were you thinking?” “How about Price?” “Oh cool. Yeah I suppose we could turn this into the same continuity as the Modern Warfare trilogy.” “Oh no, you see this IS Modern Warfare.” “Oh you want me to make this Modern Warfare 4?” “No make it your own thing but we’ll have Price again.” “So what are we calling it?” “Modern Warfare.” “…so it is a sequel?” “No it’s a remake.” “But my story isn’t anything like the original Modern Warfare.” “Right but that doesn’t matter. We put the Modern Warfare name and Price on the cover and people will buy it for nostalgia reasons.” “So there’s gonna be call backs to the other games?” “Oh no. This is a completely separate continuity.” “Wait so nothing from the other games happened?” “No but I figured we could tease that at the end of this one.” “Ok. So should I include Soap in this too?” “Oh no don’t bother. But how about Gaz?” “Sure that works.” “Except don’t call him Gaz. Call him Kyle. Also make him black.” It was also really stupid to me how no one has a cool code name anymore. Kyle doesn’t get referred to as Gaz until the end, and quite frankly I can’t even consider Gaz and Price the same characters as the ones from the originals. This just feels like such a weird interpretation of these characters because now their millennials and don’t have any of the same experiences. Price never fought in the Gulf War and made the iconic sniper shot that took a man’s arm off. He doesn’t even have Task Force 141 yet. Quite frankly, if they were smart, they could’ve made this a prequel to the first game to explain the bond he and Gaz had, but then they race swapped Gaz, set it in 2019 and hit the reset button on the continuity. So that’s great. Anyway, I didn’t hate this campaign but it just felt wrong. I don’t like the idea of Call of Duty becoming the Disney of video games remaking their old stuff and pretending it’s new. It’s such a weird thing to spend your money on (and for the record I didn’t- my gf leant me this game after she got it for like $10 at GameStop pre-owned). Lastly, this thing was a pain in the ass to install. Had to install the game (few minutes) then the update (6 hours), THEN DOWNLOAD THE CAMPAIGN?????? (1 hour), and then they just give me the finger as I had to download something else to actually PLAY the campaign (2 hours). I miss when Call of Duty wasn’t annoying. Their annual releases used to be special. Now their just hollow.