I’m not really sure how I feel about the game. On one hand, it is a pretty generic FPS game albeit a very polished one, and yet I cannot deny that I had fun with it or at least a strong impression that I did.
Modern Warfare picks up 5 years after the events of the first game, Russia has been taken over by the Ultranationalist Party and Zakhaev the antagonist of the previous game is viewed as a martyr.
As a US Ranger you go deep undercover infiltrating the ranks of a terrorist group.
This is when the controversial massacre of a Russian airport takes place. Much has been said about this chapter but playing through it felt terribly forced. Your character movement slows, ostensibly to allow the gravity of the situation to sink in or even to convey the character’s hesitation in going through with the mission.
The problem is that first person shooters are not the most conducive of genres to good characterization because you mostly play as a faceless, silent protagonist. We are hardly given any information at all about the personality of Pvt Joseph Allen before we suddenly find ourselves in front of civilians with a machine gun and lots of ammo. In that split second, the player either falls back on previous game experience (ie. Shoot first, ask questions later), project ourselves onto the character and (hopefully) try to stop the terrorists by turning on them or stand around fidgeting like an awkward teenager in a school dance.
Regardless of how the player reacts, you find out quickly what the game intends for you to do, however all that doesn’t really matter because SURPRISE! the terrorists knew you were working for the CIA all along and planned to use you to trigger a war between Russia and the US.
The whole sequence leaves you feeling helpless and used, forced into a decision you would not ordinarily make, which is, and this might seem like a bit of a stretch, exactly how Joseph Allen would have felt.
If this is indeed what the developers intended, then it is a masterstroke, exploiting the limitations of the medium to allow the audience to relate to the emotions of the character.
I’ll admit though that it is not something that presents itself, I arrived at this realization long after I played that sequence and it could very well be that I’m grasping at straws here.
Following that, the plot becomes more conventional except with a twist.
America is invaded by a terrestrial force!
Perhaps the invasion of the US of A would carry a greater weight if I felt any sort of emotional attachment to the country, as it is I might as well have been playing a Na’vi defending Pandora from Americans.
Although the depiction of a burning White House did make me think about how a similar scene with the Istana would sit with Singaporeans, personally I found it to be an oddly comical exercise of the imagination.
In what is now a trademark of the series, players switch perspectives moving on to ever increasingly improbable events, but the game keeps up the pace such that any sort of incredulity only sets in after you put down the controller.
Players advance through the game by moving from one checkpoint to the next, making sure to shoot any enemies so they don’t get a chance to obscure your view with strawberry sauce, although every good soldier knows that strawberry sauce is easily removed by hiding behind cover for a few seconds.
Nothing new here. Not that anyone plays a Call of Duty game for innovative gameplay.
After a while, it almost seems as if you are engaged in a sort of line dance with the enemy AI.
Receive objective, sprint in the direction of objective. Get shot from unseen enemies, go prone behind cover until screen is clear of blood. Peek above cover, shoot at the moving human shaped pixels 30 meters away. Get shot from another direction, throw grenade, hide behind cover. Enemy thrown grenade lands near you, panic, run into the open to get shot to death or get blown up by the grenade you were trying to throw back. Reload from last checkpoint, repeat until you have memorized enemy positions and use that knowledge to get to the next checkpoint.
It can get a little trite and at certain spots becomes frustratingly like memory card matching except with bullets and if you don’t match the cards right you get a face full of hot lead.
However this gives rise to some unexpected and probably unintended humourous situations. Characters important to the story seem to have a certain degree of self awareness and would often rush into a firefight with reckless abandon only to be shot or have a grenade explode at their feet, at which they react by lying on the ground for a couple of seconds before picking themselves up as if they had only been hit by a snowball.
Meanwhile the more expendable members of your squad have an inclination to walk into your line of fire only to realise they don’t have the regenerative powers bestowed by having one or more distinctive features. Here’s a tip, try growing a Mohawk.
Hiding your face behind a balaclava doesn't seem to work as well.
On the multiplayer side, you have the expected online multiplayer modes with the progression system which the first game made the standard. Tweaks to individual perks, the addition of death streaks and changes to the UAVs would keep veteran players occupied but wouldn’t mean a lot to someone new to the series.
What anyone can appreciate though is Spec-Ops, short stand-alone missions lasting a couple of minutes that could be played solo or with a friend. These let you replay some of the more memorable sequences in the campaign without having to go through the grind to get to them.
Modern Warfare 2 is a more than competent shooter that may or may not impress you with what it tries to do with its borderline schizophrenic plot. It is like going to Macdonald’s to have a cappuccino because its cheap, only to be pleasantly surprised at the effort the barista put into writing a message in the foam. The coffee still tastes like coffee though.
Coffee is Oscar Mike!
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