Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 Campaign (XBox 360) – Review

Modern Warfare 2 requires the player to check off a box accepting the violent content of the level before playing, and the game make good on its promises.  The plot is over the top, but the scenarios are extremely daring for a major commercial release like this.  The game’s bravado earned it some amusing liberal handwringing (check out this laughable review from Slate) and off-the-mark commentary, and it is noteworthy.  Major spoilers within!

Call of Duty started off as a WWII franchise which hijacked scenes from Saving Private Ryan to great effect, even if it was blatant plagiarism.  With a blood effects patch, the game was fast and visceral, and the Call of Duty franchise went back to the well for years after mining the Second World War for games.  Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare was a blockbuster hit, serving up its very own story line.  The first Modern Warfare posited an imaginary invasion of Iraq in which Saddam blew up Baghdad with a nuclear bomb, killing the invading American army.  Your character famously looks up at a mushroom cloud before dying, pretty daring for a shallow first-person shooter.  Of course, the Arab bogeyman was only a puppet of Russian mastermind Zakhaev, whom your team hunts down and kills.

Five years later, Zakhaev is a martyred hero, and his henchman Makarov is blowing shit up real good all over Europe.  You play multiple characters, but they are all interchangeable.  Sometimes you’ll play an Army grunt in the wrong place at the wrong time, sometimes a special operator in a secret unit.  Captain Price and General Shepherd are the only characters with a hint of personality.  The game starts off in Afghanistan, showing off the top-of-the-line graphics and fluid game play.  It is a bit silly that after killing thirty or more militia, the Army refuses to fire on some observing militia commanders out of principle.  Shooting up an Afghan city with a Humvee-mounted mini-gun lives up to the promise, and the urban combat that follows sets the tone.

The game offers the generic action tropes we have come to expect (recover a downed satellite, you don’t say!), but then shifts into obscene violence unexpectedly.  As an undercover terrorist working for Makarov, the player calmly massacres a room full of cops and civilians in a security line at the Moscow airport.  For such a giant corporate game, this is a ballsy move.  The more the civilians scream and run, mowed down by automatic gunfire, the more you realize this is all going in a different direction.  The environments are chaotic, shit is flying everywhere, it reminded me of the old Crisis Zone arcade game.

The best of the following levels include a Russian invasion of the USA, with full-scale battles in suburban neighborhoods, fast food restaurants, and Washington, DC.  Gunplay in the White House is good gaming, and blowing out the top floor of the Department of Justice with a Vulcan mini-gun is genius.  A nuclear bomb is detonated in the atmosphere over the East coast, viewed from an astronaut’s perspective, working on a satellite outside the ISS right before his untimely death.  On the ground the EMP blast knocks out everything, and the laser dots on the guns stop working, too.  It’s a nice attention to detail, but I couldn’t help noticing a technical stick from the Brazil level in the streets of Washington, or Makarov’s men in Afghanistan driving Escalades with roof mounted mini-guns.  Oh well, the action is top notch.   

In the end, the traitorous top US General Shepard is revealed as the puppet master, and kills one of your characters, burns you up with gasoline, lighting it with his cigar (my bottom dollar says the badly burned Ghost will be back for Modern Warfare 3.)  In the final assault, Captain Price (who detonated that nuclear bomb to stop the war) and your character take out Shepard’s Afghanistan base.  Of course, even this game won’t set you up to kill US Servicemen, so Blackwater type goons fill in.  Their red lasers swinging around a darkened cave make for some stark visuals, and the race out of the exploding base, then away from an airstrike make for great forward momentum.

Modern Warfare 2 doesn’t care much about explaining the story, no flashy between-level movies.  A better title for the game could have been Human Wave Survival; holding off hordes of soldiers is pretty entertaining.  Makarov is still alive in the end, ready for the sequel.  What can you say, this isn’t exactly anti-military stuff.  In today’s military fiction, the US Government is the only credible threat left, right after Private Military Contractors.  The storyline is (I) Foreign terrorist attacks the US when (II) Loose cannon agent hunts them down and discovers (III) Elements within the Government were behind it all along to advance their own agenda.  The graphics are amazing, the action is fast, and blood spatters prevent you from running and gunning, annoying at first, but necessary.  I’m saddened the AC-130 levels aren’t included in the campaign, replaced by Predator drones.  This may not take the place of Soldier of Fortune II: Double Helix as my favorite FPS of all time, but it is a great game, and an original take on a classic genre.