Given how little I write about… well, given how rarely I actually play Call of Duty games, it’s easy to assume that I don’t like them. But I do. CoD 2, or 4: Modern Warfare were genuinely amazing dumb exciting military FPS titles and I’ve greatly enjoyed a few other entries in the series. All singleplayer, of course, I never cared much about this kind of multiplayer. But nonetheless, I don’t play them often not because I don’t want them to be good. But because I know that most of the time they are disappointing, and I don’t want to pay Activision Blizzard full price for disappointment (I actually would prefer to never pay them, but they do own some good franchises).
This time, I’ve decided to check on Call of Duty: Modern Warfare story campaign. The 2019 one, not the original or remastered. And it’s less disappointing than I’ve expected.
As the title might imply, this is a revisit and a soft reboot of Modern Warfare sub-series in CoD. Some of the things are meant to be a prequel to the events that might happen like they did originally. Some of the things are straight up reimagined in this game. You get the usual package of varied missions, played from the perspectives of different characters, you get Captain Price, you get modern urban combat and invasions masking as “civil wars” and lots of grey areas exploited for whatever someone considers to be a greater good. The plot itself is dumb, as it always has been, but fortunately the characters are pretty decently portrayed, have more personality and glimpses at character development than in most games in the series. And it’s quite entertaining.
It’s not as tight as 4: Modern Warfare or MW2 have been, I’d argue. Those games, while not exactly all great, have been really well choreographed and felt good to play. This one has lots of good moments, but overall feels more loose with less fun stuff in-between. It does look nice, though, which is surprising for the series, which were so often ridiculed for looking outdated. Oh and, this time around the game feels less provocative, even though there are countless moments where you’re given a choice to act on your perception of morality because during war people prey on trust. It’s not subtle and not elegant, but I’d argue that it’s less headline grabbing than some of the things done by the previous entries.
So Call of Duty: Warzone MW is a pretty decent game. Wait, why did I say Call of Duty: Warzone MW? Because the success of its free to play Warzone component has been so successful, that even though you buy Call of Duty: Modern Warfare in the shop, you don’t have a game with that name in your library. You have Warzone. And the singleplayer campaign that you bought is an optional thing you can choose to not install. And then you have to log in your Activision account, from your Battle.net account, to scroll to the right a bit to find that content that you bought, because Activision isn’t even shy about pushing the main money maker into the forefront. It’s pathetic, really, to see how little Activision cares about their games, and how easy they dismiss them for what brings in more money.
Anyway. Should you get Call of Duty: Modern Warfare for the singleplayer? Probably not. It’s not bad, but you might as well replay the remastered MW instead. But it’s pretty okay and is at least not disappointing.