Modern Warfare 2 campaign review – An excellent pitch for an Infinity Ward RPG

Call of Duty’s campaign looks more and more like a dying kind of game. Fewer and fewer major studios are interested in making a single-player shooter with a story that takes about six hours to finish.

I’ve often found Call of Duty campaigns to be interesting simply for continuing to exist. They’re always lavish technical showcases for a series that struggles every year to stay relevant. For the teams that create them, the campaigns are a reminder that there’s more to Call of Duty than its conversation-dominating, air-sucking multiplayer.

And even when they run out of ideas, Call of Duty campaigns are consistently entertaining.

modern warfare 2The campaign, on the one hand, is a very standard shooty-bang-bang jaunt around the world with enough rah-rah attitude and military jargon to almost become its own genre.

However, having finished it nearly twice, I was constantly amazed at how much more it offered than I thought (and could!) fit into it. In many ways, this is the most inventive and audacious campaign we’ve seen from the series. If you look at it purely from the point of view of the game.

Modern Warfare 2’s missions, for the most part, trade in the expected spectacle and bombast for a more intimate yet open approach. Instead of world-ending catastrophes, events focus on a smaller, more credible threat. You put yourself in the shoes of different members of Task Force 141, depending on which one of them is in the area and most available to respond to whatever escalation is happening this time.

Sharing its name with one of Call of Duty’s most iconic games (and campaigns), it will certainly hold its own against the classics. But Infinity Ward didn’t seem too fazed by the pressure of those towering ‘Modern Warfare 2’ lyrics plastered all over the marketing. The game is happy to reference past quotes, or wink and nod about certain moments, but quickly outgrows them to introduce something new and interesting, and very 2022.

Nearly every second mission changes the script in some way, starting with a standard style (ghillie-clad snipers, complete building clearing, etc.), before switching gears to play with an experimental idea or demonstrate a surprising new use of mechanics.

One constant this time around is a backpack, which is effectively your mobile inventory. For the more standard missions, carry both Lethal and Tactical Grenades, which you would normally have to trade with each other. Here you have the freedom to decide which one best suits your current situation and equip it. For example, a mission assigns you the task of cleaning several warehouses on your own.

You have the option of planting C4 on the doors or climbing up and throwing a gas grenade into the air ducts. While you’re there, you might want to take some shots through the skylights or take out your heartbeat sensor to track enemy positions for when do One step inside. You get to do the unexpected, the thing that feels dead compared to what CoD has always been.

Based on the same backpack system, some missions will force you to play a Last of Us game of slowly crawling through houses and rummaging through trash, using household items to create makeshift Molotovs, smoke bombs, booby traps for mice and objects. sharp to force doors open and closed. boxes. It’s quiet enough at times that you have time to locate clues on how to open locked safes.

Discovery is part of the joy, and the game often shows restraint; he rarely leans into the different paths he can take or the potential items he can create. Again, it’s very un-CoD.

On one of those missions, he wanted to find a silenced weapon. I did, and this is how I did it. Other people relied solely on stealth, and there’s even an achievement for clearing it without using weapons. You’re free to improvise, to the point where you might not even find certain crafting recipes if you didn’t explore the area enough.

Those missions always pair you with a companion, but instead of them following you (or you following them, per convention), they offer radio help. There are more moments of camaraderie and character development here than in any other Call of Duty I can think of. This is how most of the game’s narrative is told, clearly taking its cues from places outside of Activision’s oeuvre. And the game is so much better for it.

As ambitious as it is with its installment, Modern Warfare 2’s narrative ends up being its most perplexing, both in how it flows and what it decides to follow since the 2019 reboot. On its own, this is yet another story about a Arabic-speaking dark-haired guy from the Middle East who is organizing a terrorist attack in the West. The squad must jump between different parts of the world, including the mandatory mission or two in Europe, to avoid disaster. It’s as routine as they come.

However, as a sequel to Modern Warfare 2019, it strangely avoids dealing with the events, fallout, and state of the world set at the end of that game. You wouldn’t need to know that the two key drivers of that game’s groundbreaking narrative left to head up a new studio to realize that something changed in the intervening years.

It seems that the captains of the current ship have been left with what is essentially a container of very high-level characters, events, locations, and themes, but not how they all fit together. So we end up with a game that brings in some familiar faces and uses established factions when necessary, but without the context of the first game.

Farah, for example, was effectively the protagonist of the 2019 reboot. She is a freedom fighter who leads her ill-equipped people to oppose the invading Russian forces with the help of Price and company. The relationship between Farah and Price/the US ranged from personal to symbiotic; he needed the squad’s elite weapons and training, and they relied on her access to catch their target.

Much of the narrative (including the ending) followed Farah’s struggles, with a lot of context coming through through flashbacks that helped develop her character. Modern Warfare 2 relegates Farah to a guest character, giving her exactly a appearance in one of the more experimental missions in the game, almost as if the writers couldn’t include it anywhere else in the game, so that’s where it ended.

Abandoning that lineage, flawed as it is, Modern Warfare 2 leans into a more pedestrian set of events with predictable twists and turns. Characters, locations, and motivations may differ, but the story here could easily be from any modern Call of Duty campaign.

Modern Warfare 2’s campaign is a cocktail of modern mechanics, updated characters and mission callbacks, and classic villains. In the end, the campaign ends up saying little of substance. And while that’s certainly true of its predecessor, at least it had the nerve to try.

Despite that, it’s the most interesting campaign in Call of Duty on a purely mechanical level and bodes well for a future beyond six-hour annualized campaigns. There are much greater heights this could reach if it were allowed to exist as a new STALKER or Fallout, and I hope we get some of that from Infinity Ward.

Modern Warfare 2 comes out on October 28 for PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S. This is all you can expect at launch.

Tested version: PC. Code provided by the publisher.

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