Call of Duty: Modern Warfare

This game has been developed for three years (2016-2019) by Infinity Ward and Activision, with additional work by High Moon Studios, Beenox, Raven Software, and Sledgehammer Games. During that time Infinity Ward Poland rewritten the IW engine, which allows for new performance enhancements and better graphics such as more detailed environments and ray-tracing capabilities. A few animations are buggy, however, like some executions, and a few wall clips.

For the first time in Call of Duty history, in addition to being moved away from the futuristic setting and back into the modern setting (as most COD fans such as myself were underwhelmed by the futuristic games), Modern Warfare has a more realistic dash, with accurate gunplay, attention-to-details, great sounds, leaning, and improved graphics. And speaking of gunplay, Infinity Ward changed gun customization completely with the new Gunsmith system, where you can add attachments to your gun, like Optics, Grenade Launchers, and Lasers. You can even change the Barrels and Stock too! Another cool thing you can do with Gunsmith is make "Hidden Weapons", where you must customize a gun correctly to make it look like another gun, like making the AK-47 an AKS-74U, the M4A1 an M16A4, etc. Keep in mind, though, that some weapons are too overpowered, most notoriously the M4A1 and 725.

The game offers an operators system (which is inspired by Rainbow Six Siege) for different teams which each one has unique voice lines and nice voice acting, with new ones from seasons like Mara, Ghost, Lerch and Roze. In addition to this campaign characters were added too, like Alex, Gaz, Price, Farah and Nikolai. Woods from the Black Ops series was also added being a pre-order bonus of Call of Duty Black Ops: Cold War!

Multiplayer gave us New Game Modes, such as Ground War, which is like Conquest from the Battlefield games, Cyber Attack, which is a hybrid of Sabotage from the earlier COD games, and Gunfight, a 2v2 mode, where you and another player face off two other players. And speaking about Game Modes, while it was most likely made to capitalize on the Battle Royale trend, the Free-To-Play Call Of Duty: Warzone can be really fun. Best of all, you can still download and play it, even if you don't have Modern Warfare. Warzone also features another game mode called Plunder, where the main goal is being the first squad getting one million dollars. The limited HUD makes multiplayer more immersive but slightly harder.

Despite the new game modes, Modern Warfare itself actually sort of lacks modes, with only 8 standard modes on launch day, whilst MW2 had 13. Ground War, despite being a good mode, also has flaws, like the squad limit is 4, mainly because of large squads ganging up in Warzone; even the matches are quite short, it's surprising how a mode like Ground War lasts 10 minutes for a 64 player game! Special Ops is even heavily dumbed down and too difficult to complete, and the co-op Operations also became completely forgotten after a couple of seasons.

Killstreaks have returned from Black Ops, and a lot of them have returned from the older Call of Duty games, such as the AC-130, the Chopper Gunner, the Emergency Airdrop, and many more! Even Bullet Control returns from Call of Duty 4 in the mission Highway of Death (remember, Bullet Control originated in the mission One Shot, One Kill)! Infinity Ward also finally removed season passes and, even better yet, loot boxes! You heard that right: no more expensive DLCs, and no more microtransaction gambling. New maps are being added for free, and you can now get all new weapons for free! In fact some maps are fantastic, and Modern Warfare is actually the first Call of Duty to include doors you can interact with! The maps are even more improved, because instead of the three-lane map design COD is well known for, Infinity Ward put in some more accurate stuff into their maps, like the ability to interact with doors, having two-story buildings. The map design, however, is slightly poor in some cases:

• Some maps and modes don't work well, like Domination on 10v10 maps, which is an absolute campfest.
• The maps can look a bit too similar.
• The game only had 10 maps on launch day, with only 3 10v10 maps.
• The spawn points aren't too well made because your spawn point is far away from the objective on some Ground War maps.
• The 10v10 maps are really oversized, making the pace of gameplay slow.
• They also decided to add in some maps from the previous Modern Warfare games, but in doing so added in ones like Scrapyard and Highrise (the latter being one of the worst maps in COD and worst of all is that they weren't reworked in any way).

And, because of the crappy maps, a lot (and we really mean it. A lot.) of campers inhabited the game, making public matches nearly unplayable and hard to win. Not only map design, but a lot of features in the game are really camp-encouraging. For example, Restock and Claymore were some of the first things you unlocked in the game. Spotter, a perk that helps you spot Claymores, is not unlocked until Level 38. And what's worse, is that the perk itself barely works. And footsteps are really loud and can give a really big, yet unfair advantage or disadvantage depending on the situation.

As for the campaign, though it may feel too repetitive and bland at times, it's a gritty, cinematic campaign, which displays the horrors of war, and does so successfully in many missions, like fighting against terrorists in Piccadilly, raiding a house in Clean House, and surviving as a young Farah from Russians in Hometown and Captive. The campaign cutscenes are also well made, which feels like you're watching a movie! Even the ending will leave you wide-eyed. But while it does a good job at being realistic and gritty sometimes, it mostly fails. It seems like the game wants to do something along the lines of Spec Ops: The Line by showing war in a more realistic way but doesn't commit to it, as doing anything bad or something that steps outside of what the developers want you to pick results in a Mission Failure, whereas whatever choice you made in Spec Ops, you had to live with it. For example, in the mission Old Comrades, there's a moment where your target, The Butcher, needs to be interrogated by threatening to shoot his family. However, the game penalizes you for killing his child or wife, even after the interrogation goes successful. You only have a choice to either participate in the interrogation or leave it to Price (and the option to kill or spare The Butcher if you participate). If the player chooses for Kyle to agree to participate, he cannot leave before the interrogation is over, as an attempt to walk out will result in a Mission Failure. Actually, the whole attempt at making the game darker is just a shock fest, which in fact may not even shock players as much as Spec Ops: The Line did. One notable example is in the mission Clean House, where near the end of the Mission, you'll encounter the controversial moment of a mother with her baby being extremely scared after your team enters the room. What's worse is that, if you're sadistic enough, you can shoot the mother and the infant (though killing the latter results in a Mission Failure); normally, you will get an instant Mission Failure with the message "Children are Non-Combatants" appearing on the screen after killing the infant. However, there is an Easter Egg where if you kill it three times in total, in the third time, instead of the mentioned message, it will be replaced with another one saying "Are you serious?", before kicking you out from the mission and heading you back to the Mission Selection screen. The game is also inconsistent in its mechanics and story at points. In the mission Hometown, the player has to be in a crouching position in order to properly stab the soldier; they can not attack while prone. However, near the end of Into The Furnace, the player has to remain in a prone position to neutralize Barkov; getting into the crouching position or standing fully up will alert Barkov and he'll instantly kill you; also, in the introduction cutscene of Into The Furnace, the plan is to storm Barkov's chemical factory with just Farah's forces, thus leaving Russia to believe that the terrorists Al-Qatala were the cause of the attack and eliminating the belief that Western forces were at play. However, at the very beginning of the mission, the attacking force use a US military APC and an attack drone.

Also, while being gritty and cinematic, in addition the campaign is controversial, especially in its depiction of Russians. For example, the mission Highway of Death is inspired by an actual war crime with the same name, but in the MW2019, the attack was carried out by Russians, not Americans (Sony also refused to sell the game in Russia because beforehand, knowing that controversy would happen). Despite the promised "grey morality", there is no Russian characters that actually fall into the grey zone (though some dialogues of Barkov's men imply that not all of them agree with his views and tactics, and just do not oppose him, cause they would be executed for insubordination), save for Nikolai, but even he appears to be a quite fishy character. One of the multiplayer and Warzone operators, Dmitry Bale, is described as a good character, but he doesn't play any role in the main story. Also not helped by the fact that the game draws some parallels with an ongoing conflict in Syria. Such as featuring infamous White Helmets as rescuers and Barkov using chemical gas against Urzikstan's population, which seems to be a nod to various unproven reports from Syria's opposition's forces (including said White Helmets) about pro-Assad and Russian forces using chemical weapons.

The game is an absolute nightmare on the technical side of things. This game requires you to have an Activision or Call of Duty account, even if you want to only play the campaign. Worse still, the game itself is oversized: on launch day, it had a reasonable size of 119GBs, but now with the inclusion of Warzone and all of the updates, the game has a size of over 250GBs for the console versions, and a whopping 350GBs on the PC version! The installation process is poorly optimized and can take several hours for it to fully install everything. The installation process is also absurd. Rather than everything be installed into one installation, it is instead split up into 11 different downloads (as of October 2020): Warzone is the base install, with two Campaign Packs, three Multiplayer Packs, two Special Ops Packs, two 'Compatibility Data' Packs, and a Survival Pack. And all of them are required to enjoy the full game. Even worse, if you purchase and install the game from a physical disc, you don't get all the required packs; you only get Warzone, one Campaign Pack, one Multiplayer Pack and one Special Ops Pack. This means that you have to find and download all the other packs separately due to being on a 50GB Blu-Ray disc for its limited content.

So that's it, then, and that's everything you should know about Modern Warfare. Now let's bring on Modern Warfare II!