And the worst crimes are always reserved for your enemies-terrorists, the Russians, people who as a group are painted almost entirely as chaotic evil, orcs in military dress-in order to make you feel better about your own transgressions. Late in the game, Captain Price, the series' most iconic character and held up in almost all situations as straightforwardly heroic, argues that doing morally questionable things on the battlefield is necessary to prevent even greater evil from taking place. They're bad orders from bad actors in an otherwise good system, or heroes who have gone too far into the dark and turned into villains during the course of an awful war. People on your side do evil things, occasionally, but you are notably and importantly exculpated from those evil acts at every turn. Anyone shooting at you, even a civilian picking up a gun out of sheer terror, is labeled as an enemy in Modern Warfare, and your decisions to kill those people are never commented on. Real suffering is here, too, and extended sequences show how terrifying being a civilian in a war zone can be.īut the game fails to properly capitalize on those negative feelings to ask any real probing questions about your behavior. Instead, you feel cruel, like a hired gun breaking down doors and murdering people as you please. In these moments, you don't feel heroic, or like a noble warrior. These sequences play out like Zero Dark Thirty in microcosm, as you tensely move from room to room, forced to judge on the fly between someone trying to hurt you and someone terrified that you're there. Multiple times in the game you have to clear residential houses, looking for your enemies. For a long time, I've insisted that these campaigns are an insightful look into American id-into what bogeymen people are afraid of, and what horrible things they might secretly want to do to them.īut Modern Warfare can't decide what, if anything, it wants to communicate or even ask about any of these elements. Call of Duty's narrative campaigns are warfighter psychodramas, whole seasons of 24 packed into six to eight hours of gameplay, all built around straight-from-the-headlines paranoia and exhaustive research into the minutiae of Western military culture and equipment. Multiplayer is a big draw for these titles, but is often what's least interesting about them. As one might imagine, trying to accomplish all of these things simultaneously is a fool's errand, and, as a result, Modern Warfare has a hard time being much of anything at all.Īs any Call of Duty adherent knows, the games are typically divided into separate modes, which share motifs and interests but little else in terms of content. Moreover, it wants to be a victory lap, an homage to the best Call of Duty game, and a title that gleefully gestures toward the franchise's past successes with all the self-congratulatory pleasure of a Star Wars sequel. It casts its net wide, aiming to be both entertaining and didactic, both power fantasy and a scathing critique of the warriors we fantasize about. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare is a greedy videogame.