“Call of Duty” had always been one of those games that I would pick up every year. It didn’t matter if it was being made by Activision or Treyarch (“Black Ops” Series), I would go to GameStop and reserve my copy. I enjoyed the single-player story that would help me understand the controls before moving to the multiplayer to play against other people online. It had been my favorite game series for a long time, but the last few years have been different. I stopped playing the “Call of Duty” series around the release of “Advanced Warfare” and played “Black Ops 3” for a couple of months after it was released before trading it in at GameStop for store credit.
I’d had enough of the sci-fi/futuristic style the series had adopted. I wanted to go back to the way the game used to be, like it was in “Modern Warfare” 1 & 2: boots on the ground, only sometimes gaining the upper hand on your opponent if you could. My wish has partially been granted with the latest installment to the series.
“Modern Warfare” is, as promised, back to form with boots on the ground and an 8-hour story campaign that is gripping and gut-wrenching, and multiplayer with a set of new maps and modes. However, the story is still another played out trope of terrorists attacking the city, you go after the terrorists, you win. Yes, they did some different things, for example, some of the missions aren’t exactly linear progressions and you have to sneak around and try to blend in, but it still boiled down to an over-exhausted trope.
As for the multiplayer, which is the version of the game most people buy the game to play, it is standard for a “Call of Duty” game. They have some new modes that are enticing, but a lot of them feel like rip-offs of old modes from other games. 2v2 Alpha is just what it sounds like: two players team up and go against another team of two on a super small map. It feels like a mode from “Halo 2” called Swat which was a 2v2 mode as well. Then there is Ground War, where you play on a massive team of 32 players against another team of 32 to hold points on a map and get an overall score. This mode feels like a simpler version of “Battlefield’s” Conquest mode in which you do the same thing.
Although I have been griping a lot about the game, it is fun. Activision may be out of ideas and must pull from other games to make it seem like they are trying to keep things fresh, but if you like the old “Call of Duty” games, I would say give this one a shot.
