Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (

2009

)

I shouldn't feel nostalgic for Modern Warfare 2, after all, it was the point at which all of Call of Duty's annoying tendencies began to metastasize into the toxic sludge that would make the series effectively unplayable for the better part of a decade. The levels are painfully linear, even more so than Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare [2007], and if you slow down for ten seconds to look around your squad-mates will start hollering at you to do something or other. The developers decided that just turning the screen red when you were hurt wasn't enough and decided the best solution was to make your camera buck like a crazed bull and shower the camera with blood and dirt. The result is that even a grazing wound is almost certain death on the higher difficulties since the effects warning you of danger make it impossible for you to effectively respond to that danger. To add insult to injury, for the first act of the game's campaign, if you get seriously injured a flashing message will appear on screen telling you to get to cover in addition to all the red, blood, and filth caked over the camera. As if it wasn't pretty fucking obvious what was happening to you. I don't think I've ever played a shooter with a lower opinion of its audience's intelligence.

Aside from the technical issues made worse and carried over from the previous titles in the series, the whole feel of Call of Duty was beginning to shift in an uncomfortable direction by this point. Gone were the simple stories of heroism and sacrifice that defined the series during it's early World War 2 entries. There wasn't even an attempt to capture the feel of real-world conflicts as the game almost immediately (after a relatively sober opening level where the US Army makes its way through a hostile middle-eastern town) catapults itself into wacky action that wouldn't be out of place in a Cannon Film. Hell, the game doesn't even make the most basic concessions to realism as throughout the game you'll encounter Russian soldiers armed with Israeli Tar-21s and FALs (that's right, Russians armed with the poster gun of NATO, the “right arm of the free world”). The tonal shift the series was undergoing can be seen just by watching the trailer. Just compare the launch trailer for Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare [2007] and the trailer for this game. The former is a somber affair, thrilling no doubt but serious through and through; while the latter is a bunch of war porn set to Eminem's Till I Collapse. This wasn't the game that made Call of Duty the go-to for every frat boy, but it was the one where the series fully embraced that identity to its detriment.

Yet despite the technical and stylistic problems cropping up in this game, I can't find it in me to denounce it, because ten years after its release this game encapsulates so much of what the medium has lost. Nothing exemplifies this better than the infamous “No Russian” level where the player takes control of a CIA mole embedded in a Russian terrorist group. The terrorists shoot up the Moscow airport, killing hundreds of civilians in the process with the player character who is along for the ride. You don't have to shoot any of the civilians, but if you try to stop the terrorists from their bloody work then you'll get a mission failed message and have to start again. At the time, this was correctly identified as a cynical marketing tactic, something that would drum up a storm of negative publicity that would draw millions of eyeballs to the game and provide a metric ton of free advertising. Yet, marketing strategy or no, ask yourself if any major game studio would have the balls to make something like “No Russian” today? It's simply impossible to imagine that any major studio in the sanitized, fearful industry that exists today would be able to make something like this. The medium has become so non-controversial and heavily-policed by culture warriors masquerading as enthusiasts that the things that draw controversies now are utterly absurd. Things like not having any black characters in a game set in medieval Bohemia, or depicting Hell as an unpleasant place, or using the word “savage” in the title of a game about a world populated by wild monsters.

Theoretically, an indie game could depict something like the “No Russian” level, and indeed a few have taken a stab at it, but any that gained any traction or popularity were quickly targeted for elimination by the same thought police who have forced the larger companies into submission. Just look at Active Shooter [2018], a game that offered players a chance to play as a school shooter, and generated a maelstrom of negative publicity that culminated with the game being removed from Steam and Indiegogo, and the developer's personal website being canceled by its hosting provider. The game was by all accounts crap, so nothing of great value was lost, but it's a sobering example, especially to those of us old enough to remember when Pico's School [1999] was released in the immediate aftermath of the Columbine shooting. There is no escaping the fact that since 2009, the scope of what is acceptable expression in video games has become vastly more restricted and regulated. Things that were once seen at series at the apex of popularity and acclaim have now become the exclusive domain of solo developers that can't even get their work published on Steam, a feat, I hasten to add, that games like Soda Drinker Pro [2016] manage with ease. Maybe the cultural critics did not come “to take our games away” but that's what they did, and the medium as a whole is poorer for it.

Of course, Modern Warfare 2 does have more to offer than just nostalgia for the good old days before the cancer of political correctness wormed its way into the heart of video games. It is, I grudgingly admit, a solid First Person Shooter despite its many flaws. The game even fixes some of the issues that Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare [2007] struggled with, namely the Veteran difficulty setting. In Call of Duty 4, Veteran difficulty was effectively unplayable thanks to horrendous grenade spam. Here, the grenades are turned way down so Veteran becomes a playable, and even enjoyable experience. Amusingly, the game tries to warn you away from playing Veteran on the difficulty selection screen asking first if you are sure and then again if you are super sure because veteran is really really tough. This seems excessive, particularly when you can lower the difficulty at any point in the campaign.

The biggest asset Modern Warfare 2 has though is undoubtedly the mission variety. Nearly every mission takes place in a unique or compelling locale, and on the rare instances where they do recycle locations, the style of the mission changes drastically. You go from rolling in an armored convoy through the twisting streets of an ersatz-Fallujah, to infiltrating a Russian base in the middle of a blinding snowstorm, to tracking terrorists through a Brazilian Favella. Those (plus the infamous No Russian level) make up the first act of the game's campaign. It is back-to-back-to-back hits in the opening, and from there on out it only gets crazier. Where Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare [2007] sought to give the player a mix of realistic theaters of war and probable sites of blacks-opts in addition to absurd missions where you're raiding a Russian missile command bunker and preventing WWIII, Modern Warfare 2 doesn't give a shit about probability after the first act ends and the Russians invade the United States Red Dawn (1984) style. This is a brilliant decision because it allows the player to defend a generic American suburb from an invading army, effectively living out a fantasy that I'm sure every young man in a sleepy little town has daydreamed about at least once. Naturally, these are some of my favorite levels in the franchise.

The latter half of the campaign cannot measure up to the dizzying heights of the first few missions, but it's not for want of trying. My personal favorite of these later missions is the one where you have to liberate the White House from the Russian soldiers that have captured it and rush to the top of the roof to pop a colored flare that will call off the airstrike that's inbound to flatten the place. Sure, the sequence is a shameless knock-off of that scene in The Rock (1996) but it was pretty rad there and it's just as rad here. Still, despite a few glimmers of something special the campaign bogs down towards the end, becoming a blur of unmemorable shoot-outs. The problem here is that there is almost no downtime in the entire campaign. There is no chill AC-130 gunship mission where you can kick back, and enjoy the slower pace of things. Not only are there no slow missions, there are not even any slow moments in the otherwise fast-paced missions. Your squadmates will constantly be yelling at you to take a position or grab a bit of gear. Worse if they give you an order, expect them to repeat it immediately (even if there's no way you could have physically done it yet).

The game's plot is absolute rubbish. The whole campaign hinges on General Shepherd, the commander of your various characters, being the secret bad guy the whole time. Shepherd being a bastard is established right from the start, as he is exactly the sort of aggressive interventionist that has gotten America bogged down in a series of protracted bloody conflicts across the world since the end of World War 2. I understand that some people playing this game may not be as hard-line an isolationist as myself, but even if you disagree about America's role as global policeman Shepherd is plainly sinister from the start. Good guys don't talk about how only the winners write history, that's just a bit too much cynicism for us to tolerate in our alleged heroes. Indeed, for most of the campaign Shepherd is shaping up to be a compelling ambiguous villain. His motivations are a mix of patriotism and personal pride, that lead him to sanction truly abominable acts in the quest to secure America's hegemony as well as restore his own honor as a great soldier. His unit doesn't balk at aiding and abetting terrorists or torturing enemy combatants if it advances their goals. An interesting story could be crafted where the men under his command begin to question the ethics of their commander and wrestle with difficult moral choice when they are ordered to do evil things to prevent a far greater evil. It would be interesting to see just how far Soap, Price, and Roach would go before they were asked to do something that ran contrary to their most closely held beliefs. Such a story wouldn't have been original, even a decade and change ago, but it would have been a damn sight better than what we actually got.

Near the end of the game, Shepherd kills one of our player characters for, as near as I can tell, no reason at all. He says he's tying up loose ends, but this doesn't clear anything up. Sure, Shepherd is guilty of some pretty heinous crimes by this point in the game, but none of his soldiers are any threat to him. There's no way that anyone in his organization would ever flip on him, the whole task force remained completely devoted to Shepherd despite the general aiding terrorists and accidentally triggering WWIII. Rather than taking the time to develop the conflict between the commander and his men, the game just dumps it on the player out of nowhere so you can have a compelling bad guy to fight as the final boss. It's all payoff and no setup, and consequently, it's just bad storytelling.

Still, the fact that Shepherd and his whole plot-line exists should take the wind out of the sails of commentators who like to claim that Call of Duty is nothing but Jingoistic propaganda... Or it would anyway if those types could be swayed by things like evidence.