Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (

2007

)

In theory, game developers could have continued to make World War 2 themed FPS games forever without the genre getting stale. It was, after all, a conflict that involved millions of combatants in thousands of different theaters. From the Japanese invasion of Burma to the Polish Home Army waging an asymmetrical war against their occupiers, there are countless minor conflicts and lesser-known battles that would make excellent fodder for video game stories. The problem was, that developers were generally worried about centering their games on battles and campaigns that nobody outside of a college History department has ever heard of. This limited the scope to the major conflicts in Europe, North Africa, and The Pacific. There was also a belief that Americans would be most interested in playing as Americans, and that since American was the largest market for video games that every shooter would have to include an American campaign at the very least. Since Americans were in the war for far less time than the other major combatants this too narrowed the scope that these games could take. Content was also further limited by questions of “good taste” that would forbid anyone from making an FPS where the player character was fighting for the axis, no matter how clear the game made it that the Axis powers were evil. All the worse for gamers; personally, I would love to play as a Chinese communist guerrilla fighting Japanese invaders, or as Greek partisan targeting Nazi supply lines. I'd be, admittedly, less enthusiastic at the prospect of playing a soldier in the Wehrmacht holding off the Red Army, but the experience could be something along the lines of the deeply unpleasant but deeply moving film Cross of Iron (1977).

All these restrictions on what WWII shooters should be, quickly resulted in the genre getting boring. Nearly every game went through the same motions, almost always centering around the storming of a virtual Normandy. After just three outings, the Call of Duty series had officially exhausted all of their limited possibilities with the historical conflict. Following that they could have jumped to another historical setting, but that presented a host of problems. The other famous conflicts of the 20th century lacked WWII's moral dimension. There were no good guys and bad guys, there were just people inflicting a series of atrocities on one another, often for nebulous political reasons. At best you had bad guys fighting worse guys. What was Infinity Ward going to do, make a Call of Duty game set in the Korean War a conflict that shifted an arbitrary border a few miles at the low cost of a couple of million lives? Or go back in time and Make Call of Duty: WWI where the player spent the first half an hour of a mission shivering in the mud before getting cut down in ten seconds after their CO orders them over the top? One could certainly make a disturbing and educational experience out of a game set in such conflicts but making a fun bit of escapism out of it was a fool's errand, not unless you wanted to chuck realism out the window entirely. So rather than delve into the past, the Call of Duty series pivoted towards being about fictional conflicts set in the modern world. Essentially becoming something along the lines of an interactive Tom Clancy novel. Modern military shooters may have existed before Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, but it was this game that provided a template for dozens of copycats, and the one that would come to define the next generation of shooters from tripe like Rogue Warrior [2009] to classics like Spec-Ops: The Line [2012]

The game opens with an absolute banger of a level, where the player joins the SAS as they raid a Russian freighter looking for black-market nukes. You start the level in a chopper on approach to the ship, giving you a birds-eye view of the entire level before you get your boots on the ground, a storm rages around you as the bird drops you off on the deck. Your squad fans out and clears the deck of any resistance before the Russian soldiers onboard have any idea what's happening. In later missions, the friendly NPCs can, at times, feel a bit like dead weight stealing good bits of cover and firing pointlessly at menacing bushes or piles of bricks. For this mission though, they feel like an elite team running through their mission with cold, brutal efficiency. Moreover, you are made to feel like one of their number, just another stone-cold bad-ass going about his bloody business. Everything goes fine with the mission until a voice comes in over the radio and warns you that enemy aircraft are closing in and they're aiming to scuttle the whole ship rather than let you get away with proof of their malfeasance. The latter half of the mission turns into a desperate sprint to the safety of the helicopter as the ship quickly starts to take on water and sink. The sequence is loaded with all sorts of nice little touches, like the way the camera tilts back and forth to mimic the movement of the sea and the way it tips almost sideways when the ship starts sinking. It's one of the finest first levels in the history of the series, perfectly setting the tone and style for the rest of the game while giving you a nice meaty experience in its own right.

Of course, not all the levels that follow are on the same level as this one. Indeed the many levels where you play as marine Sergeant Paul Jackson blur together after the thrilling opening where you go block by block searching for the enemy commander. At least some effort is taken to keep these missions feeling fresh and unique, with each one taking place at a different time of the day/night so each level will be immediately visually distinct from the last. The final mission as Jackson is especially striking as you fly a helicopter over the city while it's bathed in the blood-red light of the setting sun. It feels faintly apocalyptic which is fitting given the fact that the mission ends with an atomic bomb detonating and killing your player character. Later games in the franchise would milk this trope to death, but here in 2007, it was still a novel and indeed shocking experience. The twist is handled with a degree of skill as well, feeling completely unheroic and indeed somewhat pitiful.

The game's campaign also contains the famed AC-130 Gunship level, where the player takes control of a gunship and spends the entire level raining down death on enemy infantry and vehicles without the slightest possibility of the enemy being able to hit you back in return. The level works because the previous stage had you outnumber and outgunned, running helplessly from a superior number of enemies and being hunted by enemy choppers. Turning the tables on the bad guys with some air support of your own is a welcome change of pace at this point. It also provides a rare lull in the action, which helps to keep the campaign from devolving into a blur of loud noises and explosions. Best of all, the AC-130 operators speak in a calm monotone, only occasionally saying something with either mild excitement like “good hit” or mild concern like “get that guy.” Where are the rest of the game is all heroic stands and adrenaline-inducing action, this level feels more like a group of professionals calmly doing their job. The level also highlights something rather unnerving about contemporary conflicts, namely that there are moments where one side will so completely out-gun the other side that the battle is effectively a forgone conclusion. The gunship can swat the enemy infantry with a casual viciousness that people usually reserve for insects. That anyone can kill so easily, even when the power is being used to end the life of a few heavily armed psychos like it is here, is deeply concerning.

The AI, both for friends and foes can be a bit spotty at times. Enemies are usually pretty good at flushing you out with grenades, at least on the higher difficulties (indeed on Veteran difficulty I would say they're too good at it as I wound up spending most of my time avoiding grenades or tossing them back). However, there are moments where they forget to do this and just rush the door frame you're standing behind, letting you pick them off one by one. In open areas, they do a pretty good job of flanking you, and if there is only one avenue of approach you can expect to get shot to pieces as soon as you peek your head out from cover. The friendly AI is where the game really hurts. In some tightly-scripted sequences, the NPCs can be damn helpful and even make you feel like you're part of the same team. However, most of the time they are pretty useless, steadfastly refusing to advance until you've cleared the way for them and gone up yourself. The worst instance of this comes at the 2nd to last mission where you're racing against the clock and you're useless squad-mates just wait in the previous room for you to clear out all the bad guys, offering no more help than a friendly reminder that “there's only X minutes left” every two minutes. Maybe if you got off your ass and shot a couple of Russians we'd be further ahead of the schedule, did you ever think of that?

This entry also continues some of the more annoying traits of the series and even intensifies them. It continues in the tradition of Call of Duty 2 [2005] of having no visible health bar and instead of indicating damage by turning the screen red. This means that the more you're hit the less visibility you'll have, meaning it's very easy for a couple of cheap shots to snowball into an unwinnable situation where you can't even see the bastard shooting you. It also tanks the realism a bit when your character can recover bullet holes by simply sitting behind a bit of rubble and twiddling his thumbs for half a minute. By giving the player a grenade indicator that lets them know when they are inside the blast radius of a grenade, it means that the enemy can freely spam the things. On Regular it's hardly noticeably and on Hardened it's only a minor annoyance but on Veteran difficulty, the grenade spam is downright atrocious. It makes the whole mode effectively unplayable. For my money, only Call of Duty: World at War [2008] had worse Veteran grenade spam.

Since the release of Call of Duty 4, the franchise has been accused of a lot of things: Racism, nationalism, churning out too many half-baked sequels. Yet for my money, only the last of these accusations has any merit. I mean the racism angle is obviously false, as 90% of the time in the game, you're fighting Russians and last I checked they were still considered white. Even if you're the sort that counts Slavs as a separate race, the games are quite good at showing that not all Russians are murderous psychos. From Nikolai in Call of Duty 4, to Yuri in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 [2011], to Grigori in Call of Duty: Black Ops [2010], most games in the series seem to have at least one heroic Slav. Hell, this game opens by telling us that Russia has been engulfed in a civil war, so it's safe to say that all Russians don't see eye-to-eye with the guys who want to blow up nukes in the Middle East. The closest that the series has come to open anti-Slav racism is actually with the most recent Call of Duty: Modern Warfare [2019] which attributed a massacre that closely resembled real-life The Highway of Death to the Russians when in real life it was the American coalition forces responsible. Of course, the game is not pretending that the real-life massacre was committed by the Russian military, it's just mining the visual imagery for use in its own fictional story-line. I can see why the alt-historical take on the Highway of Death ruffles a few feathers, but I don't think it exposes some deep-seated slavophobia. Indeed, in the rare instances when you fight somebody besides the Russians, it hardly matters as you're usually so far away from the enemies that you can barely discern their race. I know personally, that one of the issues I had with the franchise was that I constantly mistake my own allies for enemy troops because realistic, modern military uniforms all look basically the same regardless of what military they belong to. Besides, the good guys in the game are usually a racially diverse bunch themselves. Sure, the game does not explicitly state that Paul Jackson is black or that James Ramirez is Hispanic, but them being so certainly wouldn't be out of step with either the American military as shown in the games or indeed in real life. The SAS are a good deal less diverse, but then again so is the UK and, consequently, its armed forces.

As for being nationalistic, this might be true if you're talking about the United Kingdom, but for those of us living in Eagleland, the answer is a resounding no. In Call of Duty 4, the US accomplishes little more than getting their own troops nuked in a pointless middle-eastern war, and in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 [2009], the principal antagonist turns out to be a rogue American general. That's downright positive when compared with Call of Duty: Black Ops [2010] which divides its time between horrific depictions of the Vietnam War and hinting that the player character is a brainwashed Russian agent sent to assassinate Kennedy. About the only good thing these games have to say about America is that our soldiers are brave and heroic in the face of danger. Hell, even then they generally wind up looking like a bunch of unruly amateurs when compared with the cold professionalism of the British SAS. Captain Price and his limey underlings are the ones who generally clean up the American messes and make sure that the world keeps on spinning despite all the terrorists and Russians trying to destroy it. Even then, the pro-British propaganda is definitely only a minor aspect of these games. Mostly they are bout delivering thrills and spectacle, and even indirectly they have little of substance to say.