I’m going to get this out of the way, so stick with me: I am not a habitual Call of Duty player. I played Big Red One for the PlayStation 2 in the early 2000s and then basically didn’t pick up another game in the series until this year. I don’t hold very high esteem for the franchise generally, and I think some of its more recent stunts, like mildly progressivizing Ronald Reagan to respect your pronouns if you’re nonbinary in CoD: Black Ops – Cold War, are goofy as shit. I’ve also heard a lot of critics and lovers of the franchise basically say they don’t much care for the stories, and that they’re really only here for Warzone, and Warzone is great. I will take them at their word; I also don’t play much battle royale shit, though I have less of an ideological beef with that genre at large.
But this summer, I decided to buck my own prejudices and take an honest dive into Call of Duty’s most consequential sub-franchise, Modern Warfare. I figured I might not enjoy myself, I might even be miserable doing this, but I would at least have a perspective on the series that would be rooted in experience. I briefly wrote about my time playing the original trilogy and Modern Warfare (2019) here. My ultimate position on the series was, until playing Modern Warfare II, basically this: I hate it, it is my video game series nemesis, but I do have a modicum of respect for it (which only fuels my hate further).
This post is not about those prior games. It is about Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II (2022).
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II is a desperate, incoherent mess of a video game. It is the last neurons firing in a narrative franchise whose death is imminent, and whose replacement has already been anointed. It is paranoid, mean-spirited, openly hypocritical and deeply, deeply in need of validation of any kind. It is utterly beholden to better video games—Metal Gear Solid V, Resident Evil 7 and the Hitman and Uncharted series, to name a few—and refuses to try anything new on its own. It is strewn with the wreckage of nostalgia for itself, littered with endless callbacks and references to a series it is trying to supplant. It wants you to promise it that you won’t leave it for Warzone as soon as humanly possible. You say yes, knowing full well that you’re lying. This is all before getting to the atrocious ideological perspective it holds; I’ve written about that elsewhere though.
This sad excuse for a single player campaign skews on the longer side for a Modern Warfare game, about 12 hours altogether. In that time you shift between different character perspectives, primarily back and forth between the “iconic” Task Force 141 crew of Soap, Gaz, Ghost and Price and Mexican Special Forces Colonel Alejandro Vargas and his partner, SGM Rodolfo Parra. In addition to the completely fictional locales of the United Republic of Adal, Urzikstan and Los Almas (supposedly in the foothills of northern Mexico), players will fight their way through Amsterdam, an unnamed Texas border town that could be El Paso but all you see of it is a trailer park and suburban area, and a very tall building in Chicago that isn’t the Sears Tower.
Narratively, it’s hard to comprehend how Modern Warfare II in any way connects with the events of the previous game. We start the game by wantonly assassinating the general of Iran’s Quds Force, and immediately jump forward several months to learn that the general’s protege, Major Hassan Zyani, has taken that personally for some reason. He vows to take revenge and has teamed up with Al Qatala (the anarchist terrorists from the first game) and a new boogeyman, the Los Almas drug cartel, to smuggle three stolen container-loaded cruise missiles into proximity with the US. The idea behind Zyani’s plan is he wants to hold the US personally accountable for the murder of his superior, and that involves blowing up consequential targets with the missiles. We’ll put a pin in this.
The theme of every Modern Warfare game since the beginning of time is that, despite projecting the image that it is the most powerful, technologically advanced and situationally-aware military force in the world, the United States and its allies in the west are in reality just widdle smol beans who are twying their best to fight da bad guys every day uwu. Every single Modern Warfare game depicts Western warfighters as being in a constant struggle against an enemy who, despite having every available disadvantage, is always and without fail one step ahead. You might say “oh well Kaile, it’s clear this is just a narrative device, haven’t you ever seen spy movies?” And all I can say in response is, “read the fucking counterinsurgency manual.” This is legitimately how the military views itself, and as a consequence, it’s how militainment depicts the military. The player is not stupid; the player surely knows that by the end of the game, they will catch and kill the bad guy, or there will be a setup for another future video game. This trope can be mostly glossed over. Buy the ticket, enjoy the ride, etc.
Modern Warfare II, however, takes this to new extremes by making everyone except for Task Force 141 and the Mexican Special Forces a full-on shitshow.
Sixty percent of this game is dealing with the threat that Zyani poses. These are the missions you’ve no doubt seen snippets from, like that one shot of the Amsterdam street that made everyone cum for no reason the other day. Missions where you have to be Tactical™ and use Stealth™ and Watch Your Corners™ as you traverse through areas that may or may not be actual war zones committing acts of absolutely unsanctioned violence. These are the missions where you aim down the sights of your pistol to Deescalate Civilians™, where you perform “sick as hell” underwater takedowns and showcase your Battlefield Superiority™ while dressed in jeans, a t-shirt and plate carriers. Wanna rappel down the side of a building and shoot bad guys upside down? There’s a mission for that. Want to storm an oil tanker like the good old days? There’s a mission for that. Want to snipe 100 enemies unawares from a mile out? You guessed it. This shit is all noise to me, but it’s largely “inoffensive”[1]Here I don’t mean inoffensive in the ideological sense, but rather in the strictest gameplay sense. Fuck the whole game ideologically. noise. It is the video game equivalent of elevator music, and of course it’s going to be in the video game equivalent of an elevator.
The other forty percent is side-tracked bullshit that largely has to do with the developers seeming to wring their hands over whether or not mercenary warfighting – that is, the advent of private military contractors like Blackwater – is “honorable.” This is honestly pretty surprising, coming from a game series that has largely bought its own bullshit hook, line and sinker, and compelled the player to do the same. We’re talking about a series reboot where the most famous line in the first game was Captain Price telling Gaz in a moment of doubt, “We get dirty to keep the world clean.” Like why all of a sudden give a shit if a PMC bends the rules when that’s, like, the entire fucking purpose of Task Force 141? Well, lmao, have you seen what rules they’re breaking?
From the jump we are introduced to “Shadow Company,” a PMC owned by a Erik Prince-esque yahoo named Phillip Graves. Yes, he is going to be a villain; yes, the game lampshades this in a stupid cutscene. You actually inhabit a Shadow Company aircraft in one of the missions that takes place in Los Almas; you fuck up a cartel compound and then fuck up an adjacent town full of (presumably) civilians with cannonfire. Graves is the one who fires the cruise missile which takes out the Quds Force general in the game’s opening salvo; he is also the yahoo whose employees got bamboozled by Russian mercenaries while they were transporting… [checks notes] three container cruise missiles. Ah.
Graves teams up with Task Force 141 and Los Vaqueros (the Mexican Special Forces bros) to find a cartel HQ and capture its boss. He then immediately turns heel, takes over Los Vaqueros’ base, tries to eliminate Ghost and Soap (who get away), and invades Los Almas. In the process of searching for the missing TF141 operatives, they systematically murder any and every civilian who get in their way! It’s so fun. We love to see it.[2]we don’t.
You then have to break Los Vaqueros out of prison, reclaim their base, and kill Graves, just in time for the cartel boss to tell you that a cruise missile is en route to Chicago. This is 40 percent of the game. Christ on a cracker.
It feels real fucking weird to watch this game suddenly equivocate over whether or not PMCs are “ethical,” when its entire ideological underpinning – that the US/the West is fighting a “just war” and that no-holds-barred counterinsurgency is the best tool to use in that fight – demands full buy-in from the fighter/the player. When it spent the entirety of the first game demanding to know why the gloves couldn’t just come off, why the footsoldiers of the state like Gaz couldn’t operate more efficiently without constantly having to get the approval to act. When the military declares the Urzik Liberation Front a terrorist organization in Modern Warfare, the CIA hipster protagonist disobeys an order from his superior and goes rogue, fighting with the group against the Russian general occupying Urzikstan. And now all of a sudden, we’re out here worrying about rules and decorum and ethics when the breaking of those rules makes someone ostensibly on our team a villain? What happened to “you’re either with us, or you’re with the terrorists,” you fools?
Gameplay-wise, what am I supposed to say? It’s your standard run-and-gun shit, interspersed with roller coaster moments where you have very little in the way of agency and are just simply pressing prompts to keep the action moving forward. Occasionally, both the run-and-gun and the roller coaster shit are themselves interspersed with gameplay demos for other titles, like when you are suddenly playing Hitman III in the cartel HQ, or Metal Gear Solid V in the sniper mission over the Spanish fishery, or Resident Evil 7 during your time in the PMC-besieged city, where you sneak around gathering materials to make homemade weapons and traps to take down wildly stronger enemies. Very few of these other-game experiences were any good, serving mostly to frustrate. The main roller coaster attraction – hanging upside down from a helicopter – made me physically ill. The run-and-gun shit? I felt nothing.
I built up a begrudging respect for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare as a franchise. After taking it apart, I could understand what each component was doing, and even if I detested it, it made some sense as a whole. The original late-2000s franchise tried to build a grand narrative, a World War III opera if you will, out of components that people were maybe familiar with due to the ongoing so-called War on Terrorism™. It resisted a lot of entropic forces that were otherwise decimating military-themed entertainment by being rooted in reality, setting up a pretty nefarious and complex system of interpellation – “the sacrificial citizen” – that slowly drew players in and kept them hooked, and largely justifying its premises by showing the villains do villainous shit (even though a lot of these moments also heavily relied on shitty stereotypes of the Middle East to function). Even the reboot, Modern Warfare (2019), held a vestige of the original trilogy’s narrative certainty.
Modern Warfare II is a mess, on the other hand. It ideologically has no idea where it’s going. It’s just pulling from a grab bag of random fears instilled into Americans over the past half-century and throwing them together mad-lib style. It has basically no connection with the previous game, and it was kind of a slog to play. And so, if I may, a prediction: whether or not Modern Warfare II gets a sequel, this will likely be the last game where the single player and multiplayer modes are kept apart. My guess is that either Warzone becomes the default game, with the other franchises more directly feeding into it with expansion packs, or we end up seeing a live-service narrative game that combines Modern Warfare with Black Ops living alongside Warzone. The alternative is this weird reality where the single player campaigns get more and more vestigial until they’re literal footnotes for Warzone, and that seems less than ideal.
Regardless, this particular adventure was a profound waste of time (derogatory). Fuck Bobby Kotick, fuck all the union-busting managers and executives at Activision-Blizzard, and fuck Modern Warfare II for existing.