Call of Duty: Modern Warfare Final Verdict – A Step Forward While feeling Unchanged

Platform – PS4, Xbox One, PC
Developer – Infinity Ward
Publisher – Activision Blizzard
MSRP – $59.99

Editor’s Note – This game was reviewed on the PlayStation 4 with review copy being provided by the publisher Activision Blizzard. Gaming Instincts is also an Amazon affiliate and does get financial benefits.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare is the reboot to the original title which came out in 2007. Well with a brand new engine and with a lot of new customization options, does the game live up to the hype or do all of these new ideas put into the game just too overwhelming, we’ll give you our final verdict.

An Engaging Campaign

In the 2019 the terrorist group, Al Qatala has been making its mark as of recent as Russia invades Afghanistan. Since America is very much allies with the nation Captain Price is ordered to find the leader of AQ, The Wolf and find out what he wants to do with Russian Chemicals. Meanwhile while this is happening, the rebellion group led by Farah Karim along with a CIA agent, Alex are trying to defend the territory from Al Qatala while dealing with possibly Russian Chemicals. It’s a reboot, so you’ll see some familiar faces like captain Price, and Nikolai, your pilot from the series.

The story is split between Sergeant Kyle Garrick who goes along with Captain Price and Alex trying to help Farah Karim get information on a local terrorist threat along with protecting them from Russian Forces.

The story takes a more in your face seriousness route when you witness the many horrors of war such as dealing with the death of your allies, not knowing right from wrong and dealing with choices that would otherwise be difficult for a normal person to deal with. It’s gritty, dark but lacks a meaningful conflict near the end that feels more like a small victory rather than achieving anything noteworthy. Fortunately the 14 missions that you’ll be facing in the game offer a lot of variety with both gameplay and gunplay.

The Trials and Errors of War

As you play through the story you’ll be facing hundreds of enemies that both look and feel good to fight. With Call of Duty’s new engine, we can experience far more detail with the enemy’s and our own movements. The enemies have multiple death and are as crafty as ever as they will make use of cover, mount their weapons onto cover for eerily perfect accuracy and are an all around nuisance. When there aren’t a lot of enemies, the gameplay is normal but when a mission introduces a lot of enemies or gets played on higher difficulties, you can see the flaws clearly. Sometimes the enemies will be able to shoot you if you just look at them at the right moment or will outright surround you even though you were sure that there was nobody there. Additionally the campaigns checkpoint system can get very annoying if you happened to be in the wrong place when a checkpoint is placed. Not only can this be really challenging, but it makes the higher difficulties feel more cheaty than actually fair.

As for the actual story itself, it’s short and falls flat near the end, but fortunately the missions are pretty dang good despite all of these mishaps

A Well-Animated Battle

With the new engine, Modern Warfare looks absolutely gorgeous. Everything from the gritty environment, to the faces of the characters, to the fabric on their clothing looks pretty good up close. In the past years since around Modern Warfare, the engine mostly stayed the same, even up to around when Black Ops 4 came out. Well now just about everything about the game looks revamped and all around upgraded. The animations, the faces, the guns. It all looks amazing, even the attention to detail. Every piece of every gun is animated, the barrel heats up and steam comes out after shooting for a while. Also, the ruffling of the fabric on your uniform is a nice touch as well. Unfortunately there seems to be quite a few texture pop-ins in both the campaign and multiplayer. It’s very minor but is very noticeable, especially after having a heartfelt conversation with one of your pals.

Multiplayer

What Call of Duty is best known for is their multiplayer. Not only is it one of the best ways to show off your gaming skills to the kids at school, it’s also one of the more rewarding experiences that Call of Duty is known for. You level up through a variety of game modes such as team deathmatch, 2v2 gunfights, and 64-player Ground Wars. You’ll be participating in these matches using a loadout unique to your tastes. You can pick your guns, perks, grenades and killstreaks. Additionally you can choose your current playstyle by choosing a field upgrade which gives you a special ability on cooldown like silenced footsteps and whatnot.

Of course the main star of this Call of Duty for multiplayer are simply the amount of customization that you are given for the guns. With every gun you earn, you’ll be able to take them to the gunsmith where you will be able to customize every important piece of your weapon. This includes sights, magazine, stocks, and underbarrel attachments. What is more is that there are several different customization options with every level you give your gun which is earned by gaining kills. These attachments can drastically change the way your gun feels and works. If you have too much recoil, you’ll surely have enough attachments on your gun to eventually fix the problem. Not only that, rewards like skins, camo, stickers, and red dot sights can be customized as well to give your gun a unique flavor.

The maps on the other hand are a different story. The maps here are pretty big and offer a whole lot to incorporate some interesting strategies. Well they offer a lot of strategy in peeking around corners, which usually results in half of the match camping in order to punish those that roam around the map. Additionally some of the maps are just poorly designed with obvious disadvantages. The Euphrates Bridge for example has several flaws including going through an underpass that will usually be a deathtrap, a bridge where everybody can snipe on, and two darastically different spawn locations for teams, one of which works way too well to camp and fall back on. Additionally, the respawns can make your life worse as they refuse to put you in an area that has no enemies in.

Lastly, Ground War has only like two maps and that is a big disappointment as this could’ve been the time when Call of Duty’s fast-paced gunplay would mesh well with battlefield-styled maps. I know that there will be more maps added for free in the future but it seems like the current maps do have quite a few flaws to say the least.

Spec Ops

Spec Ops is Modern Warfare’s cooperative gamemode in which a team of four players are put into an open map and must complete the objectives in order to stop a new threat within the Verdansk area. Spec Ops supposedly takes place after the main story, as Captain Price and his crew are sending special operators, the multiplayer characters, to areas of Verdansk in order to liberate the area of an invading threat.

Much like multiplayer, you can edit your entire loaout. This includes your weapons, attatchments, extra munitions you’ll bring and character roles/classes which give you special abilities on cooldown. Of course if you unlocked plenty of weapons through multiplayer, then it carries over here too.

Rather than playing as a main protagonist and being about the the brutal realities of war, Spec Ops is about completing the extremely hard objectives and that is no joke. What they ask you and your team to do in Spec Ops are just unreasonably hard. For instance, the first mission you do in Operation Headhunter is to go from building to building and kill the lieutenants to gather information on Al Qatala’s slumlord-in chief. All is normal and enemies are placed in reasonable areas for you to shoot. Immediately after, they want you to run around the local stadium, disable 5 scramblers and destroy 5 tanks all while massive waves of unlimited enemies charge towards you. It also doesn’t help that the enemies just have pinpoint aim and can literally spawn within your vision. Unless you’re really good and know exactly what to do, your team will be wiped.

I can understand that we need a challenge, but it feels like that Spec Ops is way tougher to beat than it should be.

Conclusion

As Call of Duty has definitely improved over the years, it looks like that these very new changes are pretty much welcome, except that with new changes comes new problems, which Modern Warfare faces, but there is always improvement for the future as the game promises new maps, weapons, and possibly new modes. It’s because of this I give the game an 8.5. It’s probably not the best a Call of Duty game could be at the moment, but since the room for improvement is big, we hope that Modern Warfare has a great future.

For more coverage on Modern Warfare, check out here. You may also purchase the game on Amazon.