I just wanted to reiterate the spoiler alert above. This essay contains some details about Call of Duty 6 you might not want to know on your first playthrough. The game is structured with a lot of “oh snap” moments (in fact the number eventually became a bit annoying for me, personally) and if you’re enthusiastic about experiencing the story of Call of Duty 6 you might just want to buy a copy and give it a quick playthrough. It took me six and a half hours on “hard” or whatever they fucking call it, and I think I spent an hour of that time paused and writing overall. It’s well worth the investment of time, although $10 an hour is a bit steep if you aren’t invested in the multiplayer.
Call of Duty 6 is, at its core, a game about making you do unpleasant things. In that respect it is a game about being a soldier, about participating in wars, sure. But most games about these things sort of glorify them. They never really discuss your character following orders that he doesn’t want to. There hasn’t been a game yet that makes you usher people back into holding areas in Dachau because you don’t have the proper infrastructure to feed and clothe them. There hasn’t been a mission about abandoning civilians to certain death because taking them with you would jeopardize your safety and compromise your operation.
These are real issues you’ll have to deal with during a military operation, however. They’re heartbreaking moments of human drama and they’re times when doing the right thing means wronging every part involved. They suck, and Call of Duty 6 or Modern Warfare 2 or whatever isn’t about making you experience sucky elements of war.
Well, until it is.
The game opens up much as you’d expect. There’s a quick showcase of the new technology and the new gun models. Picadilly rails are rendered in exacting detail, so gun nerds can rejoice on that front. And a mustached general tells me that He Wants Me to be in his Super Secret Special Forces Unit which operates from a Deus Ex Machina Sub. Apologies for the capitalization there, but I just wanted to let loose an aside on how generic the operation logos and unit names are. After playing through the game only a few hours earlier I can’t recall what the specific Ranger outfit was that my second faceless, voiceless marine was a member of. It might’ve just been The Rangers.
But I digress. Modern Warfare 2 opens on war-torn Afghanistan substituting for Iraq. There’s a sequence ripped from Generation Kill where you’re manning the minigun on top of a humvee (standing in for the M-240 SAW which I want to say would be there in reality). Then there’s a brief Black Hawk Down moment where your humvee is destroyed and you have to run like mad to accomplish a dubious goal and reach the aforementioned mustachioed general. The game then goes on to re-imagine the film Cliffhanger in a way that somehow makes it interesting. Then it drops you into an airport and makes you murder civilians.
I’m going to write that sentence again for effect. After running you through generic action movie sections Modern Warfare 2 puts you in control of a civilian massacre at an airport. It’s painstakingly scripted and paced so that you can’t help but watch what’s unfolding, but for all the gravity it tries to impart at times it can’t help from being glib about the whole fucking thing. No sooner do you watch a terrorist gun down huddled masses like cattle on a killing floor than you walk by the same area to see the flight tickers flip from “on time” to “delayed.” Really, Call of Duty? Are you fucking serious? You’re going to crack a shitty joke after you just made me kill hundreds of unarmed civilians? Do you even want me to buy Call of Duty 8: The Other Cold War?
After that the game offered up another “oh snap” moment where your previous ally shoots you in the chest, revealing he knew you were a plant all along. It’s pretty hard-hitting but it doesn’t save the segment and, trust me, it won’t last. It’s going to happen another six times during the game. Someone you thought you could trust is going to render you helpless or disable you or shoot you. The only question is, is someone going to save you at the last minute?
But the impact of the massacre stays with you for a while. Even after I’d returned to Russia I still felt sore about it. They made me kill all those people, for nothing. The plot twist accompanying it was almost inexplicable. Other terrorists died during the assault, and they were plainly Russian. Wouldn’t they discount any theories about this being a plot by the US to attack Russia? What was the tactical significance of attacking this airport? Why shouldn’t I just kill Makarov outright? And it was hard to feel that bad for myself for firing off .556 into civilian crowds when my only real choice was a menu bar asking me if I was a bad enough dude to play this mission, a question I’ve been conditioned to answer “yes” to without thought since the early ninties. It was upsetting, and not in the intended way. I didn’t feel like the villain had forced me to participate in a senseless act of abhorrent violence. I felt like the game had told its story poorly. Instead of being angry at Makarov I was angry at the developer.
The following level didn’t help. The Brazilian slum mission was unpleasant in a different way. Endless spawns can work if you’re in a wide open area where you’re fending off or evading attackers, but it’s not a great idea in a labyrinthine set of passages and overpasses where you’re going to be constantly getting potshots and being flanked. It was frustrating, and the only reason I didn’t turn off the game right then and there is because I enjoyed Call of Duty 4 so god damn much I wanted to give this game a fair shake. Even though it did nothing but deign to insult me, I wanted to give it a chance, because I trust Infinity Ward’s creative vision so much.
Cue the Red Dawn reenactment, resplendent with the same bizarre hypothetical logic that made Red Dawn such a though provoking film. Less than an hour after slaughtering civvies in an airport I was defending the roof of a Benegans that had a senator in its meat locker or something. It’s all very unclear and very generic, and that’s the point. The firefights became mildly more pleasant from here on out, but the bad taste stayed in my mouth for a while. In fact it stayed in my mouth until I reached the oil rig.
I think part of this unpleasantness stems from the level design. It feels less deliberate than in previous Call of Duty titles. Perhaps they’re showcasing some sort of improved AI, but to me it simply feels like I’m left more vulnerable and given fewer options. There seem to be more endless spawns requiring I run past point x in order to survive, and the way that the spawns function and attempt to shape my movement always felt more frustrating than challenging. I felt like I was being shot from an angle I wasn’t watching, one I wouldn’t know to watch unless I’d played through the level before. And I’d feel this way a lot. Perhaps that’s why Veteran is an unlockable difficulty – it’s less about skill at that point and more about memorizing the patterns the game wants you to take. It’s like a director in the traditional filmic sense, a complete counter to the programatic director of Left 4 Dead.
Exacerbating these issues are puzzling design choices, many of them truncations of previous standard Call of Duty features. I can’t lean, but the enemies can blind fire from cover, and cover can still be penetrated. There’s a larger inventory of guns, but aside from the ACR none of them feel very new. They feel like different skins of the same gun. And why, praytell, did you decide to strap shotguns on to the bottom of various assault rifles? Did someone just see Aliens or something and think it was a cool idea?
Modern Warfare 2 feels like a sophomore effort through and through, which is frustrating considering its the fourth entry from Infinity Ward in the series. Perhaps it’s the senior slump, then? Whatever you want to call it, it’s Call of Duty in decline. Where the first Modern Warfare illustrated what it’s like to be a disposable human weapon in a world populated by massive weapons designed specifically to kill people like you, where it illustrated the devaluation of human life and human emotion and the feeling of helplessness and the painful knowledge of the surety of your own death, Call of Duty 6 gives us a story about how real men fight wars and evil men start them. It gives us long, largely irrelevant philosophical tirades punctuated by actions scenes that feel exploitative in their own context. And it seems to be largely unaware that it’s doing so. Each time Soap rolls over to me in slow motion I want to giggle. I don’t feel exhilerated. I feel like I’m subject to a steamy homosexual romance between two men, forbidden by the laws of military conduct in the 141.
But for all its flaws, as I said in the disclaimer, I’d still recommend it. Part of that is that the play that makes Call of Duty great is still intact. It’s still just as fun to double tap terrorists in the head or get that last second knife and drop into cover before someone notices you. Call of Duty has been the gold standard by which all other multiplayer shooters are measured for a while now. Its emulation is evidence enough, and while Modern Warfare 2 does little to innovate the alchemy of persistence and action remains intact.
The Special Ops modes are also incredibly fun. I haven’t had the chance to enjoy them with another person yet, but the concepts are just so enjoyable and varied, it feels like I get to play through my favorite poetic firefights from the game without any of that emotionally exploitative bullshit in between. I look forward to exploring Special Ops nearly as much as I look forward to exploring the multiplayer.
But the biggest caveat I’d like to make is that Call of Duty 6’s story gets better. It gets better for me during the Russian safehouse mission, after Ghost drags me to the chopper. Sure, there are still plot holes. Why is it that the marines have no trouble destroying the Russian horde behind me? Was it really that important for me to arrive before Shepard shoots me? Couldn’t he just search my body? It’s not like he did a very thorough interrogation. But that moment was earned. That betrayal made the entire plot fall together and changed the way I looked at the game. It isn’t a game about life and death the way that Call of Duty 4 was. It’s a game about being forced to do shit by people who want to see you die and doing all you can to break their rules in order to survive. It’s a game about being a gamer in an entirely different context.
The following scenes, where you fight your way to Shepard through his hordes of dubiously allied troops are actually kind of enjoyable, simply because Call of Duty rarely has a pair of opposing sides fighting while you try to slip by. It’s also a fresh twist to be fighting Americans in any way, shape, or form in the normally chest thumpingly patriotic Call of Duty games. Call of Duty 6 seems to recognize that in reality the soldier’s enemy is war itself, that to survive they have to find a way to abandon war, often by enduring it during the worst of times.
And even though those last scenes have some super unpleasant moments, like a terrible boat chase and a lengthy scene where you’re stabbed in the chest and left helpless which ends with a series of actions that made me shout loud enough to upset the cat, they still saved the game for me. Because it stopped being about blind patriotism after the dropped Army Ranger plotline vanished inexplicably from the game. It stopped being about how your country is above reproach, about how patriotism is the most important thing in the world. Instead it became a story about two men trying to survive against the impossible forces arrayed against them. It became the sort of story I enjoy, even if it wasn’t as well but together as previous entries, and that’s a great thing. It’s too bad they diluted it in every way and wore out their later shocks by forcing so many upon us early in the game, but nothing really beat watching my hand feebly twitch when I pressed f and realizing what I had to do to stop Shepard. At that moment I truly felt for Soap. I’ve inhabited him for a while, and some terrible things have happened to him while I was behind his eyes, but that was by far the worst. I hope he finds a nice cabin in the Alps with Captain Price. He’s certainly earned it.
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