Modern Warfare 2 In Disguise

That is an IGN opinion piece from Matt Purslow, who has been enjoying marketing campaign shooters since he was sufficiently old to grasp WASD+mouse. He has accomplished each Name of Responsibility marketing campaign a minimum of as soon as.

Warning: this text options some minor spoilers for Name of Responsibility: Modern Warfare 4.

We’re within the closing months of the yr, so it’s time for the annual coin flip: is the newest Name of Responsibility marketing campaign one of many good ones? The FPS collection struggles with a curse few others do, zig-zagging between highs and lows, its annual cadence solely making this undulating high quality all of the extra distinguished. In the final three years alone we’ve had one in all its finest campaigns sandwiched between two of its very worst. Fortunately, that on/off nature continues in 2026, which suggests it is a good yr for Name of Responsibility. Modern Warfare 4’s marketing campaign is among the collection’ finest, and far of that’s all the way down to the truth that it replicates the components of one of many biggest shooter campaigns ever made.

You see, Modern Warfare 4 is Modern Warfare 2.

Infinity Ward was using excessive within the late 2000s. It had efficiently pivoted Name of Responsibility from its Nineteen Forties origins to up to date battlefields with the primary Modern Warfare, which introduced a considerably quieter, eerier strategy to the studio’s slick fight killboxes – all inexperienced evening imaginative and prescient, silencers, and decaying Soviet structure. However for its 2009 sequel, Infinity Ward introduced the noise. Set throughout a Russian invasion of America, it pulled on the iconography of World Struggle 2 films to create epic battle sequences. The shattered streets of France had been changed by the burning picket fences of Suburbia, USA. You battled by means of homes, authorities buildings, and burger joints as you fought again these invading your homeland. However the frontlines weren’t your solely battleground – threaded alongside these missions was a story of particular operatives, led by Captain Value, making an attempt to strike towards the Russian mastermind behind all of it.

Swap out the streets of america for the roads of South Korea, and the Russian invaders for North Korean aggressors, and that synopsis of Modern Warfare 2 turns into the CliffsNotes for Modern Warfare 4. And I don’t imply that disparagingly – this components is an ideal automobile for what Name of Responsibility is excellent at: a mixture of WW2-scale army motion and smaller, espionage-style missions. And contemplating it’s been 17 years since Modern Warfare 2, I believe we may give Infinity Ward a cross right here, particularly contemplating it desperately wanted to get the Modern Warfare collection again on monitor after two lackluster chapters.

What rescues Modern Warfare 4 from feeling like a replica/paste of Modern Warfare 2 is the way it makes use of the identical broad define as a canvas for very completely different characters and situations. Whereas the headlining Captain Value and his vendetta towards Mads Mikkelsen’s The Archer is kind of MW2’s pursuit of Makarov, the actual coronary heart of the story is Younger Mazino’s Park Hyun-Jun. Park is a junior soldier, solely holding a rifle attributable to being conscripted as a part of the South Korean Army Service Act. In contrast to the particular forces operators that we’ve performed as throughout your entire reboot collection to this point, Park has little interest in being knowledgeable soldier. And but the surprising invasion of his homeland by the North Koreans means his yard is reworked right into a warzone, forcing him into fight.

The marketing campaign doesn’t have house to totally discover the emotional toll this has on the inexperienced Park, however there are small moments that allow this nice idea shine by means of – animations like a nervously twitching leg, or Mazino’s softer, extra downbeat supply. And so whereas a lot of Modern Warfare 4’s state of affairs design pulls instantly from Modern Warfare 2, be that enemy paratroopers descending into a daily metropolis, civilian structure punctured by bullets and bombs, or clearing housing blocks of invaders, the tone is markedly completely different. It’s the same mix of horror and pleasure, painted in a lot darker colors. In this sense, it treads a lot the identical floor as 2019’s Modern Warfare reboot, which explored very related matters to the 2007 unique, however augmented them with a darker tone ripped from movies like The Damage Locker and Zero Darkish Thirty.

Contrasting Park’s explosive life on the frontline is Value’s off-grid makes an attempt to eradicate The Archer. The missions that includes the moustachio’d captain (and, after all, Cleaning soap MacTavish) in Modern Warfare 2 had been all Bond, Bourne, and Hunt homages, from snow-covered stealth infiltrations to exhilarating boat chases. The identical might be mentioned about Value’s strategy in MW4. His Parisian tour is the spotlight, elegantly switching from on-rails shooter to driving mission, to on-foot firefight, and again to on-rails shooter, all inside European streets torn from Christopher McQuarrie’s filmography. Right here, the distinction is technical – that Parisian automobile chase feels considerably extra speedy and harmful than Modern Warfare 2’s snowspeeder sequence because of nearly twenty years of online game graphics and degree design evolution. In consequence, it’s essentially the most genuine Mission: Unimaginable set piece you may have exterior of the cinema. In the meantime, Value’s new (and admittedly very imprecise) hand-to-hand fight expertise give this model of the espionage story a extra brutal edge, its bone-busting and skin-slicing finishers feeling notably nasty.

There’s, after all, one thing that Modern Warfare 2 is rather more (in)well-known for. The sharp shock of No Russian could now have lastly diminished, however its difficult depiction of a terrorist assault on an airport stays one in all Name of Responsibility’s most memorable missions. Modern Warfare 4 has its personal take, albeit delivered in a really completely different form. The crux of No Russian is its interactivity – do you comply with orders and slaughter dozens of civilians, or preserve your finger off the set off? And so MW4’s variant is appropriately known as “Following Orders”, the thought given new context by casting you as a North Korean soldier requested to seek out an enemy of the totalitarian regime. As you storm homes and query terrified civilians, you’re given the chance to both toe the social gathering line or defy your monstrous leaders. Do you convey up the medical contraband you discovered? Reveal the lady you discovered beneath the kitchen flooring? Query an ally’s use of torture? And can you maintain the rope that hangs the alleged defector?

Whereas it paints a really broad picture of North Korea’s political state of affairs and doesn’t contribute to the general story in fairly the identical method No Russian does, Following Orders is nonetheless an enchanting part of Modern Warfare 4’s repainting of Modern Warfare 2’s canvas. It’s a extra fashionable tackle the same idea, offering a higher array of decisions for a way you become involved, and pushing you to think about your personal morality and place inside the machine because of a (barely) sharper line of questioning.

Examine Following Orders to Passenger, the rebooted Modern Warfare 3’s extra direct try at No Russian, and the distinction is evening and day. Slightly than study and rebuild the mission’s experimental mixture of narrative and gameplay, Passenger is just a terrorist assault involving a aircraft. And when you technically do play Passenger, it’s largely a first-person cutscene the place most of your interplay is strolling ahead between scripted sequences. Contemplating your entire level of No Russian is participant company, it’s a woeful misunderstanding of why you’d embrace an interactive terrorist assault in a online game.

Extra broadly, Passenger is emblematic of how the Modern Warfare reboot’s center chapters stumbled. 2019’s opening act was undeniably associated to the Modern Warfare of a decade prior, nevertheless it was very a lot its personal factor. The tense room clearing of Clear Home was a remix of two unique Modern Warfare missions – Dying From Above’s chilling matter-of-fact homicide and All Ghillied Up’s quiet and methodical motion – however collectively they created a brand new Name of Responsibility icon that outlined the reboot’s supposed path. However moderately than proceed that artistic strategy, 2022’s Modern Warfare 2 was content material to play weak covers of the best hits. Its catalogue was crammed with new variations of Crew Expendable, All Ghillied Up, and Dying From Above, with little greater than additional gloss to justify their existence.