Stable and influential, overcelebrated and dictatorial.
The difficulties surrounding the criticism of popular video games apply especially to the Call of Duty series. While the consensus on the wildly popular first-person shooter series has actually been shifting towards a slightly less euphoric position in recent years, with its creative stagnation becoming hard to deny for even the most die-hard fans, some of the older games in the series still seem to be surrounded by an air of myth that is hardly ever questioned by anybody. Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare in particular is still often mentioned as one of the best titles in its genre, being lauded by reviewers and gamers alike, and still making it into nearly every 'top 5 first person shooters of the generation'-type list you may find on the net. When stripped off its whizz-bang exterior, however, what we see is much closer to a competent but ultimately non-essential shooter than the Holy Grail of action games that it is often made out to be.
Call of Duty 4's single player portion in particular comes across as downright archaic at times. This may seem like a bold claim when you look at its impact on the genre, but nonetheless it is a conclusion that is hard to avoid when one takes a closer look at the game. To realise this, you will first need to consider that a video game is essentially an illusion projected onto your monitor or television screen, and part of what determines the success of a given release is how well it is able to maintain its own illusion in front of the person holding the controller. Much like in a daydream, the gamer fools himself into being in another place, using both the illusion of the game and the imagination of his own mind to create his own world. With that in mind, part of what puts a dent in Modern Warfare's credibility is how painstakingly obvious the confines of this 'dream world' really are. What the game tries to do is to give the player an action movie-like experience that takes him across all sorts of locales in an adrenaline-fueled campaign against evil, naturally personified by a band of Russian terrorists who want to spark a nuclear war. The catch is that the game seems so desperate in its attempt to create this Hollywood-like flow that it ensures that the player never escapes from it by severely limiting his possibilities. During the majority of the five hour-long campaign, the player is effectively squeezed through tight corridors, presented with passageways that are inexplicably locked until the game thinks it is okay for him to go to the next part of the level, and even confronted with invisible walls that make the near dictatorial structure of this game all the more obvious. As a result, the level design, for the most part, comes across as unnecessarily archaic, as if the developers were genuinely paranoid that the player might do anything unanticipated.
It should be noted that I by no means wish to imply that a linear level structure is necessarily bad. But when the developers go with such a design choice, this does not excuse them from having to maintain the illusion. What this comes down to in practice, is that the journey from point A to point B, even if it has been completely predetermined by the level designer, must at all times feel natural. Ideally, a game should gently guide the player to his destination, and not seize him by both his shoulders and push him towards his objective at a murderous pace. A game such as F.E.A.R. has already proven this, seeing as it felt much less confined than any Call of Duty instalment while not offering the player substantial amounts of freedom either. And it is exactly this feeling that makes the difference. You can have a room with one exit, or you can have a room with one exit and a locked door. Both rooms force the player to use the one exit, but the player will seem more limited in his choices when he is presented with a door he cannot open. Call of Duty has always been exceptionally bad at covering up its own limitations, exactly by still not realising that illusion is indeed key.
Even though the campaign's glaring shortcoming are hard to overlook, this game's single player mode is not without merits. Modern Warfare's seeming aspiration to be an action flick positively reflects in its presentation. The dramatic opening scene alone, in which you witness the last minutes of the life of a Middle-Eastern president, is an excellent showcase of the game's big budget production values. The first-person camera perspective and the chaos you see unfold on the streets as you are driven towards your execution create a tension and a sense of 'being there' (even though the player interaction is severely limited) that would just be hard to emulate in cinema. Even in the actual gameplay sequences, the romanticised battlefield tension is presented with the believability of a Hollywood war film, but with that added aspect of interactivity guaranteeing an extra layer of connectivity between the player and the events that unfold on-screen. Meanwhile, the shooting mechanics feel exceptionally light and responsive. So much so that one could pose the question if just a little more realism in the gunplay would not have been appropriate in a game that tries so hard to present itself as realistic. The recoilless, too-samey feel of Modern Warfare's armoury feels like it would have been more appropriate in a Serious Sam-like horde shooter.
While many would agree that the multiplayer mode is the bread and butter of the game, it still suffers from the same essential problem, namely that it presents all too familiar gameplay under the veil of a flashy presentation, mostly adding features that, at the end of the day, are of secondary importance. Even still, Modern Warfare is where the foundation of the multiplayer for all subsequent Call of Duty titles was realised. Moreover, the perks, custom load-outs, kill-streaks, constant levelling and kill-cams all grew on to become common features in multiplayer shooters ever since they were popularised by this game. While its historical relevance as a multiplayer game is therefore undeniable, Modern Warfare ultimately adds little in the way of actual gameplay. The multiplayer essentially comes down to fast-paced fragging, and even though it is admirable that there's little to no lag, a fairly good weapon balance, and a good amount of relatively exploit-free maps, we are offered little which we have never experienced before. Call of Duty 4 has definitely changed the way in which players are rewarded for their kills, but what it is we do in this type of game has hardly changed at all. And lamentable as it may be that subsequent instalments in the series have been putting an increasing amount of focus on expanding the exterior structure of the multiplayer aspect rather than attempting to rethink, in one way or another, the actual concept of multiplayer, it is perhaps an even more sad conclusion that, by 2012, many other developers have tried (some more fruitfully than others) to emulate the commercial success of the Call of Duty series by exploring the reward system of multiplayer first-person shooters without actually trying to evolve the idea of multiplayer itself.
It would be too harsh to claim that Call of Duty 4's success balances entirely on the game's presentation. It is true that popularity does not guarantee quality, but if a game is to reach the amount of popularity of a release such as this, its basic structure must at least be in order. As such, Modern Warfare is a very playable and indeed enjoyable game that will not be a waste of money to anyone who's even remotely into the genre. At the same time, however, the legendary reputation of this title does not correspond with what the gamers are presented with. Purely on a gameplay level, very little occurs that transcends what we were already familiar with by the time this game came out in 2007, not in the last place from previous Call of Duty instalments. Much of the gameplay is unspectacular at its core, and some of it even feels as awkward as it always has. In fact, perhaps the underlying problem of Modern Warfare and indeed the whole Call of Duty series is that the game structure strays too far from what its presentation suggests. The game tries to combine the grittiness of a pseudo-realistic look with the light-heartedness of a full-fledged arcade shooter, and somehow that never ceases to feel strange completely.
It was never my goal to try and destroy the reputation of Call of Duty 4, because it is generally good at what it tries to do and it has had an undeniable impact on the video game industry, making this title hard to overlook indeed. But apart from showing us that popularity and quality really are two different things, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare also confirms that an influential game may not always dictate progression.