Call Of Duty Modern Warfare 2 Remastered Do Not Push This Button

[Ashlie Mealey]

Aftertaking a year off in 2018, Call of Duty\u2019s single-player campaign has come roaring back in the revival of the Modern Warfare name. For my money, this is the best campaign the series has seen since 2010\u2019s Black Ops; and if that sounds like a backhanded compliment, I don\u2019t mean it as one. Though it stops short of being as provocative and button-pushing as it seemed poised to be, it is nevertheless an extremely well-designed first-person shooter that refreshes the franchise format just enough with a few cool new ideas and some smart new takes on others we haven\u2019t seen in years.

The plot of Modern Warfare\u2019s rebooted storyline starts out trying to blur the lines between good and bad, but it ends up quickly establishing the good guys as very clearly good. The US team is led by memorably mustachioed fan-favorite Captain John Price, while the sister and brother duo of Farah and Hamir head up an insurgency movement fighting to push Russian forces out of their fictional home country of Urzikstan. That\u2019s right: it\u2019s cool to shoot at Russia again.

That\u2019s not to say that uncomfortable, morally gray things don\u2019t happen in this campaign; they do, and sometimes those events are directly in your control. Unarmed women die. Children are shot. Civilians can catch bullets. Suicide bombers are a threat. But even in Modern Warfare\u2019s biggest moment \u2013 a showdown with a generically named enemy lieutenant called The Butcher \u2013 Infinity Ward wanders near the moral line but never actually steps up to or over it. That\u2019s disappointing, because I\u2019d really hoped this story would really have something meaningful to say about the soul-affecting nature of war in a time when the United States has been involved in so many conflicts for so long.\n

Still, just because Modern Warfare doesn\u2019t have a lot of bite behind its bark doesn\u2019t mean it\u2019s not a great action ride. It is one of the best linear first-person shooter campaigns I\u2019ve played in a good while, thanks to an exciting pace across its five-ish-hour story that, notably, is always mixing up the gameplay. Sure, we\u2019ve done the run-of-the-mill street battles a million times before in this series, but here you\u2019re never doing them for very long without something unexpected happening. Modern Warfare delights most when it surprises, like when you have to engage in tense close-quarters combat to clean out the enemy from small, multi-story houses \u2013 often when it\u2019s pitch-black outside of your night-vision goggles. Or when you fly explosive-rigged drones into enemy helicopters or paint targets for missile strikes.

Meanwhile, the enemy AI is perfectly average. They\u2019re not cannon fodder, but they don\u2019t exactly rival Half-Life\u2019s \u201cflock\u201d behavior either. I managed to break the AI once, when I went up a ladder straight to the third floor of a building, got noticed by a guy in the hallway outside the room I was in, and he yelled just before I gunned him down with my silenced shotgun. His yell summoned literally everyone else in the house, one by one, who I gunned down like fish in a barrel as soon as they appeared in the doorway.

Another highlight was a boss fight of sorts in which you play as a child, and...well, I won\u2019t say any more for spoiler reasons, but you can read about it in my original Modern Warfare preview if you like. It\u2019s even got dialogue choices in key scenes, and those added a few welcome moments of feeling like I had a real impact on the story, even if you ultimately don\u2019t.

This Call of Duty even throws a smart curveball at you about halfway through by taking the gun out of your hands completely and switching to stealth as you guide a civilian through a terrorist-overrun embassy. In this sequence, you use the surveillance cameras to survey each room and tell her where and when to move over the phone. It\u2019s something we\u2019ve never seen in the series before, and it\u2019s a clever flip of the script that helps make Modern Warfare more tense and interesting by taking the action down a notch or two so that it can then ratchet it up again for greater effect.\n

But perhaps my favorite mission is also its biggest: an \u201cAll Ghillied Up\u201d homage that has you and Captain Price skulking through a small town, silencers ready, taking out bad guys with single shots to the head. Thwip! The freedom to tackle the buildings in any order you choose makes it feel full of possibilities: you can take any entrance in each one, and optionally search the outside to find the electrical main to kill the lights and enhance your stealthy hunting capabilities. I savored every moment of that mission; I took out every last bad guy on the grounds and in the buildings, and I cut the power to every building. The original Modern Warfare was the first Call of Duty to learn that the quiet moments only helped enhance the loud ones and vice versa, and this reboot applies the lesson well.

2019\u2019s Modern Warfare is also stunningly gorgeous. The lighting \u2013 particularly in the outdoor forest areas at nighttime \u2013 looks dazzling, and it\u2019s especially impressive on the characters themselves. These faces and their animations are among the most lifelike I\u2019ve ever seen in a game. I know that sounds like hyperbole, but it\u2019s not. These are some seriously impressive character models \u2013 and not just in cutscenes. Audio shines as well, particularly with thundering weapon sounds punctuated by the bouncing of expended bullet casings on the ground. Though I will note that, while I appreciated the multitude of sound option packages in the Audio Settings menu, I wasn\u2019t completely happy with any of them using my Dolby-enabled Astro A40 headset. Thankfully, though, you can customize individual audio settings and aren\u2019t just stuck with the presets. The point is: play it in 4K with a good sound setup if you can.

Whether mentioned in passing or during the full reveal of the multiplayer gameplay, the crowd went wild at every opportunity for Modern Warfare. Infinite Warfare is still being met with caution on the internet (although there was nothing but love from gamers for the playable maps during XP this year), and the new Zombies mode gets the laughs, but it's Modern Warfare Remastered that's welcomed home like a vet after a tour of duty.

All the pressure is on Raven Software to deliver the classic with the production values and wrapping we expect from the best remastered packages, and it seems the dev team is pushing a lot more than the expected visual upgrades. We sat down with Raven Software's David Pellas to talk about fan expectations, updating the game ten years later, and the pressure it's applying to itself to deliver the ultimate Call of Duty care package.

First and foremost our primary philosophy was we cannot f**k with the game design. Maintaining the gameplay integrity was key. In a practical sense that means things like timing. If it took you X seconds to mantle it will still take you X seconds to mantle. If it takes the sniper X seconds to aim down sights, it still takes you that amount of time.

But we also wanted to modernise the game, so with something like the mantle you used to go up to an object, press the button, climb over it and keep moving forward. Now we've created a system that allows you to flow into the mantle and across but the timing is exactly the same. There's no gameplay change there but it feels more natural, more modern, because that's what games do now. For weapon ADS many of the scopes would just move up and then snap to pop up - and that timing was absolutely critical to maintain - but the visual looked wonky, it didn't feel modern. So we created a new system to make that more fluid. Maintaining the gameplay is key and it's something we're not bending on.

Visuals are obviously the big upgrade that people are going to see. It wasn't just about making it look pretty and up-resing a few textures. We had great philosophical goals with artistic reinvention. In the original the buildings were very squared-up with sharp corners. What we did was bevel those edges and add character by taking out bricks. It can never effect the sight lines, cover or player reads. We're not changing that. But we wanted the world to feel more realistic. There are pockmarks in the buildings, maybe from bullet holes, or from kids throwing rocks.

Philosophically we approached it to maintain the gameplay and ramp up the visuals - not just environmental but with animations that connect you to the world a little but more. In Shock and Awe there's a moment where a guy gets sucked out of the back of a helicopter and that was a cool but we thought we could do a better job of grounding you in the moment by popping up a first-person hand animation, you can see all the godrays coming through the fingers, and you're trying to help him not die. There's almost this emotional tease. We added a lot of individual things there with a tonne of animation improvements. We're not changing the narrative in any way, we're enhancing it because it's a great story. The execution of that story was really strong but we can emphasise it to make it feel like it belongs to today's game space. It's not just an up-res or something.

I hope they embrace it for the legendary experience it is. There's no way we want to change the gameplay experience because this is a remaster, it's not a complete reimagining or retelling of the story. It's important that we took those steps to connect the player to the world in a way that gamers today are used to in current Call of Duties. In terms of the setting if you look at any news channel today there are conflicts like this happening in environments similar to this. A lot of the story that's being told could happen today. What was great about the Modern Warfare series in general was it was believable and relatable. It still is today.

VG247: Also in a gameplay sense it's very different to Call of Duty games now in terms of speed and movement and strategies. You can't double jump over another player's head in multiplayer or bounce around those maps.

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