Call of Duty: Modern Warfare Preview: This Reboot Wants to Make You Uncomfortable - IGN

Realism, gray morality return to Call of Duty.

By Ryan McCaffrey

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare is probably going to upset people, perhaps by design. The reboot, which brings familiar characters like Captain Price into modern-day, “ripped from the headlines” missions but is otherwise not connected to the previous entries in the brand’s best-known subfranchise, brings with it all of the expected technical upgrades: ray tracing, multi-layer shading, spectral rendering, 4K resolution, HDR, etc. But it’s the renewed focus on realism and the single-player campaign, which was so unimportant to Call of Duty in last year’s Black Ops 4 that it literally didn’t have one, that’s going to help Modern Warfare leave its mark.

As in previous Modern Warfares, the campaign is split between multiple perspectives. Here, it’s the Tier 1 Operators – the highly trained military experts with cutting-edge tech – and the rebel factions who fight terrorism with guerilla tactics and improvised weapons like Molotov cocktails and IEDs. I saw a slice from each side. Both were incredibly dark; literally in the case of the Tier 1 Operators, and figuratively for the rebels.

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Modern Warfare allows you to nudge doors open quietly and peek through the small opening.

The former started with a first-person scene in London’s Picadilly Square, where a terrorist sets off a bomb and kills many innocent civilians. The subsequent mission as the Tier 1 ops, whose intel has led them to the terrorist leader’s townhouse, starts at the front door of a narrow, four-story building that you’ll have to work your way up to the top of from the ground floor. You creep from room to room. And in its aim to get back to realism, Modern Warfare allows you to nudge doors open quietly and peek through the small opening, in addition to the usual busting in loudly. A bad guy yells, you slam the door and move aside, and bullets rip through the door. Having seen the layout of the small bathroom while peeking in, you simply spray bullets from your assault rifle through the adjacent wall to where he has to be on the other side. All goes quiet, you open the door, and he’s indeed dead as a doornail.

You creep up the steps, and the bad guys scream anxiously to each other, knowing something is amiss. You hear panicked voices. Bursting into another dark room, you shotgun one bad guy, turn and see a frantic woman. She screams “No, no no!” but inches back towards a table with an object on it. You shoot her dead just has her hand was nearly on the object she was reaching for, which, upon closer inspection, was a detonator. On another floor, you do more night vision-powered close-quarters combat, punctuated by an encounter with a woman holding a baby. You don’t pull the trigger – and it's unclear if the game would let you do so if you tried – but it’s a disturbing moment nevertheless.

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ABOVE: IGN's review of the original Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare.

It’s stressful, dramatic, and tense – like Call of Duty’s version of a boss fight.

“Disturbing” is a good starting point for the rebel mission I saw next. It is rebel leader Farrah’s origin story, of sorts, flashing back to when she was a young girl of maybe 10 or so and Russians were violently taking control of their Eastern European town, block by block. A particularly massive, Ivan Drago-like soldier busts into your house, gasmask covering his face. You, as young Farrah, watch as your father tries to fight the brute off, only to watch him thrown aside and shot. As he bleeds out while slumped against a wall, you and your younger brother must try and escape the grasp of the enemy soldier. You crawl through an open ventilation duct between rooms in the small, single-story house, creep into the hallway, pick up a screwdriver off the floor, and then sneak up behind the hunter. You jab the tool into his calf. He writhes in pain, throws you aside, and the chase is on again. You repeat this harrowing two more times, and on the third encounter, your little brother hops on the intruder’s back, hangs from his neck, and gives you a chance to get the gun off of the soldier’s back and put a few rounds in his chest, narrowly missing shooting your own brother and ending the fight. It’s stressful, dramatic, and tense – like Call of Duty’s version of a boss fight. And I hope we see more moments like this in the full campaign.

And that’s not even the end of the mission. From there, you take the dead lug’s gasmask and escape with your brother into the streets, which are filled with teargas and crawling with invading, heavily armed bad guys. Along the way, a dying friendly tries to pry the gasmask off of your younger sibling, sending him into a coughing fit in a time when silence and secrecy is the key to survival. You reach a flower field at the outskirts of town, where the air is clear enough to remove your gasmasks, but your brother’s lungs are still burning, causing him to cough uncontrollably. Russians are loading innocent civilians into the backs up pickup trucks and then killing them. We need the truck to escape, but are unarmed and, as a reminder, just children. Your brother tells you to use his cell phone to distract them, so you flank around, call his phone, which you’ve taken and left out, and wait for them to follow the ringtone’s sound. Conveniently, your target left a six-shot revolver behind while investigating the noise. You pick it up, take aim at another man four times your size, and pull the trigger.

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The screen faded to black and the demo ended, but I didn’t stop thinking about Modern Warfare for the rest of the day. To be fair, this isn’t the first time a big-name developer, comprised of both veterans from the old days as well as newer talent, has remade its own most famous game (see 2016’s DOOM by id Software). But if Modern Warfare turns out just as well, then we’re all in for a memorable experience. It certainly didn’t hurt that art director Joel Emslie, one of a number of old-school Infinity Ward veterans who have returned to the studio for this project, showed off a ghillie-clad character model and said “I'm really big on ghillie suits” before I left, leaving me to daydream about a new, intense take on Call of Duty 4’s classic “All Ghillied Up” mission...

Ryan McCaffrey is IGN’s Executive Editor of Previews. Follow him on Twitter at @DMC_Ryan, catch him on Unlocked, and drop-ship him Taylor Ham sandwiches from New Jersey whenever possible.

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