Call of Duty Modern Warfare - Final Thoughts
Last week Friday saw the release of the rebooted Modern Warfare series coming back to the front line for the Call of Duty franchise. There were two separate occasions for Beta tryouts before launch of the game, but lets have a look into the final product in more detail.
Our beloved single player campaign has returned, after seeing last years Call of Duty Black Ops 4 not having one, but rather containing a Battle Royale mode. Infinity Ward decided to rather introduce the single player campaign back into the mix and this made me really excited being a fan of the original Modern Warfare series.
One of the highlighted characters to return would have to be Captain Price, who we know and love from the original series. He is paired up with some new characters and there is a great introduction of Gaz, from the original series, under the name of Sergeant Kyle Garrick. The story is really action packed and gave me the same feel of excitement and satisfaction that the original Modern Warfare series gave me.
The campaign itself does follow the traditional Call of Duty formula being that the actual game play length is not very long. I was able to beat the game within a few hours and that was without rushing through the missions too much either. There was not really many new elements added in terms of game play mechanics, but there are a few night missions where you get to experience the night vision mode. This I feel was extremely well done and there was more of a special ops tactical approach within these missions that introduced a new dynamic to the single player for me. How you would approach a stair case, move with your team, covering corners, opening a door slowly, entering and BOOM, clock an enemy!!! It was really something new to experience. but there was plenty of the fast paced action game play that we know and love from Call of Duty, spread throughout. The single player was well balanced from story line, to tactical and all the way to blow everything up.
Moving on to Call of Duty's main bread and butter platform, the notorious Multiplayer segment of the game! I did review the Multiplayer Open Beta for the PC not to long ago, but we do have further elements to consider in the full release now.
There are the usual Call of Duty fundamentals that I feel they will never stray from and will always be part of the franchise in terms of their Multiplayer experience, but there are some features worth pointing out during my experience of play. I have found the cross play to work extremely well, considering locally on PC how few players there are compared to console, but now having the opportunity of cross play, finding games has become more frequent. Furthermore, there are more game modes being played rather than the stagnant TDM game mode, which brings about a new experience for me personally.
There are not a lot of maps on launch, but we have been promised by Infinity Ward, that there would no map packs part of a season pass, but rather new maps will be launched during the year life cycle of the game. Uhm, hello, Infinity Ward, we need more maps, like now!! I really have enjoyed how they brought back killstreaks rather than scoresreaks, sorry domination players, now you have to run around and kill people!
Groundwar is a lot of fun to hop into and explore a bigger map and feel the chaos of the battlefield or maybe you would like to jam some gunfight with a friend and be competitive over there. There is also 20v20 Domaination and Headquaters games. I feel they did try to expand on this and introduce more player based game modes. This for me was the core elements of Multiplayer that really stood out minus the usual aspects like class customization, weapons, perks, etc!
Specs Ops mode is back and I really enjoyed how this mode was introduced at the end of the campaign, saying "Hey, there is some more stuff for you try and experience". I really got excited for this sneaky introduction. Spec Ops is broken down into 4 separate missions that you can take on with 3 other players online with various challenges presented. It is hard so make sure you keep your communication open. You have various classes that you can choose from that will aid you during missions and you can level up your specific class. Your load outs carry over from Multiplayer so you can customize them for Spec Ops how you like. You also have the classic spec ops mode where you hold an area and defend yourself against wave after wave of enemies. Each round presents new random drops that will assist you in the next wave. I really had a lot of fun with this and felt it was a refreshing experience compared to how Zombies is always included in the Call of Duty package so,this makes for a nice change.
The PC performance of the game is good and runs really well overall. There were bugs here and there in menus, during cut scenes in the campaign, but they are already releasing patchs to attend to these issues. I was playing the game on Ultra settings in 1440p and it ran very smooth, very little FPS drops, but the biggest let down in the game was the Ray Tracing. When I enabled Ray Tracing, it was not even noticeable at all and after playing titles like Metro Exodus, Quake 2, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Battlefield V, Control to mention a few, Call of Duty had no effect what so ever. It was a huge let down considering the hype build up to the launch of the game. Overall the graphics were not that good, the game had some graphical moments for example during the night missions when you used the night vision googles, but overall nothing that blew me away.
Call of Duty as a franchise has been going for a long time now, well over a decade, with great titles forming part of the series. This Modern Warfare reboot hit home with me due to experiencing the original series like I did and I am sure many fans will agree. The game overall was decent, but nothing that I would be overly impressed by compared to some of the other amazing titles that have already been released earlier this year. Call of Duty Modern Warfare is available now on PC via Battlenet, PS4 and Xbox One.