It’s dark. You’ve slowly picking your way through enemy territory, laying down and crawling to cower from helicopter spotlights, remaining cautious and vigilant. It’s a slow, laborious process. Your own side’s helicopter support appears, and you call in a strike on the enemy post ahead of you. It explodes in a dizzy burst of destructive force. “That’s bloody outrageous, mate” says one of your fellow soldiers in awestruck approval.
You’re soon transported into that helicopter, with a view in foggy heat-sensitive black and white and a gunsight aimed at the shapes below. Don’t hit the church, you’re told, and it’s just about possible to come to the conclusion that the biggest building in sight is the church. Voices intone instructions, from readjusting the picture to shooting at some of the people below. They sound equally bored in either case. There is a protracted debate about which road “the curved road” refers to, and you are given permission to destroy a village. “Good kill”, you are told as you silently fire and indistinct shapes move across the screen in response. “I see lots of little pieces down there”. This, too, sounds bored.
This mission in Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (named Death From Above) is such a sickeningly uneasy experience that it’s hard to imagine it not being deliberately so. Part of that comes from having seen similar such footage on the news, the way it lives up to the title promise of modern warfare. But the antiseptic nature of the killing would be disturbing regardless. Modern Warfare, though, is not an anti-war war game to anything like the same extent as Cannon Fodder or even Conflict: Vietnam. Even without the series’s positioning and its owners’ political stances since, that would be obvious from the rest of it, from the multiplayer warfare as sport to the majority of the single-player campaign.
Modern Warfare uses many of the same slick FPS gameplay mechanisms as Halo 3, with the addition of a level of auto-aim which lets you kill even more rapidly. And it goes for the same camaraderie through constant chatter from those around you, except in this case they’re not spending the game telling you how awesome you are but giving you orders. You mostly play as a new recruit to the SAS (yep, those guys), and get put through your paces in a bewildering rush of painted arrows, yelled “go, go go!”s and screen-shuddering flash grenades. I got immediately identified as barely competent and shuffled to the lowest difficulty setting. I then spent a couple of missions still failing to keep up and having that eerie experience of the squad and game carrying on without me, all rails laid bare: the flipside of the seamlessly involving experience if done correctly, I guess.
As I progressed through missions, and lots and lots of killings of nameless enemies in various named bits of Eastern Europe and unnamed bits of ‘The Middle East’, I got a bit more in sync with the game. Never quite enough that I didn’t wish, even leaving aside ethical issues, that I was still playing Halo 3 instead. Enough, though, to get a bit more of an appreciation of why Modern Warfare was the game to catapult the series into one of the biggest around.
Its globe-trotting present-day story of rebels and nukes and informers and assassinations and scary global threats from the other is very reminiscent of Ubisoft’s range of Tom Clancy branded product. As are the mission-opening bits where you get presented with loving wireframe diagrams of the weaponry and vehicles you will be using, a bit of the arms dealer’s brochure that is part of the series’s raison d’être. Once you get to the gameplay, though, there is enough of the simplicity retained from World War II shooters to help support a brutal directness that feels entirely different. The priority is not ever to give the player any idea of being clever in the same way as the ingratiating Rainbow Six, but to have them fighting for survival from moment to moment. The action is prioritised, and anything around that kept to a minimum. At the right time, that yell of “go, go, go” hits with a completely different urgency.
The other thing is in just how you zip around the world, not to build up any one heroic story but with an omniscient narrator’s perspective. You swoop in to see through the eyes of a deposed leader while the opening credits play. You swoop back in time for a well-worked stealth mission with the task of following directional instructions in a preternaturally calm Scottish accent, which gave me Colin McRae Rally flashbacks. You spend several missions playing as a US Marine who you learn little about beyond his name, essentially so that you can eventually watch him die in a surprise nuclear explosion (which you get to watch in many slow motion replays, like a particularly well-executed sports play.)
The ultimate implication, and what explains the queasy Death From Above and everything else, is that Modern Warfare treats spectacle as its number one priority but casts a very wide net for what that spectacle might consist of. If making the player creep through the undergrowth while tanks and soldiers walk past unknowingly, or simulating their slow death in the wake of a nuclear blast will give them a moment of heightened emotion, great. If turning them into the sharp end of the faceless machinery of death will do the same, that can go in too. There are some similarities in the embrace of 2007’s new narrative possibilities to Bioshock, but Modern Warfare buys into them all the more. The result is more of an uneven anthology than a story, but placing moment-to-moment thrills above any sense of narrative, ethical or emotional cohesion turns out to have been a smart bet.
Top of the charts for week ending 10 November 2007:
Top of the charts for week ending 22 December 2007:
Top of the charts for week ending 12 January 2008:
