Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (2019)
It's a technical masterpiece, but a very short lived game.
Thanks to some CEO who forces the game to carry a certain name, millions of players got confused between the old MW and the new MW. I downloaded it thinking I was downloading the remaster from the original MW. Wrong. I finished it in the medium difficulty.
This game is a technical achievement. It's a big title that is worth billions. To make a game this complex one requires millions to make the textures, audio, animations, everything. Everything in this game is hiper realistic and runs smooth. Only big companies can make this game, because over the years they've must developed an assembly line with an army (pun) of artists, designers, programmers, etc to manufacture this product. It also requires tons and tons of cash to advertise this game and most of the time it's worth it, because the players buy it. This is such an influential title that I suspect that there is some politics behind the scenes, because it deals with real world conflicts and it can have a big influence on how people see the world. Having said all that, I don't think I am part of the target audience of it. I prefer fantasy style FPS.
COD is a cinematic experience, hollywoodesque, in the form of a FPS. Now I understand why this game generated so many memes. It's straight to the point. No text to read. No time to think through. Every mission places you straight into the action, you know what to do and you know where to go. There are some icons and "follow the leader", which is an NPC that guides you and tells you what to do. Everything is given for you to follow. IS this why people call the players of COD no brainers? This must be the quickest FPS to complete that I've played. This is perfect to make live streams.
This game is not about exploration or uncovering a deep plot. It's all centered around missions with checkpoints. Each mission is designed around multiple scenes and at the end of each scene there is checkpoint. This ensures that the player can die a lot and never have to rollback too much to try again. Unlike other games where the checkpoints are sparse and if you die you have to start from a far away point back in time.
In hindsight, Rainbow Six Vegas has a much more unforgiving gameplay. The aim is super imprecise and if you die the checkpoint is very far away back in the mission. On the other hand, COD is indulgent. I missed a lot of explosives, missed many sniping shots and made a lot of mistakes. Yet, COD helps you all the time. There is one point that I'd like to make that is about accessibility. Most of the instructions are given in radio messages. If you are not paying much attention and is focused on something else, if you have some degree of deafness or some problem with the audio in your hardware, you'll miss instructions and become lost. It has happened to me in some specific occasions. I was forced to press TAB to check the waypoint marker.
In comparison, I dropped Remember Me because it halted the game to force you to read guides on screen. COD MW does a very good job in making the tutorials almost unnoticeable. There is a guiding hand everywhere, but hidden enough to not become obvious. For ex: they didn't use strong colors or the classic yellow highlight to guide the player.
I can't say anything about the multiplayer because I'm not going to play it.
Goofs
In the mission with kid Farah and kid Hadir. Whoever wrote the story forgot that a child is a child and doesn't have the intelligence and the way of speaking of an adult.
Do bullets make that exaggerated parabola as they do in the desert mission? It's a game but the parabola is so exaggerated that it seemed a football's free kick.
To blend in the civilians by carrying a brick. The char does wear a mask and appropriate clothes in that mission. But really? The enemies are fooled by a brick?
