This game had a lot to live up to sharing a name with the most iconic game in the series and I think it almost gets there? At least in terms of the campaign. The story is full of plotholes and you can smell the US military boot on their breath as they're telling it to you, but the characters are fun, and the gameplay in the campaign is stellar. It has some of my favorite missions in the entire series, like Alone, a mission where you're alone and injured in a town full of people trying to kill you as you're sneaking around and scrounging for supplies just trying to survive, or Recon By Fire, a mission that starts as an homage to All Ghillied Up from COD4, and goes into being an open ended sandbox where you have to clear out a few buildings taking out people in one of a few different ways, with a surprising amount of freedom.

I have problems with the multiplayer, mostly relating to progression, but just as a game to play it is really great. The guns feel great and you have tons of customization to make them feel exactly how you want them to. The progression sucks though. I hate having to use weapons I don't want to just to unlock the guns I do want to. Just let me level up a little bit and get my MP5 goddammit don't make me use this battle rifle to then unlock this assault rifle to finally unlock the smg. Other than that I really love it, it's the best one since the last Modern Warfare.

I haven't touched Spec Ops yet so I won't comment on that, but I HAVE played a bunch of Warzone and a bit of DMZ and both are a whole lot of fun. Warzone is a very fun battle royale, mostly because it's built on this game's already incredible gunplay. Nothing gets my heart pounding like being in the last few players, other battle royales don't give me that feeling anymore but I just have a lot of fun with Warzone so I get more invested in the matches.

DMZ from what I've heard is basically just Escape From Tarkov. Now I haven't played Tarkov, but I'm starting to think I might need to. This mode is a lot of fun. I haven't played much of it mostly because it requires a team, but if I had one I would be playing much more of it.

Overall, I think this game is great. It's one of the best CODs in years, but also has some incredibly stupid shit in it. All of my complaints with the campaign can be easily summed up with this. They put No Russian in the after credits scene and just made it 9/11-2. What the fuck were they thinking?

Reviewed on Dec 28, 2022


Comments