The Most Realistic Mission in Call of Duty EVER!

The story doesn’t fare much better. There’s an Iranian military officer, the Mexican Cartel, and the Russians are even involved somehow. It’s a checklist of popular villains from US-centric war stories, but the story it tells is practically incoherent. You just follow Major Hassan to whatever locations the developers thought would look cool, and fight against whatever baddies the developers thought would be cool to kill, blow up, or otherwise mutilate. Despite failing a level if you kill a civilian, I lost count of the number of war crimes I committed. If the enemy has a gun, it’s a-okay. I was going to go out on a limb and suggest that destroying civilian petrol stations and houses would be unheralded territory for the real army, but when the schools and hospitals are regularly hit in the pursuit of justice, this might actually be a brief moment of realism among the gun glorification.

Modern Warfare II looks amazing, I want to reiterate that it might be the most realistic looking game I’ve ever played, especially when it comes to faces and cutscenes. But the realism ends with the aesthetics, and if the Call of Duty series really wants to innovate going forward, it needs to focus less on the graphics and more on the game. There’s only so many levels I can play where I enter perfectly recreated buildings and pour bullets into AI enemies.