It also presents, as it always has, an unquestioning endorsement of military intervention.

The occasional implementation of a crafting system, which allows you to make mines and smoke bombs from materials you find in the environment, is most heavily used in a sort of semi-apocalyptic, post-explosion survival mission that might as well be called The Blast of Us. Call of Duty 4 Modern Warfare’s famed All Ghillied Up and Death from Above missions get very accurate tributes, while a mission to infiltrate a cartel owner’s mansion is basically a Hitman level, complete with social stealth, multiple routes and flashy architecture. Indeed, some of the key sequences are borrowed from other places.

It is brash and entertaining without ever quite stumbling on an interesting idea. Photograph: ActivisionĪ lot of the time, however, Modern Warfare II resembles one of those new straight-to-streaming action movies starring any of the Hollywood leading actors named Chris. The gang’s all here … teamwork is the key theme in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II. A section where you infiltrate a convoy of military vehicles as it zooms along a civilian highway might be one of the best driving sequences I’ve ever played in a mainstream shooter and there’s a brilliant gun fight on the deck of a cargo boat in rough seas, where massive shipping containers slide all over the place, squishing unwary combatants. En route, there are a few spectacular set-pieces. It’s slickly produced, fast-moving stuff, ricocheting around the world, from the Middle East to Mexico, while gruff guys yell macho spec-ops phrases at each other. The newly created Task Force 141 is sent to track down an Iranian terrorist who has somehow acquired a set of American nuclear missiles. The campaign story takes place three years after the close of 2019’s Modern Warfare. Those days are gone, but Modern Warfare II shows there is still guilty pleasure to be had in these ridiculous yearly instalments of macho combat gymnastics. Once upon a time, these games sold 30m copies a year, and people queued outside stores at midnight to buy them. I t is almost comforting in this era of “games as a service”, where franchises exist as endless monetisation machines designed to consume every second of our free time, that Call of Duty still gets an annual retail release.

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