Posts Tagged ‘ Call of Duty ’

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 – “Can you spot the differences?”

Back when I did my “World at War” review I mentioned how the “Call of Duty” teams, despite taking small strides in terms of capturing the essence of a powerful, dramatic scenario like war, were still clinging to an essentially game-y experience, laden with obnoxious elements, the most displeasing of all being the HUD. Well, someone at funny or die must have read my mind, because they edited a video of what would it be like to “play” – “Call of Duty” style – the Normandy scene from Spielberg’s “Saving Private Ryan”. It’s not only a funny video clip, as it ends up posing the same questions I (and others) have been making. Think about it, sooner than you think, we’ll have quasi-realistic graphics in video games, and despite the emotional, aesthetic potential of these superbly rendered images, games remain ever focused on crude notions of “fun”, rather than tapping the possibilities that come with that potential expressiveness. The “Call of Duty” brand is an excellent example of this. Despite their huge success, their creators are still delivering, detailed graphics aside, the exact same game as they were back in “Allied Assault”. And whilst their games are increasingly visceral and continue to establish powerful ambiances with their over-glorified engines and whatnot, all those elements remain effectively meaningless in terms of the interactive experience. It’s still a game about shooting lifeless dummies as well as you can. It’s still the game about becoming a macho warrior. It’s still a game about feeling empowered and invincible. And it’s still a game about saving the world from the big bad men. Admit it, we’re still playing “Wolfenstein 3D”. There is still no point to it, no emotional sub-text or rhetoric involved in the games’ discourse.

Which is why all the controversy surrounding the “Modern Warfare 2’s” infamous “No Russian” level just seems absolutely ridiculous to me. It’s crude, silly and completely out of context in the game.  I guarantee you that any emotion you might feel during that sequence will vanish after five seconds of you understanding what’s going on. Under the guise of forcing you to face the horrors of terrorists, the game developers  simply deliver the exact same game-y experience, but for one difference, your opponents have no weapons, and bleed more than your typical grunt. They shout screams of horror, but we are talking of the same mass of generic, cardboard beings which you happily kill during normal levels.  When was the last time you felt disgusted from killing a cardboard image? Were those you kill real characters, with a story, a livelihood, an expressive behavior… creatures that had some sort of emotional involvement with us players, and maybe the scene would go beyond mere shock value. Video games have done it before, even in the first person shooter genre. To add to the detriment of the scene, those strange ethereal stars and cross-hairs are still flying above them, and it’s still a level in which you have to kill to “win”. The whole matter is as controversial as funny or die’s video. It doesn’t matter at all how realistic the characters look, because they’re still over-glorified targets in a shooting range, as Eurogamer so elegantly put. There can be no drama in killing virtual plastic dolls, let alone when you’re supposed to be some super warrior out to save the world, who just happens to have shot those same models thousands of times before, only with different clothing and less screaming. Killing them is as controversial as watching “Rambo” hack away the innards of some poor schmuck that just happens not to have an AK-47 lying around. It isn’t dramatic. The schmuck is just a schmuck – an impersonal abstraction without any lifelike character, just like any other of the thousands of terrorists in line for a bullet in the brain.

This isn’t the same as saying that “Modern Warfare 2” is just another piece of trash the industry spewed at us. Infinity Ward may take itself too seriously for their own good, they may not know how to write or tell a story that goes beyond the most naive patriotic bull or right-wing of conspiracies and they may not grasp the most basic aspects on how to create a character with some mildly nuanced form of emotion, but… but they do know how to make things blow up. Even Naughty Dog pales in comparison. Which is why “Modern Warfare 2”, aside from the lackluster initial levels, is a trip worth taking, if only for the pure excitement it can deliver. Its authors have gone to great lengths to replicate some of the most enjoyable experiences from many other pop references, from “Black Hawk Down” and “James Bond” to “Resident Evil 5” and “Metal Gear Solid“. Sure, it’s dumb, rude and stupid, but it’s also a superbly well paced, stylish and epic spectacle. Alas, when the game does end, nothing will remain except for the notion that you just experienced the most guilty of pleasures, the kind that leaves aught behind except for a kindling sparkle of warm adrenaline. We’ve seen this before, it was great then, it is great now, but honestly, this is not what we need right now. We need more, and this just ain’t it.

score: 2/5

2009
11/29
POSTED BY
CATEGORY
Review
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Resident Evil 5 – “Bigger, Better, more Bad-ass!”

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Lately, it seems as though Japanese developers have bowed down before the commercial and artistic logic of USA-based mainstream video-games. The loss of their cultural identity, as people and as developers, has severely impoverished the video-game medium; “Resident Evil 5” is the latest sign of that impoverishment. Because “Resident Evil 4” was already a very action-oriented game, it seems that the developers at Capcom used the new sequel as a way to further step beyond the boundaries of the survival horror genre into the action foray. It’s a logical move from the big producer, as it allows “Resident Evil 5” to reach a much wider audience, as the “Gears of War” and “Killzone 2” fans will surely be interested in playing the game, whether or not they were fans of the series before its last incarnation. The result of this commercial rationale is a game that is heavily sustained by its ancestors design, but that incorporates much of the tropes present in modern shooters, curiously enough, going as far as taking inspiration from games which “Resident Evil 4” itself inspired (“Gears of War” comes to mind). Such is “Resident Evil 5” greatest fault, the fact that it destroys its individual identity as a survival horror, action-adventure game, by trading its core ideas with the popularized elements of modern shooters.

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It is true however, that there was very little left in “Resident Evil 4” that could be associated with its predecessors. Adventure motifs were all but absent, save for the occasional “fetch” puzzle, and horror codes such as frights or psychological mind-games were completely missing. What wasn’t lacking however, was a creepy atmosphere and a tension oriented game-play that effectively forced players to feel the stress of encountering the dangers of a massive zombie attack. The biggest difference in “5” is that it lacks the quality aesthetic work that made its predecessor’s atmosphere so foreboding, and focuses solely on the empowering of stressful encounters with enemies. Keeping in tradition with an Americanized view on entertainment, the first way of enhancing the sense of stress and dread that the new “Resident Evil” feeds on is by upping the scale. On one hand, by using bigger monsters and boss-fights, by delivering larger set-pieces and backgrounds for game-play, and by increasing the sheer numbers of enemies that the player has to get rid of to finish the game. A fair estimate would be that there are more zombies in “Resi 5” than in the rest of the series all together. The other change in scale comes from one of the game’s most important design decisions: the co-op mode.

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Though “Resident Evil” always had more than one main protagonist to its stories, only the fifth iteration allows players to play side by side with a friend. It’s immediately obvious when you pick up the controller and start playing, that the game was designed and tested to fit into co-op play. Level design, inventory management, boss battles and even the rare puzzles all need a form of cooperative effort to overcome difficulties. This cooperative dynamic allows co-op play to be engaging, by making communication a valid asset for the development of mutual strategies, thus increasing the liberty players have to tackle each scenario and each encounter. The downside is that the game is so focused on co-op, that the single player mode becomes irrelevant and almost unplayable. There’s a good AI controlled companion there to assist you, but it’s severely limited in the ways in which it can communicate and interact with the player, making complex strategies nigh impossible. And since the game makes its greatest asset that dual player logic, this transforms the single player mode into an empty chore, filled with constant struggles to make the virtual companion take the proper actions in order to pass each of the game’s challenges.

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Truth be said, co-op makes for an exciting way of playing, and makes the game shine as a pure action game, like few have been able to in the recent past. However, that isn’t, nor ever was, the core of the “Resident Evil” experience. This misunderstanding of the series’ legacy, and its core design, becomes fully apparent in the nature of the final levels of the game, in which it takes a form that seems straight out of “Tomb Raider” – a large, eerie tomb from an ancient civilization filled with small puzzles – or “Gears of War” – a military base populated with fully armed zombies, wrapped around a cover-oriented level design scheme. And these are only the worst examples of the loss of identity on part of this “Resident Evil”,  because even the when the game behaves similarly to “4” it misses out on important notions of aesthetic that were integrate part of the series – by using serious voice acting for a cheesy storyline, or daylight flooded African shanty towns as a scenario for a horror tale.

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Every design choice in “Resident Evil 5” screams of an attempt at capturing American FPS audiences, from the embodiment of action-oriented staples such as co-op play, a cover-based battle system and epic-sized set-pieces, to the more buffed-up character designs and supposedly more serious narrative. Trampled beneath these realizations is the past of “Resident Evil”, completely forgotten by the game’s designers. Instead of trying to re-frame the action oriented nature of “4” in a an action-adventure context, closer to the series’ classic ideas, “Resident Evil 5” designers chose to upgrade “Resident Evil 4” by taking inspiration from mainstream shooters. Had it been a thoughtful reinterpretation of Capcom’s most beloved series, then it might have been a unique game to explore, but as it stands, it’s as “unique” as the latest entry of “Killzone”, “Call of Duty” or “Gears of War”. “Resident Evil 5” may be a very tense, well paced shooter, or if you prefer, a “bigger, better, more bad-ass” version of its predecessor, but make no mistake, there’s already too much of that around nowadays.

score: 2/5

2009
03/19
POSTED BY
CATEGORY
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Call of Duty World at War – “Call of Duty four World War II”

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If there’s anything that sticks out in the “Call of Duty” series, is its focus on delivering a thrilling, cinematic in-your-face depiction of war. It’s not by chance that the first major inspiration for the series was Steven Spielberg’s opus of the Normandy landing in “Saving Private Ryan”: the shaking of the camera, blurring the gritty colors of war-machines and destroyed landscapes, with red sprouts of blood emerging in the bloody onslaught of human life, bullet by bullet, explosion by explosion… limb by limb, man by man. Capturing that chaotic experience of horror and sacrifice is the kind of thing you’d expect games would be known and respected for. But it isn’t, and we all know that. In that sense, “Call of Duty” was definitely a small step forward. Firstly, with its audiovisual fidelity, which successfully established the same atmosphere that Spielberg’s film became known for. Secondly, because the game adapted the classic FPS formula to the war context. Most FPS games forced you to go for point A to point B, while obliging you to, single-handily, kill every possible enemy in sight. “Call of Duty” (like its predecessor “Medal of Honor: Allied Assault”) opted to encompass the player in an army, making him choose ways in which to avoid direct confrontation with enemies, through flanking and the use of indirect fire. Also, player’s comrades take some of the burden into their hands, killing a considerable amount of enemies. Stripped to its barest, “Call of Duty” forces the player to accomplish a certain objective (break a defense line, clear a location of enemies, plant a bomb, protect a convoy), but framing in it in a convincing way that doesn’t make it (too) ridiculous. You still play a hero like in most shooters, but it isn’t a lonely or utterly invincible hero. “Call of Duty 4” tuned the series’ formula to near perfection, by harmoniously weaving Level, Art and Sound Design to produce a rising tension in each set piece, and in the overarching experience. It was still the same game, but the audacity and scale of its confrontations, coupled with great cutscene directing, made its campaign a glorious ode to war… in a videogame-y kind of way. “World at War” is the same. No more, no less. It stumbles in the same faults as its predecessor, and can be lacking in some of the more creative assets which made it a success, but “World at War” really is “Call of Duty 4″… in a World War II scenario.

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Using the same narrative vehicles as its predecessors, “World at War” presents each set piece by utilizing snazzy power-point-ish presentations, as your ranking officer briefs you in on the details concerning the upcoming battle. You get to experience two campaigns: one in which you fight on the pacific front to crush the Japanese armada, following the steps of a traditional American style hero, the compassionate, yet tough Seargant Roebuck, played by Kiefer ‘Bauer’ Sutherland in his already cliched monotonic voice; the other storyline, more interesting and provocative, places you as the right-wing man of Seargant Reznov, a vindictive, cruel hearted Soviet, who seeks revenge against the Germans for the destruction of Stalingrad. It’s immediately clear that the first campaign is more of the same epic set pieces in which great American heroes go about freeing the world from the dreaded enemy, in this case, the Japanese, herein portrayed as vicious monsters bent on winning a war at all costs, whether it involves sneaking techniques, kamikaze attacks or plain old backstabbing. You’d think that in a war, killing would be a despicable act whichever the surrounding conditions, but apparently the Japanese kill in an “evil” way. The Soviet campaign is more original, as it does try to portray a different side of the war. The Soviets are depicted as more realistic characters, in the sense that their personalities reflect the unquestionable fact that they are fighting a bloody war. They are ruthless and moved by selfish goals, unbent by hypocritical notions of moral or military conduct, which ends up making their campaign more truthful and moving… and of course, Gary Oldman’s amazing voice-work can really make you wanna go kill some Nazi scourge. However, it needs to be pointed out that in both plot-lines, the subjectivity of American perspective is prevalent, so expect a great deal of prejudice, xenophobia, social, and historical inaccuracies. Like Churchill said, History is written by the victors.

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As you’re thrust into the battlefield proper, you get to presence everything in first person, your presence diluted with that of the mute and otherwise irrelevant main character. The action unfolds on screen just as it did in “Call of Duty 4”, in which the barrier between cutscene and gameplay was blurred to a degree which made you wonder if you could change the course of certain events. Some you can and some you don’t, which doesn’t really matter since it never really changes how the story ultimately unfolds. It’s a bit less linear for that, and it adds to the notion of immersion and false choice that helps create a sense of a credible world. Because the transition between story and action is seamless, the breathtaking action pieces are made all the more emotional for it, especially in the Soviet Campaign. From Stalingrad to Berlin, you’ll be in constant awe with the scale of each war set, fleshed out by a beautifully crafted mise en scène, courtesy of the Infinity Engine, which once again provides the same ambient lighting and particle effects that made “Call of Duty 4” so visually captivating. The final showdown in Berlin gives a whole new meaning to the concept of destroyed beauty, as you endure the ravishing of the opulent Reichstag, covered in smoke, dust and flames, a stark palette of death and war covering the landscape. Trust me when I say that images don’t do it justice [for some strange reason, I could only find one image that accurately represented the graphics of the game (the one above, click on it to see it in high-res), as all of the images available on the net are blurred out or badly compressed; so sorry about that]. But the multitude of moody color palettes can only serve as background for the cacophony of raining bullets, explosions and frenetic shouts of pain and camaraderie. Once again, the soundtrack steals the show, thanks to its pitch perfect fidelity, and the smart use of musical crescendos to enhance the epic grandeur of war. The score (by Sean Murray) is still a competently mixed miscellany of electronic, industrial, metal and classical sonorities that successfully punctuate the emotional impact of the game. And yet again, the Soviet portions of the soundtrack are the best: you simply cannot beat the visceral impact of a beautifully orchestrated chorus.

Despite the arresting power of the “Call of Duty” games, they still have a long road ahead in terms of creating meaningful and realistic war experiences. Their more important fault still lies in their dramatic core. Though the Soviet Campaign does take it a step forward, by trying to introduce nuanced characters, the series is still lacking when it comes to true drama, because it has no real characters, subtext or emotion. And “Call of Duty” does need drama to make the experience feel genuine, because the essence of war is death and loss, and the emotional responses associated with those events are missing. Only when the player hesitates before mindlessly shooting an enemy, or resents his inability to save a comrade, will the War FPS genre achieve plenitude. Unfortunately, the series never went in that direction, and continues to lethargically tread in its own FPS convention laden path. But, even forgetting any aspirations the series’ authors dismiss, the fact is that this episode doesn’t improve the series one bit, allowing easy to fix flaws to maintain one more year. The most glaring of which is the stubborn use of a noisy, aesthetically displeasing HUD… a baffling notion for a 2008 top tier game that puts so much weight on immersion. And though it can be useful in terms of helping the player move along, there are a number of available alternatives that don’t break up immersion (see “Peter Jackson’s King Kong” game). Just imagine “Saving Private Ryan” with golden stars, numbers and icons flying about the screen like in a football match transmission; if that doesn’t remind you that “Call of Duty” is a game, as opposed to a 1st person war-experience, then nothing does. And sure, there are still AI problems, level design model eccentricities that need fixing, and the overall sense that this is just one more World War II FPS. But, truth be told, forgetting the game’s lack of originality can be simple while playing the game. It’s just entertaining, and sadly, in this medium that’s really all it needs to be. Personally, I’m still wishing they can someday come up with a dramatic first-person experience that is akin to “Saving Private Ryan”… in more than just the aesthetic qualities of the film. But I know, it’s a hopeless dream.

Overall: 2/5

2008
11/29
POSTED BY
CATEGORY
Review
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