Call of Duty: Modern Warfare Remastered Review- Returning to active Duty

Nine years since Modern Warfare got the call to participate in active duty and to this day its tremors are still being felt. Since then there have been swathes of imitators attempting to replicate and duplicate its success, carrying similar bombasts and scraping for a modicum of Modern Warfare’s renowned multiplayer success. This remastered version gives this ground-breaking FPS a good spit shine, a veneer of polish so pristine that it dares make most remasters look like their original releases. Modern Warfare Remastered has been beautifully curated and stands up as one of the elite remasterings of the generation, an honour befitting its seismic impact on the videogame industry, and every Call of Duty to this day still bows down to its majesty all these years later.

Packaged alongside Infinite Warfare for those who bought the pricier editions of the game, Modern Warfare Remastered might be looked at as an afterthought. You might assume Infinite Ward is casually coughing up a prettier version of a 9 year old game, haphazardly bolting it out to consumers in a bid to garner more capital, but this is truly a remaster, carefully designed to both allow for reminiscence of old times, and reigning in newer audiences to experience the shooter that rewrote the rulebook and got the mainstream masses chirping non-stop in lieu of its presence. By all accounts Modern Warfare getting a remaster should be a huge deal to anybody who spent hours upon hours in its multiplayer suite, and to those who were blown away by the pulse thumping single player campaign, putting gamers on a blood pressure monitor the entire way through. These ballistic thrills can now be relived with a sharp and deftly handled leap forward to current generation consoles, meaning you can get stuck in again, but this is more than a mere nostalgic globe trot rife with explosions, this is the innovator and the architect of the standard military shooter.

So what makes this the remaster of all remasters? The care and attention to detail of course. The remaster not only includes mesmerising definition of graphical textures and improved environments, but the minor details are superb. Take the swishing and sweeping litter as you approach the car surrounded by Al-Asad’s henchman before meeting the man himself before execution; or the gushing plumes of smoke emitting from the smoke grenades as you surreptitiously plant explosive charges in the Ultimatum mission, both moments show the leaps in visual quality utilised, indicative of a worthy remastering. The best moments of the game are spruced up beautifully, making a revisit a much more pleasurable experience, enhancing an excellent shooter beyond the necessary to make it a deeper and more expressive than it was before.

The campaign of Modern Warfare retains all its zest too as you would expect. From the moment you slash up melons to the time you’re All Ghillied Up and proceed to the Mile High Club, you will embrace the slickness and the production values all over again. Never one to be an easy ride, Modern Warfare tests your precision and acumen with various weapons both scoping and no scoping and acquainting yourself with modern war tech. You’ll bare witness to many things under the eyes of Soap McTavish including a thunderous blitzkrieg of military affairs, skulking silently, clothed in foliage as enemy forces trample through a field as you clench nervously for personal space hoping and pleading to yourself that you won’t get caught and forced to restart if you snuff it. The pace of the campaign has been the blueprint for all Call of Duty games, but Modern Warfare is the zenith of its success. One dinger that sticks like an insignificant leech to its leviathan core, are the relentless enemies who toss grenades hither and fither towards your feet, granting you, at times, an impossible length of time for you to scurry away from danger. Veteran difficulty will make the problem even worse and the challenges you face with that difficulty enabled are incredibly high already. Sometimes Modern Warfare can be overkill and sometimes it detracts from all its revered excellence.

The videogame industry owes a great debt of gratitude to Modern Warfare for its innovative and raucous multiplayer offerings. Not only is Modern Warfare’s multiplayer brilliantly frenetic, chaotic and all-out explosive fun, but it has single-handedly popularised a lexicon and infamous playstyles that have its dedicated fanbase raging down headsets and spewing cuss words asunder. Maybe Modern Warfare’s multiplayer has generated a surge of irritable and unpopular set of player archetypes, but at the same time its simplicity and addictiveness are unmatched in the genre. Whether you are battling in a cramped area with lots of shipping containers or surging through middle-eastern sun-baked streets, the multiplayer never fails to inject that surge of adrenaline, and for this reason and many others, Modern Warfare’s multiplayer is one of a kind.

Regardless of how much time has past since its original release, Modern Warfare has aged brilliantly and the remaster proves this tenfold. An already riveting and brilliant shooter, Modern Warfare Remastered revitalises and uplifts the look and vibrancy of the original release, exquisitely polishing it for a new stage on PS4 and XBOX ONE. This is definitely not an aside to Infinite Warfare, but a complete game featured alongside it. The single-player is fantastic and takes you across the globe engaging in a litany of missions that challenge your abilities to utilise advanced equipment and centring you in perilous scenarios. The gameplay is as fast, fluid and gripping as ever, even with the incessant grenade use of the enemy A.I being the game’s only real sticking point. Then there’s the insurmountable multiplayer offerings with its host of punchy game modes, furthering the appeal of the entire production, uniquely spawning a lexicon and many imitators in the nine years since its initial release. The bottom line is it doesn’t matter if you are a veteran of nine years at CoD who knows everything there is to know about how to play Call of Duty like a pro, or you are totally new to it all- Modern Warfare will both accommodate and consume you, looking and playing better than it ever has done, which is precisely what its legacy has granted and what you should look forward to discovering or rediscovering.

+A sharp and pristine remaster worthy of Call of Duty,

+The visual upgrade shows how much care the remaster has received,

+The base game is still incredible nine years after initial release.

-Too many grenade deaths due to unfair enemy A.I tendencies,

-No bonus content,

-Waiting for hypothetical remasters of Modern Warfare 2 and 3.

93%

Virginia Review-Silent Sensation?

Not another walking simulator! You exclaim before hastening to the nearest fire exit and slamming the door shut. Suffices to say the immediate reactions to another game where you walk about and interact with things will make some gamers spew criticism towards it without a second thought, after all the walking simulator is a videogame genre, and the word ‘videogame’ is supposed to illicit kinetic action and excitement. These often short curios however, get shafted for having the longevity of shortcrust pastry and there’s not a lot going on in them. The examples are plentiful from Dear Esther, Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture and The Vanishing of Ethan Carter to more experimental and inspired titles like Layers of Fear, Gone Home and this darling Virginia. What Virginia manages to accomplish though, is a subtlety unique to its own storytelling within the broad realm of the genre and lifts it above mediocrity because of its ability to tell a story without leaning on convention.

Before you wail and think this has something to do with a woman because Virginia Woolf was a woman and you connect this piece of information with the fact she was a key figurehead in literature, know that Virginia is a setting, one you should be aware of if you live in America and it is a real place for those who don’t know and who have never stepped foot on its soil. The game is based on a real story circa 1992 and you play as a female FBI detective called Anne Tarver and along with your partner Maria Halperin, are investigating the vanishing of a boy called Lucas Fairfax. Forget about the investigation though, because the heart of the game is about the relationship between Anne and Maria. The chemistry between these two figures is engaging to see unfold, and along with other characters including a priest, your sergeant and a few fellow employees-manages to spur on your curiosity of how all of them connect to the story. The places you visit including an abandoned observatory, a bar and a diner help to prolong the sense of wonder and the inscrutable definition of what you see and how everything unfolds. Virginia has a rather peculiar range of ideas all concocting to create a short but thought provoking tale, and it is all done without spoken dialogue.

Unlike the vast majority of story-led videogames the industry churns out, Virginia is notable primarily for the absence of verbal communication. All the actions and responses from the characters are received through physical reaction, demonstrating how a solid narrative can be forged without verbally telling you anything. It’s a commonly practised technique in film making outside Hollywood, and there are a litany of lauded foreign films that transcend language barriers through events as they unfold from cut to cut. Virginia purposefully and methodically crafts its story by utilising this intricate storytelling method to sew one scene to the next, allowing the player to inspect emotions and body language for deeper meaning and understanding underneath their actions. The result is instead of making characters feel like the central hook, animals and objects have just as much importance, carrying significance by their repetitious placement. When you pick up the pendant with Maria’s mother’s face on it or watching the cardinal lying prone then springing back to life, or the buffalo being ritually sacrificed in a sacred place where figures gather round wearing white masks, you begin to realise that they are all linked together in some way because Virginia doesn’t let you forget about them. This imagery demonstrates Virginia attempting to tackle cinematic aesthetics head on and while that isn’t very videogames or interactive, it nevertheless reveals the potential that videogames have in providing more intricate ways of telling stories.

If you’re looking for a proper game to play there isn’t much here to recommend. You will be touching and grabbing things relevant to the story like letters and your F.B.I badge to show one individual in the game, and also picking up flowers and feathers, but there’s just not enough engagement between you and the game to care about, which is Virginia’s biggest bugbear. You are here for the story or you aren’t, there is no considerable argument to conjure up as to why it’s a decent game to actually play. Yet its length just like its price, isn’t suggesting you’ll ever get bored with it because you know what you should be getting in advance. You can’t help but be deflated that Virginia doesn’t give you much to participate in, but the story is compelling and nuanced enough that you should set aside your gameplay requirements and experience it with a fresh and curious mindset.

Visually Virginia isn’t a looker but the way its artistry evokes its differentiation is nevertheless compelling. The myriad of locations you visit reflect the webbing of the story and the characters, with each setting promoting a mood for players to feel swallowed in by. The inviting interiors of the bar you visit and the eloquent music performed on stage sets a tone so sterling and yet so calming that at times, Virginia can be chilling and thought-provoking. The music in general is delightful and never departs from suitable tones that fit the moment.

Virginia is all about subtlety and you’ll learn to appreciate its values the further the story progresses. Sporting no dialogue is without a doubt Virginia’s biggest niche, both requiring the player to pay attention to what’s happening, and continually stroking their curiosity. The novelty of Virginia’s soundtrack can’t be understated either, supporting and maintaining the thematic juices and tones the developers want you to be swallowed in by. There might not be much of an actual game in here and the cutting techniques deployed while relevantly tuning the mood, are jarring and a bit bothersome, but Virginia is primarily a game about story, if a good yarn is what you are clamouring for then Virginia comes openly recommended.

+The absence of dialogue creates a sumptuous deck of meaning through its layered mise-en-scene,

+Soundtrack is superb with tonally eloquent scores that suit the themes of Virginia,

+Locations are diverse and offer thought provocation consistently.

-Not much interaction going on in this one,

-Could easily be a film, doesn’t suit the videogame form so much,

-More of it would’ve been welcome.

78%