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Given that I haven’t played this 4-6-hour campaign since it originally came out, I’m surprised at how much of it I remembered. That speaks to how memorable a lot of these missions are: I still love the snowmobile escape early on, the frantic fight through the favelas, the battle at Burger Town where you can sadistically abuse the drone-strike missile capability you’re given, surviving the war in firebombed Washington DC, and the very memorable finale. The weapons as played through the lens of 2020 expectations are a collection of same-y machine guns intermixed with some still-as-fun-as-ever fun thermal-scope automatic weapons, sniper rifles, and riot shotguns. And breaching a door in slow motion is still one heck of a grin-inducing experience.
And then there’s Modern Warfare 2’s most infamous level: the intentionally controversial No Russian, in which you’re sent undercover and asked to shoot innocent civilians in a Russian airport terminal alongside the bad guys (and yes, you can still skip it if you don’t feel comfortable playing it). Ten years on, I decided to see if I could get through it without pulling the trigger, and while you can avoid shooting a single civilian, you’ll still need to open fire on the police who arrive on the scene later in the level. So one way or the other, this mission can still make me squirm.
Verdict
Thank goodness for all of its memorable, Michael Bay-style blockbuster moments, because in 2020 Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 is competing for our attention with its own very impressive reboot. In that light, the generic shooting-gallery gameplay of Modern Warfare 2’s campaign feels dated – after so many games we’re onto the magician’s trick now. The new Modern Warfare has largely pushed the series past this for the better. So while this remaster is still a fun ride that looks impressively current, it’s lost a lot of its punch. Some of that is due to the advances of time, but it’s mostly because it’s been bested by…itself.