The Warfighter recipe is quite simple. You take all the least memorable moments of a Call of Duty campaign, you roughly chop your ingredients, you hurl it all into the development oven and retrieve when half-baked. Bland familiarity for all the family is then assured.
Warfighter transplants the Afghan running and gunning of the Medal of Honor reboot into an eternal sequence of entry and exit wounds in various troublespots (in Muslim countries) throughout the world. With this switch the sense of military authenticity is wiped clean, and the best character of MOH - the remarkable terrain of the land you were covering - is lost to the winds. In the last game you could be tricked into feeling that you were a soldier operating behind enemy lines. In Warfighter, you're just Chuck Norris on a bad day.
EA, you see, went to great pains to underline the authenticity of Warfighter. It was adamant that it was based on the memoirs of real elite soldiers, and drummed out the message that every location was tied to real world terror. In truth, however, the travails of Mother, Preacher and new kid Stump are so hard to follow you struggle to remember what you're doing, who you're with or even where you are. The game is riddled with unnecessary jumps around the timeline (punctuated with unhelpful notes like 'Four hours earlier...') and is haphazardly peppered with ropey-looking scenes of distraught family life back home. As such the quest for PET-N explosives is a dismal and confusing one, and you can't help feel that our hero's daughter's ears look a bit funny.
What you can't take away from Warfighter, however, is that a base level it feels good when you shoot a bad guy in the head. The previous game's 'headshot!' icon even makes a welcome return - now turning a gruesome shade of red if you've racked up a clean kill. As you snipe through the streets of Serbia, rescue hostages from the typhoon-struck Philippines or pistol-whip bad men in a terrorist training cave - the meat of Warfighter proves perfectly adequate. It's just desperately unimaginative, and surprisingly short to boot.
7 comments so far...
fracturedrich on 27 Oct '12 said:
i dont no why they botherd i liked previous moh but with so many good games why even bother putting the time into this they should of took another year or to and made more of an effert for me they have just buried the series well done
ItchyRash on 27 Oct '12 said:
Such a shame as I actually really like the campaign on the last MoH. The campaign on that was a million times better than the BF3 campaign. Agree that this game has probably buried the series yet again. Ah well
NicoThaDon on 27 Oct '12 said:
I actually enjoyed this campaign a lot. It is a good mix and at a good pace. I think the review is especially harsh but it was always going to be with black ops 2 around the corner.
RetroDad on 28 Oct '12 said:
Hmmm... No mention of the 'decent' multiplayer until the summary box? Let's be honest, Warfighter was always going to be the runt of the current military fps games. In the interest of fairness though, the replay factor comes from online play. Would MW3 still have received a 9/10 if the focus during the review was purely on the short campaign? I was never interested in purchasing Warfighter, but I feel there needed to be a more balanced review for readers than presented here.
Lancer Armstrong on 28 Oct '12 said:
It's very rare in the world of gaming for a sequel to be worse than the previous installment. Hell, how is it even possible? All you have to do is stick to the basics, improve on what worked and get rid of what didn't. Even if you have nothing original to contribute, we at least expect the new game to be better on a technical level.
So what the hell happened? This was looking like a much more exciting shooter than Black Ops 2 (a.k.a. Call of Duty: Ghost Recon). How did they f**k this up?
I was never gonna buy this anyway (I prefer Halo and Gears, and the only military FPS I buy is Battlefield), but I was looking forward to this at least giving CoD a run for its money.
Still wouldn't be surprised if Activision is responsible for this "smear campaign", though.
Metalratex on 29 Oct '12 said:
The best review I've seen so far gave it a 6.0. Undoubtfully a failure. The series should take another break and rethink everything.
Lancer Armstrong on 30 Oct '12 said:
It really feels like the Military Shooter genre doesn't have anywhere left to go.
After World War 2 was done to death, they decided to do the "Modern Warfare" thing to death. Where to now? Black Ops 2 is going for the whole Futuristic Shooter vibe, but honestly, it's already been done for years by far better franchises like Ghost Recon and Crysis. I doubt the Call of Duty games will be able to improve on what others have already done.
I just find it hilarious how they pretend that this is a "bold new direction" for the franchise. "We've got these things called UAV's, guys.And camo that makes you invisible." Next they're gonna tell us about this a groundbreaking new mechanic called "Bullet Time".