Reviews

Call of Duty Modern Warfare Remastered - PS4 Review

Posted on: 2016-10-10

Now let’s get into the meat of this remaster and that’s the presentation: I must say I’m really impressed as it is day and night comparing it to the original on the Xbox 360 and PS3. I would say that this is more of a remake rather than a remaster.

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It’s hard to believe that Call of Duty 4 is 9 years old this year. It still feels like yesterday it came out on the Xbox 360 and PS3. Call of Duty Modern Warfare was a bold step in a different direction because during the period of 1999-2008 there was an overwhelming amount of World War II shooters and it was getting a bit stale. Infinity Ward decided to abandon the war time setting and instead went for modern day combat so there are modern weapons and technology to fit the setting. However, like the World War II setting the modern military shooter became oversaturated because other developers tried to replicate Call of Duty 4’s success and it ended up going the way of Dodo.

Call of Duty Modern Warfare takes place in the present day which revolves around a plot of a Russian ultranationalist party who are trying to over throw the current Russian government. The party is led by one Imran Zakhaev and all he wants is to see the world burn as he has given a nuclear device to a Middle Eastern warlord who uses it to repel the US military who are invading the region. The plot shifts between two protagonists, you play as a fresh recruit in the SAS called Soap Mactavish and a Sergeant named Paul Jackson in the USMC. what I can tell of the plot is that the US military go around messing things up and the SAS are behind the scenes fixing everything and it’s a great change in pace switching between the two because the SAS missions are generally slower and quieter rather than loud nature of the US missions.

The gameplay is what you would expect from a Call of Duty game however this game has a stripped back and simplistic approach and that’s not a bad thing. The newer Call of Duty games have a habit of throwing so many gimmicks that you’ll probably only use once in a tutorial, but Modern Warfare just tells you that you can play the game the way you want to and your gun is your greatest ally, no gimmicks here. The game is split up into various missions from full scale war zones that are tense and exciting to a quite stealth missions, such as the Chernobyl flash missions which is great because the game slows down after all the hectic gun battles and lets you breathe for a bit after the chaos. The gameplay did take me a while to get use to because I’ve been playing the recent games and I was a bit baffled when I couldn’t slide on my knees across the floor, however it does fit the grounded nature and makes sense that you can’t double jump or slide all over the place.

Now let’s get into the meat of this remaster and that’s the presentation: I must say I’m really impressed as it is day and night comparing it to the original on the Xbox 360 and PS3. I would say that this is more of a remake rather than a remaster as they have sprinkled enough visual flare to make it look like an entirely new game. They’ve added in more detail to make the game feel more alive for example the intro where you are at the SAS base training they added things in such as other soldiers on the firing range with you to vehicles roaming around outside which were not present in the original game. The facial animations has been given a massive boost as the characters don’t look like static manikins anymore and their movements look more natural as they vault over cover and breach doors.

The only problems I have with this game stem from the original and that is the enemies have a bad habit of throwing too many grenades. This is more apparent when you play the game on the hardest difficulty, this is not how you increase challenge. The other thing I noticed was that the lip syncing was off in some scenes as the mouth movement just looked a puppet flapping its mouth up and down.

Overall, I was very pleased with the this remaster and I don’t often say that as most of the remasters we’ve had recently have been rather lazy, but this one was made with love by people who respect the source material. Modern Warfare Remastered is only available to those who buy the special editions of Call of Duty Infinite Warfare so get pre-ordering if you want to play it. The multiplayer for Modern Warfare Remastered will be launching next month so check back then to hear my thoughts.  

4.5/5

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