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Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 is pure 21st century action cinema, a cacophonous opera of destruction and gunfire in intricately recreated cityscapes around the world

Earlier this week, at a studio complex somewhere in Kentish Town, Activision previewed what will certainly be one of the biggest entertainment events of the year. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, the latest in the long-running series of first-person shooters, is likely to make more money than any blockbuster movie release, and through subsequent downloadable content, it will continue to generate millions of dollars throughout 2012.

Last year, the Cold War-based Call of Duty: Black Ops shifted something in the region of 18m copies and became America’s biggest-selling game ever. But fans consider the spin-off Modern Warfare titles – developed by the original Call of Duty studio, Infinity Ward – to be the standard bearers for the series.

Of course, Modern Warfare 3 was always an inevitability, but nothing about its development has been predictable. Last year, several months after the release of the smash hit Modern Warfare 2, Activision sacked Infinity Ward co-founders Jason West and Vince Zampella for, “breaches of contract and insubordination”.

The duo sued Activision, Activision counter-sued and in the meantime dozens more Infinity Ward staff left, many joining their previous bosses at new development start-up, Respawn Entertainment, now working on an undisclosed project for EA. Very quickly, Activision revealed that it had also formed a new studio, Sledgehammer Games, with Glen Schofield and Michael Condrey previously of EA’s Visceral Games at its head, and a remit to work on the Call of Duty brand.

Indeed, the team was already being paired up with a restructured Infinity Ward to start work on Modern Warfare 3. The two companies have shared development duties – an increasingly common set-up in the modern industry, where projects can require teams of up to 200 people.

“We’re taking it to an entirely new level,” says Infinity Ward creative strategist Robert Bowling, displaying the customary games industry hyperbole. “We’re taking players into the heart of major cities all around the world, delivering urban combat in places like Manhattan and London. We’re also going throughout Europe, to Russia, parts of Africa, and the Himalayas – you will travel the world.” Yes you will, and judging by the two missions Activision revealed to us at the press event, you will blow most of it up in the process.

The story, apparently, picks up immediately after the close of Modern Warfare 2, in which Russia launched an invasion of the US, while the elite counter-terrorist squad Task Force 141, attempted to gather evidence against Russian ultranationalist leader Vladimir Makarov. “Washington DC is burning, ” explains Schofield. “Task Force 141 is either dead or on the run and battles rage along the eastern seaboard of the United States. You must now join with your delta team in Manhattan to help turn the tide against the Russians who have occupied New York City…”

Titled Black Tuesday, the first mission we’re shown picks up at the opening of the New York campaign. The player starts aboard a Black Hawk helicopter that’s just crash-landed in the city’s financial district. The objective is to get to the stock exchange, but there is a full-scale battle raging. Missiles cut through the sky, taking out vast chunks of Manhattan real estate. A front line of obliterated roads, burned-out police cars and crawling APCs is populated by groups of soldiers cowering behind great chunks of fallen masonry. It is, in short, what we expect from a Call of Duty set-piece – a cacophonous opera of destruction and gunfire, through which the player is closely guided by a computer-controlled superior (in this case, someone called Sandman).

From here, we burst into an office block riddled with bullet holes. An enemy chopper hovers outside, spraying everything with machine-gun fire. Then we’re out into an alley between tenements and fire escapes, before bursting into a jewellery store and engaging in another gun fight amid dozens of glass display cases exploding into shards.

The key moment is when we finally reach the stock exchange and indulge in a lengthy shoot-out on the trading floor, which has been intricately replicated – and then destroyed. Then we’re up a series of scaffolding platforms onto the roof where a thermite charge takes out a satellite dish, blocking enemy communications. From here, we get the grandstanding conclusion.

A comms link is established with a drone craft, and as in Modern Warfare 2, the player is able to remote-guide Reaper missiles at enemy positions, finally taking out a Hind and watching it spin to fiery oblivion in the streets below. But this isn’t quite the end. There’s still time to leap into a Black Hawk, laying down mini-gun fire, and duelling with another Hind between the skyscrapers – the final audacious moments see the two craft firing at each other through the superstructure of an unfinished building. It is every Michael Bay movie condensed into one roaring aerial showdown.

“The campaign is all about that cinematic intensity,” says Bowling, somewhat needlessly after what we’ve just experienced. “We are locked into delivering 60 frames per second; that’s what allows us to combine the high-speed gameplay and tight gun control. But the single player is just one aspect of a much, much larger experience.” Along with the main campaign, we’re promised the now customary Spec-Ops missions, and a two-player co-op option that will be apparently be massively built upon since its Modern Warfare 2 introduction. As for online multiplayer – well, something big is planned and an announcement is due next week.

To close the event, Bowling and Schofield show us another level, this time following the Bravo Six team on a covert mission in London’s docklands. An enemy weapons shipment is being unloaded, and we’re here to gather valuable intel (guided from the air by a voice actor who sounds uncannily like series regular, Craig Fairbrass).

There’s no indication of how this all links in with the Russian invasion of the US, but the air support is picking up heat signatures in a nearby warehouse and our job is, naturally, to take out the bad guys. The player is in control of a character named Burns who’s using a silenced P90 to pick off soldiers. Then we’re out into the dock and a full-on assault, with car alarms going off everywhere and Canary Wharf towering in the background, just visible through the night-time drizzle.

Whatever was offloaded from the ship has now seemingly been spirited off, and we’re giving chase in a truck, which thunders onto railway tracks and down into the tube system, where enemies fire from a hurtling train. We zig-zag between oncoming trains, taking constant fire. At one point, the whole cavalcade whips through a packed station, and we see commuters running in panic. We’re told to watch our fire – and for a second it looks like the infamous No Russian scene from Modern Warfare 2, where the player has to take part in a terrorist raid on a Russian airport filled with civilians. Eventually, the tube train jumps the track and spins through the tunnel in a fury of debris. And we’re out.

It is, as Call of Duty has always been, breathless stuff – a total sensory assault, this time lent an extra dramatic charge by those intricately detailed representations of familiar cityscapes. I wonder if the developers have considered how the use of such imagery will remind some of real-life atrocities in New York and London – and indeed, the trailer has already evoked the hysterical wrath of the Daily Mail, which has claimed that the tube train sections essentially simulate the July 7 bombings. It is an attention-grabbing connection, but it is also spurious; players will understand that the use of recognisable landmarks ramps up both the intensity and the stakes, and these hugely familiar cities have been destroyed countless times over the years in monster and sci-fi flicks.

With the tumultuous demo over, plenty of intriguing questions remain. We’re not sure if any favourite characters from previous Modern Warfare titles are returning, and there’s much to discover about the reworked multiplayer. In gameplay terms, amid the state-of-the art special effects and sheer graphical detail, the corridor-like structure is hugely familiar, a single route plotted through the chaos.

A question mark looms over whether the Modern Warfare 3 single-player mode can innovate beyond the restrictive formula of its predecessors. But then, do its millions of fans want it to?

This is a series based on bombast and bullets, and while last year’s Black Ops made a few interesting narrative sojourns into the territory of the 1970s conspiracy thriller, it looks like Modern Warfare 3 will be pure 21st century action cinema – a gigantic paean to the art of computer-generated destruction.

• Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 will be released on 8 November for Xbox 360, PS3 and PC

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Former id Software designer on how China inspired him to create a innovative game full of hidden depths

Astonishingly, it is nearly a century and a half since Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland first enthralled the general public with its hallucinatory charms, yet Alice’s allure remains undimmed. Last year’s Tim Burton film saw her reclaim her position at the centre stage of pop culture, and introduced her to a new generation. But it played things far too safe to satisfy true Wonderland aficionados – surprisingly, given Burton’s surreal track record. Salvation, though, may be at hand, in the shape of Alice: Madness Returns, a game in which you get to navigate Alice through the pitfalls of Wonderland.

Alice: Madness Returns has a great pedigree, as well as an unusual provenance. It is actually a sequel, to the only previous Lewis Carroll-based game with any credibility, American McGee’s Alice, although the original came out in 2000. Its creator, the wondrously named American McGee, is a man whose status in the industry was forged as a high-profile member of the id Software teams that defined first-person shooters as we know them – McGee was a leading light on the Doom games plus Quake and Quake II.

To add another curve-ball to proceedings, despite his name, McGee is now based in Shanghai, and Alice: Madness Returns will be the first major western-published game created entirely in China. We caught up with McGee on a rare UK visit. So why resurrect Alice after a decade? “Well, there wasn’t a lot of planning to it. I had moved to Shanghai, and started a studio there, and it made sense at some point during the creation of the studio that it became capable of doing a sequel to Alice. It was never a case of: ‘Hey, it has been 10 years – let’s bring this thing back to life.”

Playing through a demo level confirms that the general format of the original game has survived a decade intact: it’s a third-person action-adventure, mixing platforming and combat, in which you play Alice and must traverse levels familiar in theme to followers of Lewis Carroll. Alice has melee and ranged attacks (she shoots bombs from a teapot) and can spawn clockwork white rabbits which explode after a while. Plus, she can shrink herself down, which also reveals hidden pathways.

McGee elaborates: “We thought there was a combination of gameplay elements that worked really well in the first game, but at the same time, we had the luxury of listening to the audience for 10 years. There were certainly issues about the gameplay: the combat system in particular, so that gave us an opportunity to improve it and put a lot more depth in there. But at its core, it’s still very much a narrative-driven game.”

“In each of the new domains Alice visits, we have a domain-specific ability. So, for instance, in the Queen’s domain, there’s a Giant Alice section, where she gets to eat some cake, stomp around and squish card-guards by the hundreds. There’s side-scrolling in the Oriental domain, which happens by way of these shadow-projection puzzles; it looks very much like a Mario throwback. We also have a section we call Off With Her Head, in the Dollhouse domain. There, she has her head transformed into the head of a doll, and it is popped off, then thrown into a sort of Marble Madness level, where it bounces along and encounters obstacles. I think that really helps to strengthen the variety, which is one of the core aspects of the game.”

Won’t a sequel to a 10-year-old game face accusations of being old-fashioned, though? “I think we may get that comment, but at the same time, I think these classic gameplay mechanisms that you now see re-emerging on mobile devices and in social games will live forever. Somebody who didn’t have the opportunity to play the first game might find it quite refreshing”

As might an Alice fan disillusioned by Tim Burton’s film? “It was funny: we started development long before that film was even announced, so they managed to announce it, get the thing done and launch it in a matter of a year. Meanwhile, we had been working on the foundation and prep-work for the sequel to the game for quite some time. Personally, I was disappointed with the way in which that film came off. The biggest failing, I thought, was that they didn’t focus enough on Alice as a character – it became this ensemble thing, with mainly Johnny Depp as the lead, although he was not that much fun to watch.”

American in China

As McGee tells the story of how he ended up in China, one thing becomes clear: despite the patriotic name, he isn’t exactly about to sign up for the Tea Party. He’s only half-joking when he says: “I was living in LA, and someone offered me the opportunity to move to Hong Kong to work on a game. George Bush had also just won his second election, and I had told all my friends that if he was elected again, I was going to leave, so those two things coincided. Although I knew the production in Hong Kong was a flawed one before I ever moved, I saw it as a good opportunity to get out to the region and get some experience in China.”

“So after two years in Hong Kong, I was bouncing up to Shanghai quite a bit with a friend to start up an outsourcing company there which was servicing the games industry doing art assets. When someone offered me a development deal for American McGee’s Grimm, I said: “I don’t have a studio,” but they said: “Don’t worry about it: go and build one.” So that was an amazing opportunity, and I jumped on it and took it to Shanghai, because by then I had developed some good connections there.”

Surely that must have involved some major culture-shocks? “I think probably the largest shock came not necessarily from the culture, but from the experience of leaving the US and moving to Hong Kong because, when I did that, I had a very “Burn it down” attitude. I literally sold everything I owned – my car, my house and my possessions – and all I was left with were two suitcases and a cat. That’s a very powerful experience, especially when we’ve been brought up in a culture that assigns so much value to possessions. It was very cathartic, though. Moving into China, of course there are challenges, but you get past them.”

Surprisingly, McGee argues that developing games in China isn’t necessarily cheaper, since he still has to adhere to international pay-scales, but what he likes most is the prevailing attitude: “It’s a very optimistic place to be these days. There’s a lot of innovation going on, a lot of change happening and a very blue-sky mentality, especially among the creative industries, because they are now, for the first time, inventing all-new markets, in all-new technologies, and all-new ways of accessing consumers, so that means you have a very young, dynamic creative and consumer culture there, which feeds directly into the culture inside the studio. It’s a nice place to be making games.” Meanwhile, in the west, optimism has never been in shorter supply. But at least Alice: Madness Returns should supply plenty of escapism.

• Alice: Madness Returns is due to arrive for Xbox 360, PS3 and PC on 17 June

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First-person shooters are often labelled as shallow thrill rides, but do a slew of recent releases hint at something more?

Bulletstorm is a really stupid game, isn’t it? A ‘guilty pleasure’. Something proper gamers shouldn’t admit to enjoying. In it, the meat-headed mercenary Grayson Hunt spends ten hours blasting his way through a planet of mutants, kicking people into the gaping maws of man-eating plants, while wise-cracking about the smell of sun-baked arseholes. This is a game that glorifies demented slaughter; an orgy of mindless, sadistic pleasure. We can all agree on this, right?

Perhaps. Perhaps not. What if, beneath the symphony of hyper-kinetic gunplay, Bulletstorm is actually a game about guilt and grief? What if it were an immense Jacobean tragedy disguised as a dim-witted hack-’em-up? And what if it were not alone in using the FPS genre to explore mental torment?

Okay, you might have to bear with me on this one.Hunt, you see, is wracked with remorse. He has just spent the last few years of his career killing innocent people under the orders of General Sarrano, commander of the sinister Dead Echo galactic army. Except Hunt didn’t know they were innocent people, he was told they were war criminals. Destroyed by the truth, Hunt seeks a terrible revenge, attacking Serrano’s gigantic spacecraft, forcing it to crash land on the devastated pleasure planet where the rest of the game takes place. But this brings Hunt no peace – instead, his friends are killed early on in the escapade, and he’s left with their deaths on his conscience too.

Throughout each cutscene, amid the colourful insults, he constantly ruminates on loss. He obsesses over it. His suicidal mission to track down and murder Serrano, who has naturally survived the crash, is a search for redemption; a redemption that can only ever be realised in his own annihilation. Remorse is the emotion that hovers over the entire game. It is there, if you squint hard enough, in the very structure: seven chapters – the seven stages of grief.

And interestingly, Sarrano plays up on this. Toward the end of the game, the twisted Dead Echo chief constantly reminds Hunt about his crimes, about the thousands he’s killed. When you enter the stricken spacecraft and start slaughtering its guards, the general mocks Hunt over the ship’s PA system –’those are honest men you’re killing, they have wives and children.’ Did the developer, People Can Fly, just shove that in for a laugh? Or were they querying the disposability of life in the shoot-’em-up universe? It reminds me of the classic scene in Clerks, where Randal dissects the ending of Return of the Jedi, denigrating the rebels for destroying the second Death Star while it is still being built by thousands of innocent construction workers.

And Bulletstorm is not alone as an FPS carrying subtexts of loss and anguish. Dead Space 2 is about post-traumatic stress disorder: Isaac Clarke has become catastrophically unhinged by the horrors he witnessed in the original game – his life is one long hallucination of monstrous threat; the Marker is madness. Call of Duty: Black Ops revolves around paranoid schizophrenia – did Alex Mason kill Kennedy or not? He imagined a Russian ally for much of the game so anything is possible. But the question hangs and is purposely not resolved. There is ambiguity surrounding everything that happens in the game, because the game is a patchwork of cloudy, unstable memories.

In a recent post on the blog The Gwumps, the author talks about Fallout: New Vegas and about how the character Boone, a vengeful sniper looking to wipe out members of The Legion, is as much a victim of endless, pointless violence as he is a perpetrator. He symbolises what’s happened to humanity in the wake of the apocalypse – deadened, scarred and unraveled. It looks like Deus Ex: Human Revolution will also explore the loss of humanity, this time through genetic and cybernetic enhancement. And Monolith’s first-person horror shooter, Condemned 2: Bloodshot, provides perhaps the most nihilistic commentary on moral death and mental decline, its hero transmogrified from an FBI agent into a violent homeless alcoholic.

Sure, first-person shooters are the death metal of video gaming; they revel in darkness, and the cheap hyperbole of loss and slaughter. But Bulletstorm is interesting in that it comments on and questions the killing while simultaneously encouraging players to revel in it. It exploits the fundamental strength of the genre – the lack of an onscreen lead character (at least during the action). There is a unique hotwire connection between game and player; the psychological gap is narrowed. Without an avatar to blame, we’re more complicit, and the motivations become more hazy. Consequently, digital artists have regularly appropriated the FPS format to ask questions about war and consent, from Wafaa Bilal’s hugely controversial Virtual Jihadi to Federico Solmi’s Douche Bag City.

Bulletstorm actually having meaning is a difficult sell, I know that. But then, of course, intent is only a fraction of meaning. All those silly fifties sci-fi movies about giant irradiated insects spoke volumes about nuclear dread, possibly without intending it. Did Texas Chainsaw Massacre really seek to critique post-Vietnam America or was it an accident? “Everything means something, I guess,” one character famously drawls at the start of the movie.

In games, where narrative is usually pushed to the sidelines, players create their own ‘reality’ – itself an extremely malleable concept in the virtual world. After playing Half-Life for the second or third time, I began to wonder – did the events of the game actually happen? Or did Gordon Freeman die after the resonance cascade? Maybe the whole story was conjured by the character’s misfiring synapses, a last wash of complex brain chemicals to help assuage the guilt. The best shooters, like the best horror movies, are about the ambiguity that exists at the extremes of behaviour and motivation. Bulletstorm might want us to ask, “are we doing the right thing here?”

Perhaps I’ve been playing too long. Or perhaps those who think Bulletstorm is just a shallow production line of gut-splattered set-pieces are not asking the right questions about first-person shooters, or why they enjoy them.

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The sequel to one of the most memorable first-person shooters has you putting on the diving boots of a Big Daddy, the iconic thoughies of the original BioShock. But how does that fare?
BioShock 2 not only has you playing a bigger, badder character, but the game is expansive and grand… yet very, very familiar.
In my review I take a look at the return to Rapture and ask, does BioShock 2 live up to the legacy, or is it a soggy rehash?
BioShock 2 Review originally appeared on About.com PlayStation Games on Sunday, February 21st, 2010 at 00:19:39.

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