Retrospective: Call of Duty

Everyone remembers being part of a suicidal charge to defend Stalingrad as weaponless Russian peasant Alexei, or that very first mission with the US Airborne where you catch up with your sergeant and find him dead, his parachute snagged on a tree. But going back and playing Call of Duty, what you realise you've forgotten is the gently harrowing tone of even the unscripted combat.

You're always made so aware of the presence of your squad-mates, these men fighting alongside you and dying uncelebrated and unremembered. And it's not just that they die all the time, but they can die so quickly and for such colourless reasons. You'll be clearing a house when a Surprise German in the corner will spray you with a sub-machinegun, and your friends will all keel over bloodlessly.

It'd be difficult to argue that Call of Duty was tasteful, but it did and still does manage to be something more than a shooter. In his Eurogamer review all those years ago, Rob Fahey described how the game's scenarios had managed to "put a lump in his throat" and "make his blood boil", even commenting that the game's art direction sometimes came across as "too pretentious". And those feelings were echoed by many, many other reviewers.

But going back and playing Call of Duty now after receiving its expansion pack and four sequels on a yearly basis like an American footballer taking one hit after another, I'm standing up, I'm taking off my helmet and I'm wondering this: Where on Earth has this series' heart gone? Watch the intro to Call of Duty 1 and the Modern Warfare 2 launch trailer and you'll probably get where I'm coming from.

Fundamentally, Call of Duty gave the impression that war is more often than not a bad time. Modern Warfare? What is Modern Warfare? It's not actually modern warfare, for one thing. It's SAS teams dropping onto Russian cargo ships in the middle of a storm, finding a nuclear bomb and then leaping back onto their helicopter as the ship sinks.

It's shooting a man's arm off. It's also, apparently, firing missiles at a medieval castle and two men jumping over a sliding, flaming motorbike. That's not a bad time. That's awesome! What man or woman wouldn't answer the call of duty if your duty was to ride a skimobile down a mountain while firing a machine pistol with one hand?

This change isn't necessarily a bad thing, of course. I'm just very aware right now that the first Call of Duty promised an emotional depth to this series, and if all sight of that wasn't lost when they chose to set footage of men dying to an Eminem single, it currently seems very distant. This decision to exchange the game's backdrop from the most exciting moments of a real war to an action movie (complete with villain and stunts) seems a shame, to me at least. It feels like all Infinity Ward is trying to do now is drop jaws by any means necessary.

Never mind the fact that they might have just made the biggest-selling videogame of all time. Playing the original game again, I feel like this series could have been more than that.