‘Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War’ review: boring in the US

United States of America: Wow, we sure are exhausted.

This was the conclusion I came to after finishing the single player campaign in the last “Call of Duty”, an understanding that I don’t think was entirely unintended. These are games designed by global teams of hundreds of people, created largely as multiplayer powerhouses that make money long after the initial sale. But modern single-player “Call of Duty” campaigns are filled with narrative tension that speaks to those the game’s publisher believes to be the intended players.

The contradictions are present in the last installment. The franchise cannot free itself from its pro-America stance, and the latest, a game set amid the Cold War stress of the early 1980s, frames Ronald Reagan as a movie star hero who viewed the presidency as the role of his life. And yet the game also wants to portray the United States as flawed and its military as arrogant.

Can you do both? Sure, but not without sacrifices.

At the end of the game, a US agent states that sometimes military organizations have to cross a line to make sure “the line is still there in the morning.” “Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War” wants to walk the line on its own, nodding equally to a very complex narrative and large-scale, arcade-like action sequences.

In other words, it wants to present fun, but it also wants to convey a bit of the now pro forma guilt that all gun video games must possess – the underlying wink that, yes, we all feel at least a little bit bad about. the $ 70 thing we’re giving you. I mean there’s no way to feel good about the opening scene of the game, in which the Iranians exist solely to absorb bullets, but I want to believe that it is there to argue against the thesis of the tough American agent of the game.

After all, it is a fallacy to believe that a line can be maintained if it is crossed. “Black Ops Cold War” doesn’t hold it up – ultimately it lands on the side that favors patriotism above all else, even if it appears to be holding its nose while doing so.

Roughly two decades after the “Call of Duty” brand, the Activision-owned franchise certainly knows its audience. Maybe that’s why I shuddered the few times “Black Ops Cold War” tried to bring me into their fold, to argue that, “Hey, it’s nice and nice here. Stay! “I never had a bad time with the game, and enjoyed the missions that had me infiltrate a KBG stronghold, which provided me with a bit of exploration and attempts to solve puzzles. A scene near the end was certainly looking for some psychedelics. Inspired by “Apocalypse Now” when it showed how the presentation of events and facts depends on who’s manipulating, it’s a clever scene where we’re re-creating a memory, and the deeper we probe, the more confusing and unnatural the worlds become.

That scene alone shows that there are ambitions here, as it is a fact that the “Call of Duty” games will feature moments that argue that “the enemy is us”, but here was a moment that seemed to question not only beliefs but the written history that comes after a war. Still, he felt restrained, handcuffed by the need not to stray too far from the “Call of Duty” of good versus evil.

Essentially, the single-player narrative of “Black Ops Cold War” didn’t seem entirely self-assured. This is a game, ultimately, about nostalgia, of looking back to a time when it was falsely believed that everyone had a patriotic love for their country. You could make a quarantine drinking game with “Black Ops Cold War”: take a sip every time an American warns that the Russians are going to destroy our way of life.

Russians, generally portrayed as smoking figures in ill health, make the same warning, but the only way of life they show us on both sides is one of oppression, murder, distrust, and broad generalizations. American men, mostly dressed in leather jackets, seem to belong in a recount of “Boogie Nights”; My female lead was warned to put one of these stereotypes aside, our brusque leader Russell Adler. Nobody likes anybody, and Reagan, acting like John Wayne, rejects a short protest that the United States should not break the rules of war.

So giddyap, he says “Black Ops Cold War,” takes us into conspiracy-driven territory that draws inspiration from real life, and then drops internet messages worthy of a bunch. One of the game’s earliest missions is labeled “Fracture Jaw”, itself a nod to a plan to bring nuclear weapons to Vietnam, overturned in real life by President Johnson in 1968. The main antagonist is the Russian spy Perseus. , a mysterious figure whose name is an allusion to another mystery. Whether or not there was a real Russian spy calling himself by that name depends on who is telling it.

The narrative is delivered primarily in voice-over, as we go from facing off against Iranian terrorists to chasing a mobster around an East Berlin checkpoint to infiltrate abandoned Russian military bases in mountain towns and even plunge into Cuba, where our CIA agents fantasize about eliminating Fidel. Castro, all in an effort to locate Perseus. It is a threat because it has the power to devastate Europe, thanks to the fact that it discovered nuclear weapons that the United States hid in the name, supposedly, of self-defense.

We, That’s America, as the flawed good boy is a key touchstone of the “Black Ops” line of “Call of Duty,” which is generally one of the most realistic and real-life-inspired games in the franchise. . But as the game continues to spin on itself, finally revealing a plot revolving around the Central Intelligence Agency’s Project MK-Ultra, a covert and illegal extreme mind control operation, the game is testing our patience. so as not to abandon our fellow agents and side with the Soviet Union.

That is an option that was given to us at one point, and there is no really good option. We can contribute to the launch of a hidden cache of nuclear weapons or attempt to bring down Perseus, which can lead to an even more covert battle to spread disinformation, also known as the modern world of “alternative facts.” Both options, however, feed a conspiracy narrative, of a world of hidden stories where anyone other than us is suspicious. Throughout the game, our CIA leader Adler warns us of those who “have no true loyalty to anyone but himself” but do so without awareness of their own headstrong patriotism.

“Black Ops Cold War” challenges us, then, in its final moments to change sides and make the Western world fall apart. As tired as I was at this point of hearing Reagan tell us that America’s greatest weapon is its freedom: have a drink! – this felt, even for a video game in which he had personally murdered thousands of people, something reckless and absurd. Here was a not-so-subtle statement, framed as a revenge plot, that the rejection of a blind faith belief throughout America, even its war crimes, would ultimately destroy it and result in a future even more hellish than us. . To be able to imagine.

No, I don’t think the developers of “Black Ops Cold War” believe that. I think they were looking for something more nuanced, hoping to show how the threads of the Cold War have permeated the 2020 world and led to aspiring internet detectives and dangerous paramilitary civilians doing things like answering our president’s calls. current to “release”. Michigan.

Maybe, God forbid, the audience to eat this, but what I found was a story that simply wanted to take a nap, a war game worn with the very nationalism of the country that it is forced into, year after year, to cheer.