Ed recommend this game and asked me to share my thoughts, so that’s what I’m gonna do here on the forum. Though I should point out that I’m not a huge fan of the “modern military shooter” (or MMS) subgenre of FPS games, but I have played Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare and Battlefield 3, among others, and enjoyed both. Warfighter was originally released in 2012, a year after BF3.
Off the bat I’ll say that I really like the fact that you can see your legs and waist when you look down – it’s a nice little detail that I love in first person perspective games. Another piece of detail that was great is that every nation shown in the campaign spoke its own language: the Americans obviously spoke English, the Arabas Arabic, Pakistanis used Urdu, Poles spoke in Polish, the Bosnians Serbo-Croatian, etc. This was a refreshing change when compared to the average MMS, where almost everyone speaks English but with different accents.
The story of the singleplayer campaign wasn’t anything special. In fact, I’d say this was probably one of the weakest aspects of the entire experience, right next to its painfully obvious linearity and unoriginality (waiting for NPCs to open doors for you and many other annoying tropes are to be found here). I was also uncomfortable with the whole “god and country” theme, which I admit could have been much worse and I should’ve expected a degree of this anyway. On the bright side, the core gameplay model was good – the shooting and movement mechanics felt appropriately tight yet dynamic, which is what pulled me through the more boring parts. At times it was surprisingly challenging for the normal difficulty mode of an MMS, which was a nice surprise. The cover system is a bit strange and awkward, I’d have preferred to see a more conventional one a la RO2: HoS, but it’s nice to see that they’ve included leaning at all.
A welcome feature is the inclusion of the AK-103, one of my favourite weapons, though it was kinda weird how common it was among all those non-Russian “baddies”, considering its mostly designed for the Federation’s special forces. However, I looked this up and, indeed, it looks like the game was actually quite accurate in regards to this as Pakistan and a number of other Asian countries apparently do use the AK-103. There was a decent selection of firearms to use throughout the campaign, all with high-quality models and textures; my only gripe here is that the game needlessly gets rid of the gun you pick up every now and then, replacing it with the default for the mission.
My favourite chapter was probably the one set in Sarajevo, due to several reasons. Firstly, it was a nice change of scenery and it was great to see GROM actually having a role in the singleplayer too, plus I think the former Yugoslav territories have plenty of unused potential as a setting for more serious MMS titles. Secondly, the levels that followed (the one on the boat and the final mission) also felt quite nice – in general it seemed to me as though the quality of the campaign picked up quite a bit in Bosnia. Still, it’s a shame that the story was so uninspired and predictable; I personally thought Battlefield 3’s singleplyer was pretty good and kind of original for an MMS, much better than this.
Finally, there’s the multiplayer. From the get go it is worth mentioning a huge plus, that being the ability to choose from a variety of playable special forces hailing from different countries. We’re so used to seeing the Americans, the British SAS, and the Russian Spetsnaz in this type of FPS – and they’re all here too – but we can also play as the aforementioned GROM from Poland, the German Kommando Spezialkräfte, even as South Korea’s special forces (among others)!
The online in general is easily the best feature of this game, likely to keep you coming back for many more hours of firefights. There is a decent number of varied gamemodes to keep things interesting (mostly conquest and CTF versions) and there is even an in-game server browser, which is something that is sadly increasingly rare in competitive multiplayer titles. MoH: Warfighter does use EA’s Battlelog, but it is fairly optional unlike in BF3 and most things can be done within the actual program and not through a browser. Battlefield’s awesome squad system also makes a return here.
Overall, I can see why this game has a 55 aggregate score on Metacritic, but I personally would have given it a slightly higher rating – more like a 6 or 7 in my book, with the singleplayer dragging it down and the multiplayer pushing it up and definitely being its saving grace. I can easily recommend this to yous though and I’m glad I ended up getting it. Would actually be fun to see more people playing this so we could fill out the platoon (Skaara could do Norway, Nuclear for US, and Komo for Russia? There are even more countries to choose from though). And it’s pretty fun to hear your player character mixing accented English with words from his mother tongue.
