Russian mercenaries, Iranian terrorists, and a Mexican drug cartel walk into a bar. It sounds like the set-up to a bad joke, but there’s nothing tongue-in-cheek about the portrayal of these disparate elements in Modern Warfare II’s story campaign (we’ll be taking a deeper look at the multiplayer next issue once we’ve had more time with it). Even so, if you can overlook a clumsy plot punctuated by a handful of particularly uncomfortable moments, a sequence of stellar set-pieces makes for an action blockbuster without equal.
While the story of 2019’s Modern Warfare was far from perfect, it set a high bar for presenting a grounded narrative. The developers sensibly opted to set the action in a largely fictionalised locale, interspersing the array of shooting galleries with
