The meat of it all though lies with Sergeant Gary ‘Roach’ Anderson and John ‘Soap’ MacTavish as they and the spec-ops team Task Force 141 attempt to find Makarov and stop the war. As Private James Ramirez players will fight through the streets of Washington DC defending the capital against the Russians. The rest of Modern Warfare 2 takes place in the aftermath. It only really achieves something close to Bigelow’s sun-bleached vision of modern warfare at the start of ‘No Russian’ and at the end where Makarov shoots Allen in the head, leaving him to kick start a new global war. Call of Duty has always seemed to be caught between the realism of Kathryn Bigelow and the bombast of Michael Bay, falling all too easily into the latter time and again. Eventually it starts to look less like Heat and more like Con Air as an army of SWAT arrives on the airport runway. The more pixelated bullets you pump into pixelated bodies the less real it all becomes. After that opening though that 21st Century desensitisation kicks in. It’s hard to think of a less dramatic intro to a level that involves you, the player, participating in mass murder. Makarov states: “Remember, no Russian.” The elevator doors open, the team steps out and as the crowd turns they open fire. Dressed in sharp suits with Kevlar vests and armed to the teeth with assault rifles and heavy machine guns they look like they’ve stepped out of Michael Mann’s Heat. The level opens with Allen, Makarov and Makarov’s team of ultra-nationalists loading up in an elevator. I think after all the hullabaloo around that particular level died down it was the starkness of it all that was really shocking. At the end of that mission Makarov kills player character Private Joseph Allen, leaving the American’s corpse as a declaration of war and setting the plot for Modern Warfare 2 in motion.

So Makarov attacks a Russian airport fully aware that a member of his strike team is an American spy. Makarov is hell bent on revenge for the death of his commander, Imran Zakhaev, even if that means war with the United States. The name is taken from main villain Vladimir Makarov’s insistence that no one on the strike team speak their native tongue. ‘No Russian’ is the name of the game’s fourth level. In Modern Warfare 2 developer Infinity Ward put players through the wringer again, this time forcing them into the boots of an undercover CIA agent moonlighting as a Russian ultra-nationalist terrorist. I suppose it’s worth questioning whether things were any different ten years ago? In 2007 Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare had forced players to die as the ousted President of an unnamed Middle Eastern country and as an American soldier in a nuclear blast. Whether in real or fictional media shocking people so desensitised to war, violence and sex is difficult to do.

Cod4 shock and awe