HomeFeatures
Every Call of Duty campaign rankedGing gang ghillie ghillie ghillie ghillie watcha
Ging gang ghillie ghillie ghillie ghillie watcha
Like a zipline descending into Verdansk, the quality curve of the Call of Duty campaign trends ever downward, year-on-year. Or so a casual observer might assume. But this is Task Force 141, soldier: we don’t do casual observation. Take my binoculars and you’ll soon see that the real story is far more complicated and compelling.
For every Ghosts in the graveyard of CODs past, there’s an unlikely space adventure to rivalTitanfall. And no matter how many times Captain Price tells you to let ‘em pass, there’s always an experimental RTS mechanic or Hitman-lite stealth mission waiting around the next corner. Call of Duty has been far more brave and changeable than it’s given credit for, and while the best ideas haven’t always stuck, they’re still very much playable. What’s more, they rarely outlast a weekend - which counts for a lot in an age of life-consuming AAA releases.
Over 20 years of service, I’ve played every single COD campaign, and can share my intel freely with allies like you. So hop in for a ride through the ups and downs of the series. Just don’t take the helicopter - those things never land softly around here.
5 Best Modern Warfare 2 Weapon LoadoutsWatch on YouTube
5 Best Modern Warfare 2 Weapon Loadouts
You’ll find every annualised entry of the series accounted for - bar Call Of Duty 3, which never came to PC, and probably never will. I’ve also made room among the rank and file for United Offensive, COD’s sole expansion pack. Both because it’s excellent, and because this is a safe place where you’re allowed to feel nostalgia for defunct PC gaming release formats.
19. Black Ops 3
18. Ghosts
This is not the Call Of Duty game with ‘offensive’ in the title, but it is the one that truly deserves it. Adrift after the departure of Jason West and Vince Zampella, Infinity Ward decides to concoct a near-future where South America has banded together to subjugate the US. Given North America’s history of the reverse, it’s an insensitive fantasy to say the least.
There are flashes of the coming brilliance of Infinite Warfare here - namely in the flash flood that crashes through Caracas as a dam bursts and leaves you gasping for higher ground. But when your chief inspiration and namesake is the Modern Warfare character whose personality consists of a skull-patterned balaclava? Well, there’s not much drama to wring out of a headsock.
17. Advanced Warfare
A rare COD with a clear purpose - which is to warn about the danger of private armies with private interests that diverge from the states that fund them. This is a confidently told story from the creative leads ofDead Space. Unfortunately, its message is much too tightly controlled.Advanced Warfareis linear the way a tightrope is: one step to the left or right of your objective and you’re punished with death.
You get a brief, beautiful holiday in Santorini, but pay for it in quick-time events. Plus: the villain is Kevin Spacey, and there are many who would now justifiably object to rendering his face on their screen.
16. Black Ops 2
How would you choose to soundtrack a shootout in a club full of civilians? Not dubstep? Then you have a stronger grasp of tone than Treyarch.Black Ops 2is a mishmash of bizarre juxtapositions - real-time strategy, branched storytelling, romanticised revenge rampages - and you have to credit the ambition, despite its deeply unpleasant character.
It’s interested in the generations of pain America’s secret wars leave behind - and how that legacy backfires on the West. Trouble is, one of those generations inhabits the far flung future of 2025 - a setting Treyarch brings to life with a rather embarrassing focus on bleepy-bloopy gadgetry. It’s less Goldeneye, more Mark Zuckerberg’s metaverse.
After release, game director Dave Anthony joined a Washington think tank dedicated to dreaming up non-traditional threats to America. You couldn’t make it up - unless, I suppose, it’s your job to make up the unimaginable.
15. Black Ops
If this was once your favourite Call Of Duty, I can say with some degree of certainty that you were a teenager in 2010. You loved Fight Club, and so, it’s clear, did Treyarch. But following in the immediate wake of Infinity Ward’s best efforts,Black Opsfelt clumsily constructed and mean-spirited.
The Forrest Gump of war crimes, it places you at the scene of the Bay of Pigs invasion, the explosion of a Soviet spacecraft, the Vietnam War and Kennedy’s assassination. And it doesn’t give you a break between any of them: Black Ops is a constant cacophony of tinny machine gun fire. It sounds like the album Lou Reed made when he got sick of having fans.
Pacing problems aside, Black Ops did at least offer a refreshing anti-nationalist perspective: “The flag may be different,” muttered Gary Oldman’s Viktor Reznov, “but the methods are the same.”
14. Modern Warfare 3 (2023)
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Activision
It was only a matter of time before the mechanics ofWarzone 2, COD’s most dominant form in recent years, broke through the Gora Dam and soaked a single-player campaign in the conventions ofbattle royale. A majority of your time inCall Of Duty: Modern Warfare 3is spent creeping around open maps looking for caches of grenades and hidden killstreaks, while staving off the attention of the AI guarding your objectives.
Only in bursts does this become the lavish, tightly-pacedFPSfans expected - perhaps because it was a rushed production, handed off to Sledgehammer rather than series originators Infinity Ward. Which, incidentally, is almost exactly what happened to Modern Warfare 3’s 2011 namesake. History really does repeat itself - particularly when your corporate paymasters fail to learn their lesson about greed.
13. Modern Warfare 3 (2011)
It’s remarkable thatModern Warfare 3is as coherent and consistent as it is, given the circumstances of its creation - right after Infinity Ward’s core team packed up and headed for Respawn. This is a series treading water for the first time, however - settling for familiar kinds of spectacle as it bulldozes one European capital after another.
There’s some slick perspective-swapping, and several moments of laugh-out-loud wonder at the audacity of the setpieces - most notably the crash of a tube train stuffed with terrorists. But at its worst, Modern Warfare 3 is a shooting gallery played with pop guns. It can’t match later iterations for oomph, and fails to advance the surprising storytelling of its predecessors. And as COD taught us early on, if you’re not advancing, you’re a sitting duck.
12. Vanguard
Like a commando breaking your neck,Vanguardtwists your head 180 degrees so that all you can see are flashbacks. Hope you like playing out tragic origin stories, because that’s all you’ll be doing, over and over - witnessing the untimely deaths of best mates and reminiscing about how formative they were for you.
11. Modern Warfare 2 (2022)
Taylor Kurosaki and Jacob Minkoff, the narrative and design directors behind Infinity Ward’s renaissance period, both left the studio in 2021 to set up a new venture. And their absence is already felt in the remixedCall Of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, which unwisely hangs much of its storytelling off cardboard cutouts like Soap and Ghost, and fails to match its immediate predecessor for convincing character development or emotional heft.
Unfortunately, all of these thrills are relegated to the back end of the journey, and the road there is forgettable and overfamiliar, leaning too hard on the model of 2019’s Clean House. The best singles here would absolutely feature on Infinity Ward’s greatest hits. But as an album, Modern Warfare II features too many songs we’ve heard before.
10. WWII
The most aesthetically artful COD ever made, it’s also a broad success in the story department: putting you at the mercy of a sergeant who seems hellbent on getting you killed. It’s the eternally relatable tale of a bullying boss whose personal failings become so dominant in your life that your own problems take a backseat.
9. United Offensive
United Offensive is stuffed with standout scenes, but the very best takes place in a flying corridor - a Boeing bomber, or “damn yank rattletrap”. You hop between seats as enemy fighters punch holes in the Flying Fortress’s flank, exposing you to the dizzyingly distant Netherlands down below. The roar, and that rattle, stay with you forever.
8. World At War
7. Modern Warfare (2019)
The original Modern Warfare trilogy ended with World War 3, maxing out the bombast and leaving the series with no room to escalate. For the reboot, Infinity Ward mercifully turned down the volume, introducing some much-needed dynamic range. Thenew Modern Warfare’s most successful moments are its most intimate - see the raid of a North London townhouse that finds you squinting at the hands of would-be targets to check if they’re armed before you go anywhere near the trigger.
That said, old mistakes are repeated: the demonisation of Russians; the lionisation of unaccountable special forces; the rewriting of real history in America’s favour. These are ugly blemishes on a story otherwise notable for its nuanced characterisation and critical take on Western-backed proxy warfare.
6. Call Of Duty 2
A worthy sequel, though not one that sets any new paradigms - to the point where it can be difficult to distinguish between memories of the first two games. A change in setting helps, the British segment taking in North Africa. And of course, this is the entry that does the D-Day landings - a remake of sorts, since Infinity Ward had originally tackled Omaha beach in Medal Of Honor: Allied Assault.
At its bravest, Infinity Ward dabbles in non-linear objectives - hinting at an alternate future where COD embraced Halo-style sandbox scenarios, rather than taking the path of ever tighter choreography. Call Of Duty 2 is also the last place you could pick a random squadmate and commit to seeing them through the fight - a minigame with no tangible prize, but deeply rewarding all the same.
5. Modern Warfare 2 (2009)
If you’re going to jump the shark, do it on a snowmobile. The swansong of the original COD team is a catalogue of brilliant Bond moments, so absurd that you don’t notice the cracks starting to show in the ice beneath your skis. The scale of its events severs any connection to the world we know, but the payoff is an electrifying sequence in which you fight house-to-house betwixt the picket fences and burger bars of idyllic America. It’s the incongruity that sells it.
No Russian’s airport attack understandably divides opinion to this day. Though it’s handled with an appropriate sense of distress, it’s arguably the moment that Infinity Ward lost the run of its own series - overestimating its tonal reach and burning its wings.
4. Black Ops: Cold War
If you’re fond of a spy story, you’ll find plenty to love about the debut campaign from Raven, the custodians of Warzone. Rooted in a Berlin safehouse during the early ‘80s, it taps into the Stasis surveillance and atom bomb paranoia of the era to terrific effect - leaving you straining to hear the muffled conversations behind the office door of your handler, lest they reveal something about what’s coming to you. Rarely has performance capture been so subtly deployed as in the hub where you observe your peers and sift through intel to locate targets.
3. Call Of Duty
This is the game that establishes COD’s cadence - flitting between dug-in American squads and moustachioed British commandos. But it’s the Russian campaign that sticks with you. In Stalingrad, survival is a matter of keeping your head below the parapet, listening to your orders, and enacting the desperate hail marys that might just stop the slaughter. The whistling rattle of an encroaching tank still makes me cringe in fear - a pitiful mortal hoping to pass unscathed between the caterpillar tracks of an unforgiving god.
2. Call Of Duty 4: Modern Warfare
Infinity Ward had long cast us as multiple protagonists in Call Of Duty; its stroke of genius with Modern Warfare was in realising they were all disposable. Each playable character in its defining campaign is merely a roving camera, an impossible perspective on events you could never experience firsthand and live to recount. Ground zero of a nuclear attack; the victim’s eye view of a presidential execution; this is tornado chasing at its most extreme and alluring. As a storytelling device, it remains incredibly powerful - a shocking and unpredictable form of first-person cinema. It turned Call Of Duty into COD, the pop cultural phenomenon.
1. Infinite Warfare
A portion of the Call Of Duty audience dismissedInfinite Warfarelong before it came out, downvoting its debut trailer into oblivion. That’s their loss, and a terrible one. This is not the floaty, unimaginative futurism that plagued Black Ops. Instead, it’s a hard science fiction story that lashes itself firmly to terra firma, even as its cast breaches the exosphere and leaves gravity behind.
Its Martians are not green, nor do their eyes grow on stalks. They are human beings, colonists descended from colonists with no experience of life on Earth and, consequently, no allegiance to it either. They think we are soft and pampered, an ungrateful drain on their mining resources, and they hate us for it. They’re probably not wrong to. Even Ethan, the combat robot programmed for bants, makes a kind of sense - his one-liners endearing him to his fellow Marines, improving their efficiency as a unit.
All the while, the action shifts breathlessly between outer space dogfights and zero-g ambushes. Even the simplest encounters leave room for vertical motion, stealth and, as a treat, bot hijacking - another shift of perspective from the studio that first mastered the art. It’s the decade’s worth of invention that had been missing in the years since Modern Warfare, and a wonderful redemption story for a developer that had lost its way.
