By: Tyler Miller
This weekend brought the Playstation exclusive Alpha for the brand new Gunfight mode in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare. Being the fan of the series that I am and the excitement that I have for this brand new reinvention of my favorite sub-series in the franchise, I just had to get my hands on it and see how the game felt and how the mode played. And overall, I’m pretty positive on it.
Gunfight is a 2v2 mode where everyone spawns in with the same loadout. You have 40 seconds to eliminate the other team before the game goes into overtime and a flag spawns to be captured. Whoever then captures the flag within 10 seconds or has the most health when time is up is the winner. Matches are fast and go by quickly due to the short length of the matches and the fact that everyone only has one life. There’s no respawning or health regenerating in this mode.
Now I’m normally not a fan of one life to live modes. I never really like the high pressure of having one life to live and things almost never really end up going well for me when I play game types like this, but I still wanted to give Gunfight the fair college try. Although I still got frustrated with how quickly I would die, I actually still had fun playing the mode. Things were fast paced and intense, and I found myself having fun with the high stakes that each round would bring.
The maps are also specifically made for Gunfight, so they’re incredibly small. You’re able to see your enemies right from the start of the match and if you’re lucky enough, you’ll even be able to take them out before even leaving the spawn area. I was a fan of the maps for the most part. The one map that I didn’t really like all that much was Pine. It takes place in a forest which means that there’s a lot of foliage for enemies to blend in with, making it hard to see them. There would be a lot of times where I would get shot from an area where I couldn’t see the enemy, but they were just right next to a bush so I couldn’t really see them.
My biggest issue with the maps though is the amount of head glitches that were prevalent in some of the maps. For those that don’t know, head glitching is when you’re hiding behind an object in a way that allows you to see and shoot clearly over it, but causes the enemy to just barely see the tip of your head. It’s frustrating to deal with because it’s incredibly hard to kill people that are doing this since the head is already a tough spot to shoot in games. The map Stack is one where this would happen all the time, so it’s something that I hope the team at Infinity Ward manages to fix in some kind of way across all of the game’s maps.
During the Alpha, Infinity Ward added an alternate Gunfight mode called Gunfight OSP (On Sight Procurement). This alternate mode still adheres to the 2v2 format, but instead of both teams spawning in with a pre-set loadout, everyone spawns in with nothing and has to pick up weapons that are laid around the map. I found that this mode was not as fun as standard Gunfight because victory typically ended up going to the team that managed to pick up the better gun first, or the team that was lucky enough to have better guns on their side of the map. On top of that, picking up weapons would take just a bit too long, causing precious seconds to be wasted trying to prepare yourself.
If there’s one thing about Gunfight that’ll greatly increase your enjoyment of it, it’s having a dedicated partner to play with, or at least someone with a microphone. While I was able to find some success playing with people that didn’t use microphones, the team oriented nature of the mode encourages you to communicate with your teammate. Just knowing where they’ve seen enemies and being able to coordinate a plan with them goes a long way to making the mode more fun.
It also doesn’t help that playing with randoms leads to people leaving partway through the match A LOT. I can’t explain how many times my teammate would leave halfway through the game, leaving me to fight by myself for the last couple rounds. It’s annoying because you’re basically guaranteed to lose in a 1v2 due to the small map size and the fast time to kill. I strongly feel like if your teammate leaves, you should be given 200 health to match the amount of health that the other team has, giving you a fighting chance.
Outside of Gunfight, the game feels, sounds, and looks great. The game is running on a new engine so there are improvements in every area. First off, the game feels different than past games in the franchise. There’s more weight to the characters and weapons than has been in most recent games. Running, sliding, and jumping over obstacles has actual weight to it and doesn’t feel like you’re a parkour runner with nothing holding you back. There are new animations as well and they all work towards a more realistic feel for the game than ever before.
The guns feel powerful and like real forces of nature. They kick like a raging bull and take some getting used to in order to get a feel for how each of them works and how to properly control them. They all sound just as powerful as they feel too. I was genuinely surprised by how loud the guns were. They sound differently too based on the environment you’re in as well. Shooting inside a metal container sounds different from shooting in the outdoors. It’s a small touch, but it goes a long way towards realism and being immersive. The weapons and world all look amazing too. It’s truly an amazing step up from past games.
After playing the Alpha this past weekend, I’m feeling pretty good about Call of Duty: Modern Warfare. While I don’t think I’ll be playing Gunfight all the time when the final game comes out, I definitely want to play more of the mode. The Alpha also gave me a good idea as for how the game will feel to play and that’s what I’m most excited about. I’m looking forward to getting my hands on the game some more next month when the Beta drops and playing some Team Deathmatch or Domination on the core multiplayer maps, as well as fiddling around with the Gunsmith customization. Things are certainly looking up for Modern Warfare.
TheComfySpot 