Genre: First-Person Shooter
Developer: Infinity Ward
Publisher: Activision

This new Call of Duty's engine has some serious technical chops, supporting everything from tesselation to Nvidia's RTX ray tracing implementation, configurable via one of the most in-depth settings menus ever. The art direction though is hit-and-miss; the character designs are either absurdly cliche or, in the case of the women, ugly, while most of the stages fail to create those classic photogenic moments.

The music was written by a woman named Sara Schachner, and her Wikipedia article says that she writes music for movies. And sure enough, the compositions in the game are poster children for everything wrong with video game music today. The game's sound effects are extremely realistic, with every bullet ricochet making this reviewer want to dive out of his chair for cover!

This is still a thing; the levels quite literally involve following scripted prompts and occasionally shooting someone-- it feels a bit like one of those dreadful early-90s FMV games. At least the control scheme makes actions like aiming and proning easy. The multiplayer feels like playing "Unreal Tournament" on "instagib" mode-- everything is a one-shot kill, so the enjoyable cat-and-mouse aspects of deathmatch are totally lost.

Lousy single player, mediocre deathmatch, run-of-the-mill art direction, and corny "could have been algorithmically-generated" Hollywood music. Can it get worse? Yes it can: every "good" leader in the game is a strong independent womyn who shouts down white cis-gendered males. Further, the game's antagonists are Russians who essentially act like Nazi concentration camp guards. Meanwhile, other contemporary war acts-- like the faked Douma gas attacks, or the US's "Highway of Death" campaign, are re-attributed for propagandistic purposes. All-in-all, this game is memorable for one thing: being terrible on essentially every level.