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Soap, stalking through the shadows of gore-stained houses, shops, and alleyways, becomes another creature from a nightmare thanks to the level's design. The dark of the night and the presence of so much brutality construct strong, appropriately shocking imagery of the PMCs' evil. The player must collect household materials to craft tools and weapons to pick off members of a superior force as they set about their massacre. As he tries to hide from the American PMCs mercilessly executing civilians throughout a stretch of moonlit alleys and roads, Soap finds himself cast in a veritable horror movie. In one mission, for example, Task Force 141 operative John "Soap" MacTavish is stranded in a small Mexican city’s cobblestoned streets. At its best, the flexibility of its format allows the game to switch genres to heighten its dramatic purposes. Modern Warfare II is determined not to bore the player by constantly tweaking Call of Duty’s fast-paced, first-person gunfights as it tells this story from mission to mission. What the Iranian, Russian, Mexican, or the American government (outside of one CIA Station Chief and a general) think of their countries covertly and openly tearing each other apart is ignored to concentrate instead on the granular next steps in advancing or stopping Zyani's plans. They do so motivated by the urgency of survival. Players turn distant enemies into puffs of red while sniping during stealthy infiltration missions, run and gun and blow stuff up in all-out firefights, and control or call in air support to blast distant targets into dark smears. The plot unfolds in predictably bloody fashion. Players assume the viewpoints of characters attempting to thwart Zyani, embarking on a whirlwind globe tour that throws away the larger implications of the story's conflict in favor of more immediate, less complicated matters.These characters include British members of the invented Task Force 141 and Alejandro Vargas, a colonel in the Mexican Special Forces, as well as occasional segments seen through the eyes (and lens of a gunship camera) of Modern Warfare II’s American-based private military organization, Shadow Company. Instead of delving into the political murkiness that the Modern Warfare subseries is well positioned to examine, what follows is a disappointingly cynical and aimless exercise in storytelling. While Call of Duty has pulled from recent history to frame its stories in the past, basing Modern Warfare II's set-up on such a contentious event – and naming Iran specifically rather than choosing to abstract the reference by setting the assassination in one of the series' fictional nations – provides a promise for narrative ambition that the game fails to fulfill. Sketched in brief, this plot is a modern paranoiac’s dreams come to life, Zyani collaborating with Russian allies and a fictional Mexican cartel to plan a missile strike on the continental United States. In a departure from recent history, this affront to a sovereign nation is met with a byzantine terrorist retaliation plot concocted by the dead general’s successor, Major Hassan Zyani. As in the actual Soleimani’s killing, Call of Duty’s fictional Quds Force commander “Major Ghorbrani” is assassinated by American forces using a drone strike, here controlled by the player. Modern Warfare II opens with a lightly fictionalized version of the real-life assassination of Iranian Quds Force commander Major General Qasem Soleimani.

And yet, the surface-level hideousness of its parade of death might not be so notably ugly if it wasn't for Modern Warfare II's cast of characters and the way they – drawn from international special forces, a private military company’s contractors, and a Mexican cartel – view the world. Like every Call of Duty game, the majority of time spent playing involves either killing or being killed in horrendous ways, for one thing, and there’s a natural revulsion that comes from seeing so many gouts of blood shooting from bodies or the ragged slump of newly lifeless human corpses piled up in a doorway. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II is a very unpleasant game.