Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare: The Campaign is Too Morbid

War is a gritty situation often filled with vast counts of death and sorrow which are emulated to a degree within Infinite Warfare. While it's nice to see the series take another violent look at war without sugar coating it, doing so in a Sci-Fi environment doesn't hold the same affect and it usually doesn't factor well into a story. There will be spoilers ahead so unless you've beaten the game or don't intend to play it I'd suggest not reading forward.

In war there are usually many deaths and in stories about war that really emulate the setting they do follow that. With the case of Infinite Warfare I felt that they took the campaign towards a too morbid type of atmosphere. This involved many deaths, but they also wiped out the entire cast. When creating stories your main characters and their close friends are supposed to be important parts of the tale. In Infinite Warfare it tries to elicit forced emotion by basically killing off every single person you come across. This is supposed to build a sorrowing effect, except when you do that multiple times within the same story it loses the luster.

Thinking back to a few games where death was big (Gears/CoD MW3 Spoilers next sentence) such as with Dom in Gears 3 or Soap in Modern Warfare the deaths were a big deal. That's because these characters grew on people over time and while others died along the way, if a larger group of characters had died before them it wouldn't have been impactful. This was a big issue I had with Infinite Warfare in that people were dying constantly to the point that I didn't feel any shock or care towards them. They were falling like flies with some having heroic fates and other ones just having a silly way to go. I didn't have enough time to really care for any of them since they appear minimally across the story and after the third one went in a half hour it was just somewhat ridiculous. Oh, that guy went into the fire like an idiot to die whereas we have special suits and could have just helped him.

More characters continue to die later and eventually by the end those remaining had a death wish for some reason. This wasn't helped by the mindless slaughter of civilians that started off the whole chain and even though that's there to demoralize it only softened the darker later portions of the game. Infinity Ward is known for having shock value moments in their campaigns from the London Incident (MW3) to No Russian (MW2), but they took every opportunity to kill everyone in this game. Those portions of the games were shocking, but that's because they were a singular event. It was crazy to the point that I was just thinking, meh another bites the dust by the end. To summarize; I don't mind death in games about war or conflict, but they need those moments matter when it comes to crafting a compelling story.



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