Call of Duty: Modern Warfare is being review-bombed because of a rewritten war crime

Whether the story manages to keep you on the edge of the seat or functions as a paint by numbers Hollywood blockbuster may be a divisive topic for some in this year’s Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, but there’s no denying that Activision’s premiere shooter experience does a hell of a job in how it tells its tale of contemporary conflict.

Said telling also excels at embellishing certain truths, particularly in the case of the Highway of Death mission that allows players to chill in a sniper’s nest and orchestrate a massive counterattack against Russian and insurgent forces in the area. Here’s the thing though: That infamous highway is an actual stretch of land that was home to some truly brutal attacks.

Dial back the clock to 1991, and America’s attack on Iraq in the Gulf War happens to be more one-sided than a Mobius strip. The Iraqi forces were in retreat by February, and on one particular stretch of road the US decided to bomb them into oblivion over two days in what was described as overly-excessive show of force, even by American standards. Imagine if Mike Tyson in his prime stepped into a boxing ring to fight a quadruple amputee and you’d get a rough idea of what “excessive” means.

So what’s the problem here? In the actual mission, your ally Farah mentions that “the Russians bombed … killing the people trying to escape.” At this point, you may have noticed that the Russians were nowhere to be found when the US bombed the Iraqi highway back into the stone age, something which has angered Russian Call of Duty fans immensely – and could perhaps be why Sony decided to halt sales of the game there. Head on over to Metacritic, and you’ll spot the game having a low as heck user review score, with the number sitting at 3/10 at the time of writing.

That number happens to have dropped significantly over the last two days, with many of the recent reviews having Russian origins or mentions of the country in them. “The game has good graphics. But the plot is disgusting propaganda and lies. Perhaps the creators of the game, in the future, should be prosecuted for the vile lies that they promote in this game. It remains only to make a game that justifies the Nazis. Shame,” reads Dallas33’s 0/10 review which was totally written by a steak-eating flag-bleeding patriot who watches the Navy cop show that protects America da.

Here’s a smattering of other 0/10 reviews that have been less than kind:

Спасибо Сони, что не выпустили это гавно у себя в магазине! Руссофобы, идите нах. Больше не куплю игры от активижн

Ha ha. Welcome to the world of American propaganda with bad Russians and good Americans.

instead of the promised gray game, you filed a Russophobian piece of **** don’t buy

You are on the right track talking about tolerance in your country, but expressing Nazism towards other countries! Bravo!!

Showing one nation as demons and another nation as angels is the same thing as RACISM. Surprise, it’s called NAZISM and it doesn’t matter what nation is on either side their is no GOOD or BAD nations or races. 0 for NAZI propaganda.

Angry Russians expressing their distaste over a real war crime being turned into a fake one that points the finger of blame at a different country? I’m not exactly surprised. It’s a pity though, because such embellishments in a game where Infinity Ward punted a story that “reflect the world that we live in” makes for a distasteful end result. After all, between Russia and the US, there’s more than enough horrendous war crimes that both nations have committed over the years for a video game developer to take inspiration from.

Last Updated: October 29, 2019