Especially the campaigns, and especially how certain characters and moments are presented in the campaigns.
It's like right on the borderline of being a chuddy glorification of the military and being an absolute pisstake of things that chuddily glorify the military, and I genuinely can't work out which way it's trying to go with it.
I swear MW2 is like, almost there, but no, they're playing it straight, which is kind of incredible in its own way, in retrospect. MW2 having a disgruntled critic of the invasion trying to get whatever they could past the CIA and MIC editors is a particular brainworm of mine that I like to entertain, though.
CoD4 was easily the most blatant jingoistic hoorah bullshit of the series, but the later games (especially post-2007 when the invasion really started to sour for the general public) made a point of drifting way more into historical fiction and campy scifi cold war stuff to avoid having a Six Days in Fallujah situation.
to this day I'm convinced MW2 was supposed to have an entirely different campaign that they somehow cut up in the very last minute. There are so many scenes from the trailer and entire levels like that bridge that's under a drone attack that never made it into the campaign, but were clearly meant to be single player levels. Or that weird nuke suitcase chase through the suburbs or whatever that was - went nowhere! There's absolutely no story payoff to that! Also the whole Shepfer turning evil and you having to chase him through Afghanistan felt weird and fake, like wtf there just plain are no fucking aircraft boneyards in AF, and also no shadow US Spec Ops Army could like hide out there, like why would they even do that and all.
No, it was supposed to be an entirely different game and I'd really like to know who fucked up and when.
Sorry for rambling, just had to get that out of my mind, I turn 40 this year. Fuck.
CoD4 had shades of being anti-war at times. MW2 was where they cannonballed into full-blown jingoism what with the Russians launching a suicide invasion of the East and explicitly stating they want to kill civilians.
I need to replay it to refresh myself on details of the story, just to see how fucking nuts it is through the lens of 2021.
I had honestly forgotten about the parts focusing on the actual Russian military forces, because most of that stuff made no god damn sense anyways. They can barely annex a postage stamp off the corner of an ally nation without almost starting a world war, the fuck kind of advance planning are they gonna secretly do to conquer like five times their own habitable landmass so quickly that the US military is unable to respond effectively?
EDIT: Nevermind about invading the way I mentioned, they invaded the eastern coast of the US? How the hell does that make any sense?
MW3 was even more absurd in that it portrayed Makarov as a terrorist unaffiliated with the Russian government, that the Good Russian President actually wanted to make peace, but also the Russian Army was launching a massive simultaneous invasion of every major city in Western Europe preluded by chemical weapons attacks staged by Makarov's terrorists.
Basically they kept doubling down on the plot making absolutely no logical sense. The plot became the filler that linked together a series of Cool Setpieces.
Even COD 4 was walking on eggshells at the time considering one of the factions was the soviet union