W hat’s the difference between the special operators of the Modern Warfare games and the protagonists of Treyarch’s Black Ops series? Much of the time, there isn’t one. Both series are dramatisations of the US military’s ability to parachute wired-up jarheads into ‘unstable’ regions at whim. In Cold War, as in Modern Warfare 2, you will eviscerate people in doorways and snipe them from cliffsides. You will breach doors in slow motion and rain death from a circling gunship. But where the special operator is portrayed as a rational, surgical response to a world that is always one rogue element from disaster, the black ops soldier is a more ambiguous figure – ‘plausibly deniable’, existing in the redacted spaces formed by superpower paranoia where reason finds little purchase. Among other things, this permits a showier disregard for the rules of engagement. One of the first things you do in Cold War is gun down a group of men from behind as they watch TV. A little later, you’re invited to throw an interrogation subject from a roof after roughing him up – one of a handful of pivotal dialogue choices throughout the game.
Set in the ’80s with occasional jaunts back to the Vietnam War, Cold War’s singleplayer is a five-to-tenhour hunt for a legendary Soviet agent known as Perseus. Between missions, you sift through evidence about your quarry on an investigation board at your safe house, gossip with allies (the usual parade of wetworkers from opposite sides of the Atlantic) and replay chapters for bonus intel. Computer terminals let you poke through KGB memos, and there’s a dark room where you’ll find photographs from previous sorties. At times the game threatens to become an intelligence analyst simulator: there are two side missions with optional ‘best’ endings that require you to decrypt passwords and identify sleeper agents. For the most part, however, it treats this material as a retro aesthetic, rather than information to be decoded. Loading cinematics abound with period trappings such as perspex maps and magnetic tape reels.