8 Video Games Where You Played As The Wrong Character
3. Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare (2019) - Farah Karim
Infinity Ward's much-anticipated soft reboot of Modern Warfare promised a mature, sensitive commentary on the nature of war in the current global political climate.
Of course this was total rubbish, as the game was just as full of military cheerleading as ever, and its historical revisionism concerning the depiction of Russians was straight out of a bad 1980s action movie.
Worse still was its choice of protagonists.
Whilst it feels like a bit of a rug-pull that Captain John Price doesn't feature as a playable character, focusing the SAS storyline instead on sergeant Kyle Garrick (later known as Gaz), that's far from the worst storytelling offence the game commits. Far worse is the heavy promotion of Urzik rebel leader Farah Karim, only for her to be completely thrown under the bus in service of another stock protagonist with a moustache.
The ability to play as Farah suggested an opportunity to finally see warzones through the eyes of a character native to the region, with a genuine investment in the war they are fighting.
Instead, Farah is relegated to one gimmicky flashback mission and an interactive cutscene in the finale and the rest of the Middle-East segment of the game centres around Alex, an embedded CIA operator straight off the generic white-bread video game protagonist production line.
Less a missed opportunity than cynically pandering to Call Of Duty's core fanbase, methinks.