Is Call of Duty a bad game?

Wherever you go within the gaming industry, you're sure to find people who all have the same opinion on one particular game franchise: Call of Duty. Whether it be from parents or previous generations complaining that it's too violent and kids are spending too much of their time on it or from pretentious gamers who claim that it's been the same game since Call of Duty 4. Now I myself used to be leaning more towards a negative opinion than a positive one towards the franchise, and how it's publishers are milking its consumer base for everything they possibly can., however, in the last three or four months I got a PS3, ended up borrowing a Call of Duty game from a friend and have been hooked ever since. Now I have played it for a significant amount of time, I'm willing to weigh in again, my thoughts and opinions on whether it is a good game or whether the industry would be better off without the sodding franchise.

Now when it comes to the single player campaign of any CoD game since Modern Warfare, you generally get the same shit thrown at it: “Oh, it's a six hour campaign at a full AAA game price with thinly disguised versions of terrorists from the modern world, it's not worth my time”.

Now to be fair, that is a valid point. The campaigns in anything past Call of Duty 4 have been six hour trigger-happy gunslinging murder-fests. There isn't much of a story to the games, there's no real character development within the narrative and the characters all seem to be macho cock-compensating American tosspots who are as deep as a kids paddling pool, and the story arcs – I say that term loosely – are basically framing devices to get from point A in the game to point B. All that being said, in all the games they all focus on action. The games feature expansive dogfights in wartorn cities, sinking ships, fighting in underground lairs, taking down helicopters etc. It's all about the action. You could say that the Call of Duty franchise is the Hollywood spectacle movie of the videogame world. In my experience, any game that makes me go “fuck yeah!” holds a positive feeling. For example, in Call of Duty 4, an explosion so big it would make God balls shrivel in fear just comes in to crash the party in the form of a nuclear detonation whilst your buddy in the helicopter decides it would be absolutely marvelous to jump out and closer to the fireworks and pretty rubble. This is one such “FUCK YEAH!” moment.  

"brb looking at pretty lights lol"

When people spout the aforementioned opinion on the fact the campaigns are short as hell, they tend to forget the one thing Call of Duty players spend most of their time on: the multiplayer. As of writing this, I have spent a whopping 74 hours playing Call of Duty: Black Ops on the multiplayer, and roughly, 5-7 hours on the single player. When someone buys a Call of Duty game, chances are, they will gloss over the single player, possibly play the Spec Ops missions, but it's mainly about the multiplayer. The multiplayer offers hours upon hours of gameplay. Is this gameplay artificially lengthened by the Prestige system? Well most definitely, but at least that goal gives players something to work to, even if it does seem tedious and monotonous to players outside the Call of Duty community.   

What I'm saying is, Call of Duty is by no means the worst thing to happen to gaming like a lot of people make it out to be. Yeah it's hugely iterative of itself, and hasn't done much evolving since Call of Duty 4, but it's not the worst, and when it comes to the community being, well, dicks, that's not Call of Duty's fault. Not directly anyway. That fault lies on the gaming community itself and needs to be resolved as such. That is also another post for another day.