You creep up the steps, and the bad guys scream anxiously to each other, knowing something is amiss. You hear panicked voices. Bursting into another dark room, you shotgun one bad guy, turn and see a frantic woman. She screams “No, no no!” but inches back towards a table with an object on it. You shoot her dead just has her hand was nearly on the object she was reaching for, which, upon closer inspection, was a detonator. On another floor, you do more night vision-powered close-quarters combat, punctuated by an encounter with a woman holding a baby. You don’t pull the trigger – and it's unclear if the game would let you do so if you tried – but it’s a disturbing moment nevertheless.
“Disturbing” is a good starting point for the rebel mission I saw next. It is rebel leader Farrah’s origin story, of sorts, flashing back to when she was a young girl of maybe 10 or so and Russians were violently taking control of their Eastern European town, block by block. A particularly massive, Ivan Drago-like soldier busts into your house, gasmask covering his face. You, as young Farrah, watch as your father tries to fight the brute off, only to watch him thrown aside and shot. As he bleeds out while slumped against a wall, you and your younger brother must try and escape the grasp of the enemy soldier. You crawl through an open ventilation duct between rooms in the small, single-story house, creep into the hallway, pick up a screwdriver off the floor, and then sneak up behind the hunter. You jab the tool into his calf. He writhes in pain, throws you aside, and the chase is on again. You repeat this harrowing two more times, and on the third encounter, your little brother hops on the intruder’s back, hangs from his neck, and gives you a chance to get the gun off of the soldier’s back and put a few rounds in his chest, narrowly missing shooting your own brother and ending the fight. It’s stressful, dramatic, and tense – like Call of Duty’s version of a boss fight. And I hope we see more moments like this in the full campaign.
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