Review of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 - soap opera

Here's what I didn't expect going into this game is Review of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2: Infinity Ward now has its own "press F to pay homage" moment, only worse in almost every imaginable way.

Campaign in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2

About halfway through the campaign, you find yourself chasing a terrorist through the yards and houses of a US border town. Every now and then, a frightened villager will pop out from behind the door and demand you leave immediately, and when this happens, a prompt will appear at the top of the screen: "Hold right mouse button to de-escalate." According to Call of Duty, the best way to calm down an angry villager is to wave a gun in their face.

This isn't just a farcical button prompt; it is an attempt to bring complete clarity to a situation that is inherently messy. You don't point a deadly weapon at an innocent person, you de-escalation situation. Likewise, you spend most of the story tearing apart villages and towns in foreign countries while chasing a terrorist, but the team completely freezes when they actually catch the guy, since it would be illegal to neither kill nor detain him. They have nothing to say about the occasional death and destruction among civilians along the way, but a very high and powerful message right at the moment of death. It's like someone left a note in the script: "Let's maybe cut out a few of these war crimes, it's okay if we don't."

Modern Warfare 2 sticks to many of the mission types and mechanics that were introduced in MW 2019, but has lost all interest in the dubious morality of modern conflict. There are breakout and clear missions in the game, but almost everyone you encounter is either a fighter or pretending to be one until they point a gun at you. And if you accidentally shoot a civilian, it will be an instant mission failure; you don't have to relive this moment or even watch death, it's just a quick reset like you hit the wrong target in the shooting range.

Instead, Modern Warfare 2 focuses on the characters of Task Force 141. We see Price take on a leadership role, Gaz becomes more confident, Ghost becomes less selfish, and Laswell steps onto the battlefield. This manifests itself in several ways. First, there are a lot more radio and mid-mission conversations that develop each character's personality. Secondly, there are now a number of key plot points that are relegated to story scenes rather than being played in first person. It's like a SWAT melodrama where brooding and enigmatic tough guys learn the importance of working together.

And that might be a worthy price to pay if the characters - while brilliantly portrayed by the Modern Warfare 2 cast - weren't just a little boring. There's only so much you can do with a team of people who almost always agree with each other and are always able to collectively save the day. We have to rely on the villains to build tension, and unfortunately most of the twists and turns land like a wad of wet tissue.

Missions in Modern Warfare 2

Story aside, the missions in Modern Warfare 2 are actually quite good. You move between open stealth sandboxes and tighter choreographed shooting ranges, stopping every few missions for something completely different, like providing fire support from a ship or a Mad Max-style highway chase in which you dive from car to car, to get to the front of the column.

In those rare moments when you find yourself unarmed, there is a new crafting mechanic in which you scour for glue, metals and other random materials, and then construct crude tools and traps. You can craft drawer and door unlocking tools, one-time sharpeners, nail bombs, and more, but the mechanics never force you to make hard decisions, and it's often easier to just sneak around until you find a weapon. It's a great taste cleanser at first, but later episodes slow down the pace of the campaign.

The shooting is sharp and effective, and the slow and tricky scenes look just as nimble as they did in All Ghillied Up, but it seems that the ratio behind this tried-and-true formula is a bit off this time. There are missions in which you control the cannons of an AC-130 helicopter, firing at the bad guys on the ground with various building-destroying ammunition, and in the next mission, you will have a highway chase. Of course, there is a little more action here, but in the aggregate it looks like three missions with turrets in a row.

When the actual gunfight begins, it is soon interrupted by either a cutscene or a stealth sequence. It's more stop-start than any other COD game in recent memory, and the highlights are diluted by overly boring stealth missions. I've never played Call of Duty before and thought it would be nice to have more actual gunplay, so in that regard Modern Warfare 2 breaks new ground for the series. It's not one of Call of Duty's best campaigns, but it has some nice moments.

Shooting and weapons in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2

If there's any connective tissue between the campaign and the multiplayer, it's that they both rely on the excellent shooting mechanics implemented in Modern Warfare 2019. Weapons rumble and boom, and you can hear each shot echoing through the environment from concrete boulevards and crashing into foliage. Flashes, steam and smoke fill the screen every time you pull the trigger - it's extremely satisfying. And it never comes at the expense of Call of Duty's famous smoothness.

Full-auto fire looks loud, brash, and erratic, but underneath all that chugging and chugging lies such precision: your aiming always seems to be perfectly accurate, no matter the recoil you're fighting and any changes you make to the weapon with Gunsmith's modification tools. , palpable. Choose a lighter stock and a heavier suppressor and you will feel the difference in faster transitions from aiming to shooting and from sprinting to shooting, but now your rifle is so heavy that it wobbles a lot when trying to make an accurate shot and wobbles when shooting.

While these systems still work great in Modern Warfare 2, they've been wrapped up in one of the most confusing and messy class creation menus in years, perhaps ever. Certain weapons in Modern Warfare 2 are now part of the weapon platform, so grinding attachments for the AK-inspired Kastov 762 assault rifle will eventually unlock similar weapons such as the Kastov 545, RPK, and Kastov-74u. But it's not as easy as maximizing the starting rifle; to get the Kastov-74u you will need to complete a certain number of levels in each weapon between it and 762 in the weapon platform.

To further confuse things, there are a bunch of generic weapon attachments that have specific unlock requirements, so if I want to put my favorite red dot optic on a max level Kastov 762, I'll have to spend a couple of hours leveling up the weapons I not going to use.

In another case where Infinity Ward is trying to fix a system that wasn't broken, perks have also been remade into perk packs. You now start with two perks and will unlock two more perks as the match progresses. However, all the best perks, for example, “Ghost”, which allows you to not notice enemy radars, are unlocked around the middle of the match. This has resulted in the UAV Recon Drone becoming both the easiest and most effective kill weapon, as it is impossible to hide from during the first half of the match.

Movement techniques such as jumping around corners and unslipping have been removed from the game to make gunplay easier, more realistic, and more accessible to newcomers and casual players. How you feel about this change will depend on how you rate your skill level, but I think it has resulted in a more consistent game.

Maps and modes in Modern Warfare 2 overview

Unfortunately, Modern Warfare 2 has one of the worst main multiplayer maps in the series, plus a strong contender for the worst Call of Duty map. of all time in the form of the Santa Sena border crossing. More on this later, but the problem with the rest of the pool is a familiar one: most of Modern Warfare 2's maps were based on real-life locations and were barely adapted to the fast-paced multiplayer of Call of Duty. Three-lane designs, which used to be the bread and butter of COD cards, are rare in MW2, and when they do appear, they are usually in an awkward, elongated or extended form.

There is a constant feeling that the enemy is almost always at your side or even behind you, rarely in front. Playing objective-based modes like Headquarters on some long or wide maps is pure masochism, as you can find yourself in the center of the map and even right in front of enemies. Tall buildings, rooftops, and balconies provide many more opportunities for snipers, but the angles available to these players sometimes extend all the way to enemy spawns.

Santa Sena is the worst example. The map is located between two border checkpoints, so you're essentially fighting between abandoned cars on a stretch of highway that's your main lane. There are two more lanes on one side, but both are incredibly narrow. All cars can be blown up with explosives, which quadruples the blast radius of a grenade, so you're always one completely random projectile throw away from being sent back to respawn. And when these vehicles are destroyed, their skeletons can be shot through or used for cover; this is bad considering how clever Call of Duty players are at exploiting tiny angles.

You either have to play Russian roulette with exploding cars and countless corners of the main lane, or squeeze through two smaller lanes that are just as prone to explosive spam and machine gunners. And because the map is so long, if you're playing at HQ, the spawn options are so limited that you'll regularly spawn directly in front of or behind enemies.

Larger modes like Invasion and Ground War provide a good resemblance to the large-scale war games of Battlefield, but the maps again let them down: there are too many opportunities for snipers, and the layout allows winning teams to literally kill opponents as they appear.

These issues speak to a lack of subtlety and polish that can be seen throughout Modern Warfare 2. There are locked attachments that have no unlock criteria, making them impossible to obtain. You can equip double XP tokens, but nothing tells you if they are still active or for how long. The game has no barracks, no player records, no challenge menu, so players can't even keep track of the K/D ratio. Fans of the hardcore mode will have to wait a couple of weeks for it to arrive as part of the first season, while those who want to dive into the new part of Gunsmith will have to find that it has been disabled due to a bug.

Spec Ops suffers from a similar problem. There are only three missions available at the start, which took me about 2 hours to complete, but their quality is much higher than the 2019 attempts. The enemy AI is still not reliable enough to rely on if you and a friend are trying to stealthily clear targets on huge Warzone-style maps, but there's next to nothing here to keep co-op gamers satisfied for more than half a day. Raids will appear in a couple of weeks, so maybe things will improve then.

It all feels a little lacking and empty, something the series has never been guilty of in the past. One year COD may have had fewer cards or weapons than the previous installment, but the backbone has always been good. Here the matter is different.

And yet, despite all these complaints, Modern Warfare 2 has the same strong gameplay as its 2019 predecessor. If the first reboot was the gaming equivalent of a short cocktail of a spicy shooter, then MW2 is a watered-down version with too many inappropriate ingredients thrown into it. I'd still happily devour it, but I'd think twice about ordering it again.