Needs some polish, but still a fun game.
To start, you have two separate games here. Single player and multiplayer.
Multiplayer is what it is, an online version of every other shooter you have ever played. Yes the maps are different, yes the weapons are different but if you know what multiplayer is like for CoD, then you have a good idea of the experience you are getting yourself into, with a few exceptions:
Positives:
The weapons can be picked up and played with pretty easily. The toughest part of any of the weapons is avoiding the snipers on the other team! Ammo is sufficiently given out and you don't get the feeling that you are being watched (aka no kill cams!). The maps are well designed and if there is anything great about this game it is the fact that the maps are new, where as in CoD if you played MW1, you pretty much know the maps of MW2 because all they did is import the old, add new textures, and poof. $60 more for you to play the same stuff!
Negatives:
If you are to find one major negative it would be the EA servers to start. So far, two weeks in, I still get dropped 3-5 times per day (playing maybe 4 hours at most). This is especially frustrating because xp is earned as you finish a round, so getting dropped means losing all the xp you may have collected. And nothing sucks more than going on a 15-2 run only to be dropped from the server, other than having it happen multiple times in the same session! Other points in this negatives column would be a severe lack of weapon customization options. From the descriptions leading up to release I was expecting something more along the lines of Army of Two where you can really customize your weapons as you go along. Instead, you get 3 slots to interchange with and you only get to use those if your xp improves, which it does, just slowly, thanks to the server drops!
Overall, multiplayer in this game is refreshing if you can stay on the server, and it is fun if you can learn the maps enough to know where not to go to avoid the number of snipers (or those that think they can snipe).
Singleplayer:
I had high hopes for this game. I'm pretty sure I remember reading a review about the single player mode that just made me giggle like a school girl. Instead, the Sp mode is about 6 hours long, linear as hell, and it has more glitches than the matrix.
Positives:
Beautiful to look at. The graphics are awesome, and everything looks as real as any game out there. Also, it was interesting to hear a friend of mine who just returned from a tour in Afghanistan tell me that he actually climbed one of the mountains in the final chapter, which is pretty cool. They took actual satellite images to create the game, and they did a very good job of making you feel like you were in country.
Negatives:
The story was weak, and unnecessary. The game would have been better off taking a few real world situations and making them into seperate chapters rather than trying to tie them all together. But what makes it worse is that you have to follow the beaten path to reach your objectives. In a time where games like Brothers in Arms allow you to freely move around the battlefield, while still having trigger points for the story, it is hard to understand why the developers would make characters untouchable like the campfire scene where you try to eliminate 7 AQ's and the 7th cannot be killed until he runs and douses the fire. Or worse, you are stuck in a fire fight with waves of enemies spawning (in some cases you can actually WATCH them spawn) while you are supposed to be painting a target, yet you cannot paint the target because the game wants to to be on the rock on the left side of the screen and you are on the rock at the right side of the screen. This takes me directly into the glitches. Nearly everyone I spoke to got stuck in the final chapter in the caves, having to restart multiple times due to trigger points not activating the next sequence, characters getting stuck on walls, etc. Add to that other chapters where you are expected to do a melee attack on a character, where you will climb down a ledge in the process, but if you shoot the character, you cannot simply jump off the ledge. Other glitches I ran into include the Apache missions where I failed to eliminate one of the RPG's, but hovered above the city while the story line takes over, only to be shot down, with no way of killing the RPG, while the game moved on to another mission. (no clue how this happened, repeatedly!)
In all, this could be a fun game. I expect that patches and updates will make it a better game. However, given the issues with singleplayer glitches, a linear storyline, and server issues on the multiplayer side, I found myself playing Fallout 3 only two days after buying this game. To make matters worse, after beating the game entirely (after beating Fallout 3), I have shelved the game for now. Maybe it will improve before I give up on it entirely, but for now, I have New Vegas in a bag to my left, and I'm going to go pop it in. And if by some miracle I have the time to wrap up New Vegas before COD Black Ops comes out, well, maybe I will tune into MoH again, but in all likelihood it will become another case in the cabinet for this gamer.
