Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2

 Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 is the sequel to the immensely popular first person shooter Call Of Duty 4 and after seeing both the critical and commercial success of its predecessor it is clear that the publishers have invested a lot of money into the sequel. While trying to extend the story of CoD 4 and build upon the multiplayer it seems that Activision and IW have had dollar signs in their eyes and have ended up making a shallow and unsatisfying blockbuster of a story and an imbalanced and unfair multiplayer experience.

Modern Warfare 2 opens in Afghanistan where one of the many characters you will control is teaching local soldiers how to fight while also trying to impress a certain general. After a short tutorial and entertaining assault course you are thrown head first into the action. The opening mission starts out as an explosive wide-open firefight in an Afghan town which then becomes an ambush in the tight streets and alleyways and then finally a tense shootout in an abandoned school. After this exciting mission you will probably feel that, as long as the missions stay similar to this, this could be one of the best single-player FPS's in a while. The second mission is just as exciting but a lot more stealthy reminding me of the amazing balance between these two types of missions I experienced in CoD 4. However after the snowmobile race down a mountain it may feel like you have just jumped into a Michael Bay movie. Then comes the controversial and well publicised 'No Russian' mission. Personally I have no gripes against this sort of mission as long as it fits well into the narrative however this mission certainly does not and feels more like a shameless publicity stunt. From this point the story gets weaker and increasingly hard to follow and the set pieces get bigger and noisier. By the end you are left with no clue why anything that took place in the story actually happened, however the single-player is short so you shouldn't have to worry about it long as you will be jumping into more of Call of Duty's addictive multiplayer. The singleplayer gameplay is the same old formula but it still works and is probably one of the most solid games, gameplay-wise, that I have played in a while

This is where the second major problem is. Multipalyer has been tweaked since CoD 4 but the tweaks seem to be not thought through and can make for a very unenjoyable multiplayer experience. For example there are a massive amount of killstreak rewards now some of these however are just plain unfair. One killstreak allows you to drop a package from the sky which rewards the player with a random reward. Too often though this reward is something which would usually take many more kills to unlock. Such as the chopper gunner which is also known as flying death. This reward makes all others obsolete and unless a player is using the correct set-up or wants to hide in a building for a while they will get killed multipile times. Other problems such as glitches allowing players to sprint at inhuman speeds or a glitch which causes a player to explode on death killing everyone within a 20m radius alos plauge the multiplayer. A minority of weapons also dominate all other weapons such as the two burst-fire rifles and the antique shotguns, this does not make the multiplayer any more fun to play.

It's not all bad though thanks to a little mode called Spec Ops. This mode is a quick and fun co-op mode which alows you and a friend to take part in small objective based missions. The main strength of this is the diversity of the missions and the fact that you will have to work with your friend instead of going solo to complete the missions.