Almost Perfect!
I bought an Xbox 360 in 2007 because of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare and it didn’t disappoint. According to my online stats, I’ve spent roughly 17 days, as in over 400 hours, playing COD4 over the last 2 years. So up front, I’m going to admit that I’m a huge fan of the series, and a huge fan of the work that the guys at Infinity Ward put out.
Modern Warfare 2 is divided into 3 playable components; the single player campaign, online multiplayer and the all new Spec Ops mode. Each component is a complete game in its own right; I figure I’ll discuss each one separately. There are no spoilers in this review, so feel free to read it through.
The single player campaign takes place a couple of years after the events of Call of Duty 4. The intro of the game is a recap of the first game showing the player several scenes from the first “Modern Warfare”. The first thing you’ll notice when you start MW2 is that this game has a ton of polish. It’s not to say that COD4 wasn’t polished, but this game looks and sounds like a big budget Hollywood action movie. Every level has a feeling of insanity. There one shocking event after the other. As in every game in this series, you take control of several soldiers spread out across the globe. There’s a lot of jumping back and forth. The story is a little tricky to follow, but if you let the between levels loading screens play out, they tend to tie up any loose ends.
The controls are very tight and feel accurate. There’s enough of a mix of mission types and weapons that allow you to choose how get past obstacles. Really, in one mission you climb us the side of an iced over mountain using ice picks, while in another mission you storm an American suburb to retake control from an invading enemy force. There’s the heart pumping adrenaline filled snow mobile chase and then there’s a mission where you storm a heavily protected Gulag style prison to retrieve a “person of interest.” Every level, every mission has this big budget feeling of grandeur. It really is an amazing game.
The one thing I’ll complain about is the length of the campaign. I played the game on “regular” difficulty and completed the entire thing in 5 hours, 17 minutes and 52 seconds. The short length of this campaign blemishes what could have been a “perfect” game, in my opinion. In the defense of the developers, unlike the average game where there are lulls in the action, MW2 suffers from no such drops in action. Literally, the only time you have to catch your breath is while the game loads in between levels and they even used that time to help tie up loose ends in the plot lines.
Special Operations or “Spec Ops” mode is the all new cooperative mode that Infinity Ward created for Modern Warfare 2. Basically, it’s a “Modern Warfare: Greatest Hits”. They take your favorite action sequences from both COD4 and MW2 and tweak them for cooperative game play. Each level is designed to be completed in less than 5 minutes, so this is great for short bursts of game play.
In one mission, you and your co-op buddy race down a snow covered mountain on snow mobiles. In another mission, they recreate the COD4 mission where you have to make your way through farmlands. You or your buddy gets to take control of an AC-130 and provide air support for the other player.
They’ve even included missions that were cut out of Modern Warfare 2. In one mission, you and your partner are tasked with crossing the Golden Gate Bridge that’s filled with enemy troops both on the bridge and several that rappel down from the sides.
There are four tiers of missions with, I’m thinking 23 missions total. There are 3 levels of difficulty. Depending on how well you do you can earn up to 3 stars per mission. You use those stars to unlock additional missions.
Specs Ops is a great addition to the game, and never feels like it was an afterthought. The missions they’ve picked were all well thought out and for those of you who’ve aren’t keen on playing the standard multiplayer, this can give you your multi-player fix and extend the life of the game.
So I’ve saved the best for last. Multi-player. My impressions can be best described by one word: “Wow”! Last year, Treyarch sold millions of copies of World at War by copying the COD4 formula. Infinity Ward has taken what many consider to be the best multi player experience of all time and revamped it. I.W. could have easily carbon copied what they did in COD4, but they decided to look at the entire system through a microscope and make bold changes that improve what I considered to be perfection.
When you play the game, it feels very much like Infinity Ward listened to the concerns of the community. For instance, there’s no more Martyrdom and no more Juggernaut. Instead they created “death streaks” for players who may not be doing well. Death streaks come into play when a player dies 3 times in a row with scoring a kill. One death streak perk, Copy Cat, allows the player to steal his executer’s class during the ensuing spawn. In another death streak perk, Painkiller, the player gets 3 times health for the first 10 seconds of the next spawn. Painkiller is kind of like “Juggernaut light”.
The level cap has been raised to level 70 this time around, and there is an incredible array of weapons, perks and kill streaks. In COD4 kill streaks were pretty straight forward: 3 kills for a UAV, 5 kills for an air strike and 7 kills for an attack chopper. This time around kill streaks unlock able perks and are fully customizable. The standard stuff is still there, but there are also tons of other kill streaks that you can unlock as you progress through multiplayer. Things like an automatic sentry gun, kill streak air drops, an AC-130 gunship you get to control (which is so much fun!) and even a tactical nuke that pretty much ends the entire round.
The perks system has been revamped as well. While there are less perks overall, you can level your perks now by using them to make them more effective and deadly. There’s the “Scavenger” perk that allows you to pick up ammo from the bodies of dead soldiers. There’s Bling that allows you to add 2 attachments to your primary. By using Bling during multiplayer you can level that perk to “Bling Pro” and you can add 2 attachments to your secondary weapon as well.
There are additions to your load out like throwing knives, automatic pistols and heat seeking rocket launchers. There are tons of new attachments for your weapons like a shotgun attachment, holographic sights, heart beat monitors and infra red detection scopes.
And if that isn’t enough, there are other ways you can customize yourself as a player by adding unlock able titles and emblems so that when you score kills everyone knows exactly who scored the kill. In games than end at the point cap (7500 points) there’s a special kill cam sequence that shows the final kill of the round so that everyone playing can see how the last guy was killed.
I could easily go on forever describing what I think is a huge improvement on a system that was almost perfect anyways. But it’s safe to say that I’ll be playing MW2 multi-player for years to come. Overall MW2 lives up to the hype. I’ve yet to feel that post hype hangover. I dream about playing MW2 at night. I think about it all day at work. It really is digital crack. With the exception of the insanely short single player campaign, this game is perfection and a true testament of a developer that is willing to take risks. The game is visually stunning, the soundtrack is fantastic and there’s so much to play and so much to do that I think it easily deserves Game of the Year honors. I spent the weeks prior to MW2’s release playing Borderlands, a fantastic RPG shooter. Borderlands seem like years behind MW2 now. Simply put this is the best game I’ve played this generation. It’s better than COD4, which up until last week was my favorite game this generation.
