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XBOX 360 REVIEW - Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2

Posted November 10th 2009 by Jared Thomas.

Despite how familiar I am with its predecessor, I went into Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 with basically no expectations. For nearly a year, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare was the only Xbox 360 title I had and I played its multiplayer into the ground. After so long, the game became a chore to play, and I would only log in now and then at the request of friends. This compounded the problem, as my rusty skills meant players who'd kept up with the game would rip my face off match after match, turning me into a vulgarity-spewing maniac who wasn't having any fun at all. By 2009 I had adapted a negative Pavlovian response to the Modern Warfare brand that rendered me immune to the hype surrounding this year's most-anticipated title.

All the same, I punked out on peer pressure and ended up reserving Modern Warfare 2 anyway, and in these dry-eyed moments between gaming sessions my brain is telling me it's happy I did. Like I said, I walked into this thing with zero expectations. And based on the time I've spent with it, this game is absolute tits.

For me, the heart of any shooter is in its multiplayer, but I understand this isn't the case with everyone. I didn't even play Modern Warfare's single-player Campaign mode until at least a year after purchase. At that point, the straightforward levels didn't hold much interest for me, but specialized missions like the "All Ghillied Up" sniper mission and "Death From Above" AC-130 gunship level offered a welcome respite from the cutthroat combat of the Live matches. Similarly, the Campaign in Modern Warfare 2 offers two things that multiplayer can't: one is a storyline and the other is intense, scripted cinematic gameplay. It does one of these things well, and fortunately it's the gameplay.  The storyline follows a throwaway plot barely worth putting into a Saturday morning cartoon. I'm not even going to go into it, it's stupid. However, it allows for absurd scenarios like trench warfare with the Russians in Washington, D.C, so all is forgiven.

The Campaign in Modern Warfare 2 lacks anything quite as big a departure as the AC-130 gunship in the first game, but each individual mission is packed with more special moments like climbing a sheer ice wall or using explosions to breach enemy bases in slow-motion. The name of the game is variety, so you'll be racing a snowmobile through a forest one moment and running unarmed to a rescue helicopter the next.

It's also a remarkable visual treat. If they ever end up making a James Cameron movie based on this intellectual property, it will be redundant. The set pieces are fantastic to take in, and Infinity Ward puts an emphasis on experiencing them first-hand. Besides the voice-over briefing before missions, the story is told entirely first-hand, which grants more power to constant twists provided by the story's scripted moments. The seamless transition between the cinematic exposition and the controllable gameplay make up for kinks in the storyline by putting you in the moment in a way that an equally bombastic Hollywood event couldn't. It feels like a first person shooter organically woven with an on-rails shooter, pushing you through these events while retaining a sense of freedom and agency in your interactions with the other chess pieces.

Upon completing the Campaign story, the game transitions immediately to its Special Ops mode, which is like a beautiful marriage between its Campaign and Multiplayer. Basically a series of highlights from the Campaign, Special Ops fills in the gaps in the single-player gameplay, not the least of which being that you can actually play Special Ops cooperatively either split-screened or over Live. There are also treats like modified versions of the ghillie-suit sniper mission and the AC-130 gunship level from the first Modern Warfare; in this case, one player controls the gunship and protects the other as they try to make it to a designated marker. The level of dependency on your partner greatly exceeds the relative rabble of lone wolves that constitutes the Multiplayer, whether you're providing cover or trying to revive a fallen partner before they bleed out, à la Gears of War, Left 4 Dead, etc.

While the Arcade Mode of the first Modern Warfare was at best a mediocre tack-on, Special Ops is practically the equal of the Campaign and Multiplayer modes. With staggered difficulties on challenges that are difficult even at the easiest level, it has the capacity to steal hours of your life, and those of your friend, if you allow it. The only downside is that special missions like the AC-130 gunship level are only playable with two players. Why not just limit single players to the gunship itself, exactly how it is in Modern Warfare? I have no idea. Not that you'd want to play solo if you can help it, but it's kind of a kick in the nuts to people who already have to play this intensely awesome game mode alone.

The AI that fuels the enemy in the Campaign and the Special Ops only enhances the challenge and fun, and I can say without shame that the AI characters probably play a better game of bullet-tag than I do. They switch cover to prevent you from simply waiting for them to pop up their heads again, show considerable patience in waiting for you to pop your head out, and shoot suppressive fire to cover their run from one hiding spot to the next.  Now, you still have the advantage of taking literally infinite damage as long as you rest between bullet wounds, but Infinity Ward took another small step to keep you from tanking through a level and relying on your Wolverine-like healing powers to get you through.  When shot, your screen is covered in blood splatter that gets worse the more damage you've taken, severely blinding you by the end.  It's nice that, despite the heavily unrealistic method of damage recovery, you're at least much less capable after taking damage.  It adds a layer of depth, forcing you to consider tactical flanking as much as sure shooting. The level design promotes this kind of movement, and the AI takes advantage of it to realistic effect in the Campaign and Special Ops.

Similarly, the Multiplayer maps feel extremely well designed for various shuffles of position, and to keep players from camping. It's too early to tell how well these maps will be exploited (and you can always bet on the ingenuity of ambitious gamers), but the complexity itself appears to be an intentional hindrance to the kind of exploitation that can make maps awful to play. First-person shooters are often maligned as a case of "first person to see and shoot the other wins" and while that's very much the case here, the design philosophy is kinder, with few areas that leave players wide open for a well-hidden sniper to pick off time after time. It also makes the matches more fun and strategic, with the same flanking tactics from Campaign and Special Ops being useful in play. For the most part, the Multiplayer takes a scalpel to the minor problems in the first game and pumps gallons of steroids into the parts that worked last time around.

For instance, customizing your soldier has become quite a bloated affair. In the Create A Class option, in which you customize five different soldiers of various settings, there's a huge number of new guns and equipment to choose among, from machine pistols to "sticky" grenades and even riot shields. The various "perks" that grant your soldier any of a variety of special abilities or stat buffs can now be boosted by completing challenges while using the perk.

Simply taking into account all these challenges – there being up to three different grades of up to seven different challenge types for over 20 different guns, for example – the amount of time it would take to complete your stock is enormous. I never completed all the gun challenges in the hundreds of hours I poured into the first game's Multiplayer, and they've only gone and added about hundreds more things to complete this time around. You can even customize your Callsign, with a little emblem and banner attached to your name that advertises some achievement or another. Earning enough revenge kills against the player who just killed you will open up a banner that says "The Avenger" on it, with some lips blowing on a gun barrel. I haven't found one that I wouldn't be embarrassed to use yet, but there are 570 of them.  On the plus side, the game gathers stats about your playtime that would make ESPN pundits blush, granting you Accolades that run from the brag-worthy Most headshots to the absurd Most time watching killcams.  Additionally, once a score limit is reached in Deathmatch, as the entire lobby gets to view a slow-motion replay of the winning kill.  It's these little encouragements that make it worth playing through a losing streak, and it's great go get the spotlight as the "hero" of the team who won the match.

The "killstreak rewards" were a big part of the first Modern Warfare, creating a game-within-a-game to try to get three, five, or seven unanswered kills and cash in tactical rewards like air strikes and support helicopters. Modern Warfare 2 takes this to the extreme, with 15 increasingly game-tilting bonuses for getting anywhere from three to 25 kills in a row. The RPG aspect of the Multiplayer is flexed here, forcing players to choose which three rewards they want to use after unlocking them through play.

The odd thing is killstreak rewards are customized separate from the Create A Class, so no matter which of your soldiers you use, you get the same killstreaks each round. It's annoying because many of the rewards are more useful in certain game types, and you'd likely be gearing your five soldiers toward different game types, so it'd be nice to work them together. For instance, it's unlikely that you'll get the seven necessary kills to call in an attack chopper in a game like Search and Destroy, where each player has only one life, but the chopper is extremely useful in a regular Team Deathmatch. Being able to customize one character with low-point rewards for games where large killstreaks are unlikely would be useful, but instead you have to change your killstreak rewards between games every time you play something different.

Similarly, I don't understand why you can't adjust your Create A Class character on the fly mid-game. Often I'll play a match and instantly realize that the setup I'd created doesn't really work that well for me, but I have to wait for the game to be over before I can make a change. It's also the case where oftentimes I won't be done changing things by the time the next game starts up, so I'll have to wait until the new game is over or just leave entirely and hop back in when it's all ready. With so many attachments and perks to deal with, you're going to spend a lot of time early on testing what works, and it's absurd that the game forces you to either quit games constantly or drag out the test-and-alter process ten minutes at a time. I don't really see what the problem is. You can only change character types between deaths anyway, so it's not like you could manipulate the system to get an unfair advantage. The only downside is someone could shoot you in the face while you're idly changing around your stuff, but it'd be your choice to take that risk.

There appears to be a lot of work put into Mario-izing the game, or in other words making it a less hostile environment for non-veterans. The "death streak" anti-rewards (?) mean that if a player dies an allotted amount of times without a kill, they get a bonus that gives them a hand-up to make more of a difference in a match. From the outset, Copycat is available, which allows the fallen player to copy the Perks of their killer. For newbies who haven't unlocked any of the helpful items yet, it gives them a chance to play with the same gear as the pros. Similarly, one of the first killstreak rewards available is the innocuous-sounding Care Package, a kind of mystery box that the player calls in via airdrop that contains a random killstreak reward, offering for three kills a bonus that might typically take 11 to earn normally, and might not even be unlocked yet for that player. In a game primarily focused on shooting, stabbing and exploding everything in your path, it's kind of sweet to see Infinity Ward looking out for the little guy.

Bottom line is Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 is scary good. I probably didn't need to tell you, but that's my personal take. I genuinely fear this game. My mind has been taken hostage this past week, unable to clearly focus on tasks unrelated to flanking enemy troops and upgrading my M16A4. It's anyone's guess how long it will take me to either collect every last unlockable feature of the Multiplayer or tire of trying. And so far I've just been playing the game alone.  By tonight, I'll have my pick of Live friends to play through not only the amazingly solid multiplayer, but also the tantalizing array of co-op Special Ops missions. There is no doubt that this game is going to be a burden on every non-gaming aspect of my life, but all that stuff has suddenly paled in comparison to my freshly and enthusiastically renewed desire to frag bitches.

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