Modern Warfare 2

One cannot talk about first person shooters without mentioning the Call of Duty franchise. It is arguably the franchise that made FPS’s what they are today. Having that said the games are far from perfect and appeal to certain play styles more than others. The ups and downs of MW2 are discussed in this post.

Before I begin to talk about the game itself I want to make some things known. I play FPS’s casually, and mostly always on the Xbox 360. What this means is that I never stress out during a game if I’m doing bad, I don’t really aim to reach ranks or flame others, etc. I just play FPS’s as a break between other things that I do. Having that said, lets look at the review.

MW2 is a fast, action packed shooter made by Infinity Ward, obviously set in the modern time period. The game keeps most of the same general mechanics as MW, the focus is still on shooting the bad guys with no “BS” (shields,etc.). What was nice was how MW2 blurred the line between bad guys and good guys, giving the game a deeper story than most FPS’s. The single player campaign features 18 missions divided into 3 Acts. During it you visit, Afghanistan, Russia, USA, and Brazil. The single player plays pretty straight forward with objectives clearly detailed to you as you play. While some parts can be tricky I never got stuck on one mission too long, even when playing on the veteran difficulty (and Veteran is nothing like Mass Effect’s Insane or the old Doom’s Nightmare).  It is also worth noting that during the campaign you can collect these intelligence laptops that offer additional achievements/trophies.

Spec Ops is an additional game mode included in MW2, this mode serves as a co-op campaign-ish. There is no story but rather just increasingly difficult challenges that you can face together with a friend. Each challenge can earn you up to 3 stars depending on what difficulty you play them on and how well you do. I’ll give credit where credit is due, spec-ops if very fun when you play with a friend.

Finally there’s multiplayer, the mode that everyone buys an FPS for. The truth is that MW2′s multiplayer is an acquired taste. Personally I don’t like it and I have never gone further than Staff Sergeant in rank, simply because I don’t like the gameplay. Multiplayer is very fast and action oriented, and it suffers greatly from people “noob tubing” (using the overpowered grenade launcher) and hacking. While the hacking seems to have been fixed with recent patches, getting blown to pieces by your spawn point or other such quick kills become annoying.  To like and enjoy the atmosphere and gameplay of multiplayer in MW2 you have to be ultra competitive, patient and accustomed to  shoot and kill tactics. Like I mentioned earlier, I play shooters casually not competitively, and I hate, hate, hate, shoot and kill tactics where you turn around a corner and BAM your dead. You spawn and BAM your dead. Your running from cover to cover and BAM quick-scoped, etc.

In conclusion MW2 is a game that you will enjoy if you dislike Halo’s shields gameplay and can handle constantly getting killed and flamed. It is clearly a game that was made for the competitive gamers in mind. If you do decide to get the game though, it is currently $29.99 on Steam, $49.99 new from EB games or $29.99 used. The buy link up top leads to the Steam version of the game.

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