Review: Modern Warfare 2

Modern Warfare 2 was always going to have a lot to live up to, after all it’s the sequel to one of the finest shooters to grace the gaming landscape in recent times – the mighty Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare – a game I was more than a little enamoured with and put a good number of hours into. Modern Warfare 2 is also one of the most hyped games of this generation, even more so than the likes of Grand Theft Auto 4 or Halo 3. Such self-aggrandising comes with the marketing territory, but even so, the hype-machine behind Modern Warfare 2 was so great that it couldn’t help but add considerably to the already massive weight of expectation; certainly if you’re going to go around branding your game “The most anticipated game ever” then you better be able to deliver.

To determine whether or not it delivers for yourself will certainly take some investment as the game’s three core modes – single-player, multiplayer and newly added co-operative – will, between them, happily eat up a good many hours of your time, the latter two especially so. But before delving into the time-sink multiplayer aspects of the game I felt it best to start with the single-player.

Welcome to boot camp…

The gameplay is as fast and frantic as ever and will feel immediately familiar to anyone who’s played Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. As with that game it isn’t shy about throwing a fair few enemies your way and on the harder difficulties they’ll quickly put an end to anyone who leaves themselves exposed for too long. Thankfully though the infinitely spawning enemies of old are gone and now cautiously taking out all the enemies will leave you able to move up without fear of another swarm of guys appear just as you step out of cover. However, this doesn’t mean it’s an easy ride as the enemy AI can be quite crafty moving up to flank or get behind you at times, which keeps you on your toes.

Another bug-bear of the first Modern Warfare (and the Call of Duty titles in general) that has thankfully been shown the door is the ridiculous grenade spamming. You will still have to deal with some grenades being thrown in your direction, but no longer do you spend your entire time manically throwing back grenades or attempting to run away from the previously ubiquitous grenade indicator. Equally so, when the AI does lob a grenade in your direction they aren’t necessarily thrown with laser-guided precision from across the map of old, another most welcome change.

The improvements all add up to a single-player campaign that is challenging without ever really being frustrating or cheap, and it is by-far the easiest Infinity Ward campaign to tackle on veteran; there’s certainly no Ferris Wheel moment in Modern Warfare 2. Players can’t get cocky though, you will still die plenty, but usually because you didn’t check your corners properly, get caught out by an unexpected wave of guys or you left yourself overly exposed for too long.

War stories

The story, as ever in these kind of games, serves mostly to lead the player from set-piece to set-piece, but for Modern Warfare this actually feels like a bit of a step backwards. Picking up where the first Modern Warfare ended you will step into the shoes of another collection of characters and interact with a couple of familiar faces from the first game. However, whereas the first Modern Warfare maintained a slim grasp on reality and felt somewhat grounded amongst all its bombastic action, Modern Warfare 2 seems to abandon all sense of realism for an entirely over-the-top explosion-filled narrative full of twists and turns that ends up so confused that on more than a few occasions I found myself wondering just what the hell was going on (and subsequently not really caring all that much).

Thankfully the set-pieces that the loose story frames are as excellent as ever and there’s a plenty of “Fuck yes!” and “Holy shit, awesome!” moments to go around. But the levels, whilst fun, don’t ever strike home quite as well as some of those found in the game’s forebear (nothing quite hits the high of “Shock and Awe” or “All Ghillied Up”, though as with all previous Infinity Ward produced Call of Dutys you can rest assured level design is generally very good), and whilst the story strives to match the emotional impact of the first Modern Warfare it never really succeeds. I really felt a connection with some of the characters of the first title, but nothing really resonates here as it did in Modern Warfare 1.

And then there’s that airport scene.

Flight of fancy

Even if you haven’t played touched videogames before the sheer amount of media coverage guarantees that nearly everyone in the developed world will have heard of the airport mission (”No Russian” in the game), and most likely been misinformed about it too. If you have somehow avoided mention of this particular section and wish to avoid spoilers then skip ahead now.

“No Russian” sees you playing as an American agent undercover trying to infiltrate the organisation of bad guy Makarov. You join said baddie and a small group of associates as they shoot up an airport brutally mowing down countless civilians. If you choose not to skip this mission (an option the game gives you at a few points) then you are involved in this act, though the level of you involvement is only marginally in your control. Personally I couldn’t do it, I couldn’t shoot the innocents, so I resolved to shooting scenery and making it look like I was joining in. I was convinced the game would rumble me and I’d be called out too early for being a fraud, but evidently doing nothing is allowed, though at the same time using your gun to take down the bad guy results in a game over screen, which is somewhat odd.

When all is said and done I don’t believe this mission justifies the amount of news coverage it has received, it’s not “offensive” as it has been labelled, but then the mainstream media would never miss and opportunity to draw a line between games and violence. And the mission is somewhat uncomfortable to experience and is an oddly sober moment for the game, albeit one looking to set up motivation for events that follow. I believe Infinity Ward were probably genuinely trying to push boundaries and use the scene for the right reason, and I think in some respects this is an area videogames are right to explore – after all Infinity Ward certainly didn’t need the press coverage to boost sales for Modern Warfare 2 – but it’s a badly executed plot device who’s handling perhaps does little to help the industry and ultimately feels out of place for a game who’s majority is made up of ridiculously over-the-top action and “Hoorah” military posturing.

You are not alone

The single-player campaign then is good, very good in fact, but never quite matches the excellence of the first Modern Warfare; and much like that game the single-player campaign is also rather short. Thanks to the frustration reduction even a run-through on hardest difficulties shouldn’t set players back too many hours and most play-throughs will likely hit the 5-9 hour mark.

But then this is the sequel to a game that has remained high in sales and online-activity charts for the last 2 years and it wasn’t anything to do with the single-player campaign, no matter how good it was. The multiplayer is quite possibly the star of the show and as a follow up to the massively popular mode from Modern Warfare 1 it is probably the area with most weight of expectation placed upon it.

The good news is that it is at least as good as the multiplayer from the first title with a lot of nice little improvements and tweaks that mix things up in surprising ways. The excellent perk system and series of unlocks returns with more to customise and unlock than ever. As with the first game though there’s some excellent balancing work in place and anyone starting at lower levels has access to weapons as good as anything you unlock later, though there are some good options you only get later on. Sadly the perks are possibly not as balanced and some of the later perks seem far more useful than some of those you get given from the off.

The biggest change to the multiplayer though is the new killstreak systems. By default you will have killstreak rewards at 3, 4 and 5 consecutive kills (UAV, supply drop and predator missile), but you start getting the option to unlock and of the other killstreak options at various levels and can customise them as you see fit. It’s a risk-reward kind of system as some of the potentially devastating killstreaks like the AC-130 or game-ending tactical nuke require fairly large killstreaks to unlock (11 and 25 respectively) so you have to be fairly confident of your ability to chain together long sets of kills without getting picked off yourself if you want to make use of them.

Supply crates actually prove to be a rather excellent addition to the multiplayer modes as these need to be called in with a smoke grenade marker (make sure you look up before you do so), but the crate will appear on the map for all to see, and can be captured by anyone including the other team – though the requesting player can capture them at a much faster rate than anyone else. The crates themselves can contain any of the other killstreak rewards, though the most potent killstreaks have significantly less chance of showing up and the lower rewards being the most-common. And added bonus of supply crates is their ability to kill anyone standing underneath their landing zone, which can lead to some embarrassing deaths.

Hell spawn

However, as excellent and addictive as the multiplayer component of the game is it’s not without issues: chiefly spawning and matchmaking, both of which plagued the previous title.

Spawning can be massively problematic and you can end up with runs of being spawned with enemies looking right at where you appear, or indeed being spawned right where you were just killed, leading to a very swift deaths. You can of course also have enemies spawning close to where you currently are leading to some cheap deaths (or kills, depending on which side of the problem you find yourself).

With the game’s matchmaking it can take ages to find fellow players, something that feels distinctly wrong when the game tells you how many hundreds of thousands of people are playing at the same time as you. Though the bigger issue is that far more often than is really acceptable the game will kick one or more of your party members (i.e. the people you wish to be playing the game with) out to other games or just back to the lobby. And of course quitting out to regroup with your friends counts as you quitting a game and therefore a loss against you (not really a big problem, but a bit of a kick in the teeth for something that is in no way your fault).

This is where Infinity Ward’s design decision to prevent people from being in an Xbox Live Party when playing team modes only serves to exacerbate the whole problem. Now I, like many of my friends, am a massive fan of the Party system on Xbox Live and whilst I was bothered by this news up front I could see sort of where Infinity Ward were coming from in aiming to prevent cheating in team games and was willing to give them the benefit of the doubt until I tried it for myself. As it turns out, now I have tried it, all this serves to do is make it incredibly hard to organise a group of people to play the game and even if you had party chat you wouldn’t be able to cheat anyway, so the whole thing strikes me as rather counter-productive.

Another small issue with the multiplayer is that very few of the maps feel all that fun to play, most seeming to promote a fair bit of camping. Of the 15 or so maps that are included on the disc there’s only a couple I’d say I like and more than a handful that can be rather irritating. There were definitely weaker maps on the first Modern Warfare, but I recalled there being more that I actually liked.

The biggest disappointment about all this is that the spawning and matchmaking issues were very much ‘features’ of the first Modern Warfare and complained about plenty by fans of that game, so with two years to sit and tinker it’s fairly astounding that these issues haven’t been addressed in any sort of fashion. This is not to suggest that the multiplayer is bad, as it remains incredibly addictive fun with a bunch of mates, but it doesn’t make some of the fundamental improvements I was hoping for.

Army of two

Perhaps the best addition in Modern Warfare 2, though, is the excellent Special Ops mode, which finally bring co-operative play to one of Infinity Ward’s titles. I think they were right not to try and shoe-horn co-op play into the main single player given how much that relies on the cinematic set-ups they use and the very individual view-point it works from, and given how much fun Special Ops is I’m more than happy that it lead them down this road.

Taking inspiration from the post-credits “Mile High Club” mission from the first Modern Warfare, Special Ops mode sees you and (optionally on some missions) a friend take on a range of self-contained challenges designed to provide short bursts of action. These missions range from full assault and breach style tasks through to defending a position against waves of enemies, or stealthily making your way through an area. The best couple, perhaps, definitely require two players and see one acting as airborne protector – either in an AC-130 or as a helicopter gunner – guiding the partner on the ground to an end-point.

These missions can be tense and exhilarating, and on the harder-difficulties out-right brutal too at times. There’s no checkpointing so if both players die (or are incapped, as you can be revived by your partner if one is still alive) then it’s back to the very beginning, which can be highly frustrating 10 minutes into a game, but the challenge is kept just “one-more-go” enough for the most part that you can’t help but come back to try and best it.

Unfortunately the last couple of missions tend to start replacing challenge with cheap tactics and the introduction of a special enemy type called the Juggernaut (an explosives blast-suit equipped trooper carrying an LMG) who can take a lot of punishment to take down and almost certainly require heavy-round sniper rifles to deal with. These gits can make life ridiculously tricky and the later challenges resort to throwing lots of them at you at once to amp up the difficulty. Thankfully that’s only a few of the missions though and most are an absolute blast to play with two people.

The end of all things

Modern Warfare 2 is a very good game. Whether or not it’s as good as its predecessor, that’s a tough question indeed. In many ways it is clearly an improvement, but like a lot of sequels hitting the shelves at the moment it’s an iteration over the first game and feels like an evolution of that game, and because of that it doesn’t quite have the impact, and never could have, that Modern Warfare 1 had.

After playing through Uncharted 2 I named it my current game of the year, though with the proviso that Modern Warfare 2 would likely nab that honour before the year was out. And whilst it is undoubtedly a very good game I would recommend to any FPS fan (and certainly if you did like the first title) it’s not quite good enough to claim that title; and unless Assassin’s Creed II steals the show at the last minute it may well be that Uncharted 2 remains my favourite game of the year. That said, Modern Warfare 2’s various multiplayer modes will undoubtedly eat far more of my hours than Uncharted 2’s adequate offerings could ever hope to.