Modern Warfare 2

Joel Cornell — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 15:14:53 +0000

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 broke pre-order and sales records for retailers across the board. Hype and advertising suggested one of the best shooters ever, but did Infinity Ward deliver?

Short answer? Hell, yes.

Call of Duty has always been the standard in the realistic shooter genre. This game brings a level of cinematic beauty that we don't see often enough. The single-player campaign is a bit shorter than desired (clocking in at about 8 hours) but the story and level design make up for it tremendously. The realism is top notch, and the game play that takes place in American locations are amazingly convincing, almost to the point of being eerie.

Beyond the campaign, a plethora of replayability exists within the Spec Ops mode. It can be played either single player or co-op, Spec Ops offers a great variety of unlockable, shorter missions with varying degrees of difficulty to provide good competition and completion value, but not much else.

As great as the campaign and Spec Ops modes are, stats on the first Modern Warfare suggested that less than 70% of players actually played the Campaign, and even fewer completed it. That being said, the multiplayer in MW2 is unrivaled. A curious lack of dedicated servers and some latency issues plague the PC release (to the tune of a 200,000 person online petition directed towards IW), but the console versions have no noticeable issues. MW2 attempts to level the playing field for casual players with 4 different "Death Streaks" (4 deaths in a row without any kills yields improved health or the ability to copy your killers perks and weapons), but it doesn't provide the equalizer it claims to be.

The host migration feature does eliminate premature ends to some games, but occasional network issues and lag are still present, although minimalized. The mechanics have only been altered slightly, but there was never any need to change much in the first place. Still, the replay value throughout the multiplayer is the highest in the FPS genre. The additional guns, attachments, upgradeable perks, custom kill streaks and even custom name tags provide a leveling experience that is an example for developers to consider, even outside of an FPS.

Beautifully rendered, consistently smooth, and entirely engrossing, Modern Warfare 2 is the best in the genre by a long shot. Since launch day, I've checked the stats and friends lists of all of my Xbox Live friends and without hyperbole, everyone is playing this game. You should be too.

Likes:

Multiplayer leveling system is customizable and addictive like no other.
Campaign is powerful, complex and gorgeous.
Controls are smooth and make for fast paced game play.

Dislikes:

Campaign is too short.
New players may find the multiplayer daunting
Too few multiplayer maps

Level Forty Two Review Score

The review scale at LevelFortyTwo is between 1 and 5. A score of 5 is considered an amazing game, 4 is a well-done game with only minor issues, 3 is in the middle; not great, but not bad, 2 is a very problematic game, and 1 is absolutely terrible.

LevelFortyTwo.com » Call of Duty 6 Review

Modern Warfare 2