Reviewed by Daniel Rutledge
In 2007, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare blew all other first-person shooters away. A sequel was inevitable and unlike movies, videogames are blessed with having a very high chance of each sequel being better than the original.
I’ve been waiting for this title since then and eagerly watching all the trailers and news releases that came out leading up to its release. Finally, the wait is over, and my particularly high expectations have been met. And exceeded.
Modern Warfare 2 is better than the original Modern Warfare, which was better than all the other Call of Duty’s. Modern Warfare 2 is better than Doom, Quake, GoldenEye, Halo 3, BioShock, Wolfenstien, Killzone 2 and everything else – it’s the best first-person shooter ever, even with nostalgia in the equation. It is also one of the best games ever made of any genre and about as much fun as you can get from a gaming experience.
The single-player campaign takes the now stock standard 10-ish hours to complete. If this is all you’re going to use the game for, then hiring it would probably suffice, even though you’ll want to play it through more than once – you can just hire it again. It manages a nigh-perfect mix of ‘Oh my God that’s amazing’ cinematic moments and plain old shoot ‘em up action. Each level is particularly well modelled and you’ll often find yourself wanting to look around at all the amazing stuff, but you can’t. You’ve got to speed through each mission with an extreme urgency. There are tonnes of bad guys wanting to kill you constantly, so no matter how detailed and pretty everything is, you really gotta keep moving.
One of the highlights of the first Modern Warfare was the segment where you played a wounded soldier crawling out of a crashed helicopter only to see a nuclear bomb go off and kill everything nearby – including you. There are some similar bits in Modern Warfare 2 that are truly amazing, and I won’t spoil what they are, but rest assured your jaw will drop more than once at the awesomeness. The controversial part where you play an undercover agent with a terrorist group carrying out a brutal attack on civilians is amazing, but if you are likely to be offended by it there is ample opportunity to skip it, with no achievement penalty.
The storyline is pretty cool. It’s the usual bad guys wanna destroy the world via World War III type scenario. It’s told in sound clips over data screens that are kind of Google-Earth style maps in between each mission, where you switch between a few characters. This fast-paced narrative is actually reasonably difficult to follow, which is occasionally just a little annoying. Some other reviewers have cited the single-player story as being weak, but I disagree – if you really want an engaging story, shoot ‘em up games are not the place to find it. The story works just fine for keeping you engaged in what you’re doing and why and I'm happy for developers Infinity Ward to spend more power on making the gameplay better rather than wasting it on story driving cutscenes.
Multiplayer is the real strength of the title. I play it on Xbox Live and there have been some major improvements on the groundbreaking Modern Warfare. The lobby system is just as painless as ever and puts you into the sort of game you want to play extremely quickly. The servers are always packed with loads of gamers and you are matched automatically to a well matched game, ping wise, which is fantastic. There is a new feature which forces matches onto a new host if the original host of a game quits, which is great as you will never lose points from a match unless you yourself quit. The slow-motion replay of the match winning kill at the end of every game is another very nice new feature.
The revolutionary reward system developed for the first Modern Warfare has been tweaked up hard and is now much larger in scope and with a great deal more customisation involved. I was like an excited little kid when I saw the trailer revealing that a new killstreak reward would enable you to be the gunner on an AC-130, among other brilliant new ones. I was a little concerned that it would be too much of an advantage though. Now having played a number of multplayer matches where such killstreak rewards have been used, I see how it all works out well. The better the benefit, the higher the killstreak you have to achieve, meaning you really have to earn the hell out of those rewards. The biggest one is a tactical nuke which ends the game by killing everyone and automatically gives you the win – but to score that sucker you need to get a mighty 25 killstreak, which is extremely bloody difficult.
There are also callsigns and emblems to give you a unique identity as you play and there are truckloads of them that are constantly unlocked with every game you play. These aren’t nearly as exciting as the new killstreak rewards, but it’s still nice to have. Of course there are the standard weapons and weapon upgrades to be unlocked constantly too, except there is simply way, way more than in Modern Warfare. The new thermal scopes are brilliant, especially when used to see through smoke and take unsuspecting enemies down. It might be intimidating when you first start playing to be facing players way better than you with vastly superior weapons, but don’t worry. You will definitely score kills and pretty quickly be making upgrades yourself.
The new, much-hyped co-op mode called Spec Ops is another great new feature. It allows two players (either split screen, system link or online) to play through some of the best missions taken from both the new campaign and the first Modern Warfare too. These are kind of arcade-style levels which test different aspects of your gameplay. There are snowmobile races, stealth missions where you use silenced weapons and sneak about, hardcore areas where you have to wreak maximum kills, even a stage where one player is in an AC-130 gunning down and helping the other on-foot player through the level. The co-op levels are very different to other forms of Modern Warfare play and while they won't have the longevity of standard mutliplayer matches, they're still a very exciting and fun activity for you and a friend or two to play with.
The graphics are very impressive, but I have to say they didn’t blow me away like other elements of the game did. They are really, really good, don’t get me wrong, but straight after playing the likes of Uncharted 2 it’s not like they’re the best graphics ever seen. The sound design of the Call of Duty franchise has always been a strong point and while it’s not high on some gamer’s priority lists, it’s very important for me. There have been no real noticeable differences to the first Modern Warfare, which is fine, as that really was the bench setter. Each weapon sounds unique and realistic and - along with all the other sounds - brilliant.
Which brings me to the soundtrack. Hollywood legend Hans Zimmer has crafted an extremely fine score for the game, very similar in a lot of places to his work on Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight. It gets a little over-dramatic in the stage where you battle around the White House, but that's understandable for the American consumers. Zimmer's score is just another way Modern Warfare 2 ups the epicness. It's great.
Modern Warfare 2 is an all-round class act. Developers Infinity Ward have raised the bar considerably once again. They’ve broken some new ground but basically improved upon the very sound basis that was Modern Warfare. I don’t imagine I’ll stop playing this before the next Modern Warfare comes out and I’m pretty confident it’ll still be gloriously sitting in the throne of ‘best first-person shooter of all time’ when that happens.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2
:: Publisher: Activision
:: Developer: Infinity Ward
:: Format: Xbox 360
:: Rating: R18