Ifafudafi
November 13th, 2009, 08:26 PM
I figured that since this game is kind of big, I'd go ahead and do a full-out review for you guys. Yes, I'm reviewing the 360 version. No, I don't want to be lynched, thankyouverymuch.
--
So, Modern Warfare 2. Rather than waste time by filling lines with general introduction, as you'll have to have been living under a sunken bridge to not have heard something about it, I'll get straight to the fun part. As Infinity Ward has divided the game into three "pillars," I'll cover all three individually and then deal with generic stuff like graphics afterwards.
Campaign! (Call of Duty 4 spoilers here.)
After the awesomeness that was Call of Duty 4, and subsequently, everything we saw from gameplay previews and trailers, it seemed as if the only way to go was up. Now don't get me wrong, it's still a buttload of fun and miles better than pretty much every other FPS on the market, but numerous head-banging story decisions and, if anything, a little decay of interest in the new modern setting really detracts from what could have been mind blowing.
On the story side, we pick up 5 years after Call of Duty 4. Turns out that killing Zakhaev did more harm then good; you've essentially turned him into a martyr for the Russian rebellion, and now a new guy, Makarov, has taken up the reins and made things even worse; eventually, he gets the Russians riled up enough to commence a direct attack on U.S. soil. The path up to that point and beyond starts out interesting, but then throws all logic out the window and falls into a bunch of action movie cliches and out-of-nowhere betrayals. As great as they are at orchestrating jaw-dropping intensity, Infinity Ward really just doesn't seem to grasp the nuances of good storytelling. Characters get very little (if any) motivational backstory, development, and such; the plot, already thin enough to almost fall apart, is told almost entirely through scattered pieces of dialouge and mission loading screens. Quite a few "you-are-there" sequences, a la CoD4's nuke scene, come in to play, but this time to little effect. While I'll be the first to support this kind of storytelling, there's little storytelling going on in any of these scenes; it seems as if Infinity Ward said "hey, people liked this kind of scene! Let's do it ten more times! That should be ten times the praise!" Instead, it causes the sequences to lose their sudden impact; not only do none of them cover scenes with the same weight, the sheer freshness of the scene has quickly worn off.
In short, the story is underdeveloped, cliched, and a general mess. I hope to god IW can salvage this for the inevitable sequel.
However, there's also the part where you actually, you know, play the game, and I'm happy to say that this is still mind-blowing. Every mission has at least one "HOLY FUCKING SHIT" moment, and many have several. Combat is fast, frantic, and yet fluid. A much wider variety of weapons and equipment come into play, with pretty much every new mission introducing a new toy to play with, keeping the experience fresh throughout. Infinitely respawning enemies are all but gone, and your allies will take a bit more initiative to move forward. At times, the pacing does drag slightly as you mow through terrorists seemingly for the sake of reaching the next checkpoint, but by the time you notice that, another brilliant set piece is just around the corner. Like before, the gameplay styles alternate between methodical covert-ops with the British and all out urban warfare with the Americans, and both are handled expertly, transitioning smoothly enough so as to not overwhelm the player while differing enough to keep them from being bored. However, while there are many more great, great moments, none of those moments quite match the best ones from CoD4. The Sniper mission with Captian MacMillain still proudly holds its place twenty miles above the rest. And yes, it's short. Personally, I completed the campaign on Hardened in about 6-7 hours, and I'm sure Veteran adds another hour or two. Ordinarily I'd complain more, but it's more as if the game takes all the awesome and packs it into a short time, rather than spreading it out thin over a longer game.
Basically, IW takes everything that was wrong with CoD4's Campaign and fixes it, while amping up the good things four times over, but loses some of the first game's spectacle in the process.
Spec-Ops!
Any self-respecting CoD4 player knows and remembers the Mile High Club epilogue. Well, take that, add in a bunch of similar missions, allow 2-player cooperative play, and a couple of liters of awesome and you get Modern Warfare 2's Spec-Ops mode. Rather than having a cooperative campaign, you'll simply play through areas taken from campaign maps, hunting down bad guys, securing intel, defusing bombs, and the like. Oh, and all the awesome ideas Infinity Ward couldn't fit into the storyline go here, too. As you complete missions on varying difficulties, you gain "stars" as a reward, and unlock new missions. But is it any fun?
While I'm tempted to just say "Hell yeah!" and move on, it bears some explanation. First of all, you're either going to play this with a partner and love it or play it by yourself and hate it. Co-op is a must here, as it adds a whole new dimension to the traditional MW gameplay. Assuming you do so, you'll have a blast; while most of the environments are lifted from the Campaign, they get new objectives and modified layouts, freshening up the experience just enough. Additionally, you'll get some truly creative (somewhat) original segments. For example, you probably remember the AC-130 mission from CoD4. Well, it's back in Spec-Ops, except now, you've got one player actually on the ground while the other has to man the gunship and play escort-man. And yes, it's awesome.
As gameplay is pretty much identical to the Campaign (minus the jaw-dropping set pieces,) I won't go over that again, although you do get the added layer of tacticality a second player brings to the mix.
So yeah, so long as you've got some other asshole with you, Spec-Ops can easily stand on its own with the other two modes.
Multiplayer!
And now the reason this game's going to sell so many fucking copies to so many fucking twelve-year-olds. CoD4's multiplayer, as you likely know, was a surprise hit, bringing both the addictive "kill dudes -> unlock shit -> shit lets you kill more dudes -> more shit gets unlocked" ideology and the brillaint perk system to multiplayer shooters, while seamlessly translating the high-octane intensity of the Campaign. Now, I'll just go ahead and say that the multiplayer is by far the best part of this package, and potentially makes MW2 the best multiplayer shooter I've ever played. Ever.
So, as a likely CoD4 player, you know the basic drill. Choose your weapons, choose your perks, choose your attachments, shoot some kids in the face. This time around though, everything is more balanced than the latest Starcraft patch; Martyrdom and Juggernaut have been reduced to secondary "death" perks, used as a means to get sagging players back into their groove; grenades are much easier to avoid/throw back, and tons of other grenade-replacing options (such as the always-fun throwing knife) ensure that you'll spend less time worrying about that damn grey icon on your HUD and more time splattering adolescent brains over the walls. There are buttloads of more weapons, and even more new attachments... Which now have their own upgrade systems. Doing well with a red dot sight earns you a holographic reflex sight, for instance. In a similar vein, using a perk well will give you a "pro" verison of the perk, adding a secondary function. These improvments are minor enough that they don't give veteran players an advantage, but noticeable enough that it gives you yet another extra drive to keep playing, upping the MUST-GET-MORE-STUFF addiction factor another couple hundred times. And then there's the laundry list of new kill-streak rewards; no, none of them are more overpowered than the rest, and I have yet to see a nuke.
Standard gameplay is still fast and frantic. Guns hit what they're aiming at and hit hard. The weakest guns won't take more than 10 bullets to down an enemy, and even spray-n'-pray machine pistols have near pinpoint accuracy. Any time you're not shooting at someone, chances are you're either reloading, being shot yourself, or being flanked (and subsequently shot.) Yet, it never gets overwhelming; you always know where you're going, what you're doing, what you're shooting at, and so on.
In essence, it creates its own unique gameplay style away from the ROCKETLAUNCHERRUSH of Halo, the vehicular dominance of Battlefield, the mad rocket-jumping of Unreal, and the exhausting tacticality of Rainbow Six. It's twice as fun and twice as balanced as CoD4.
And to briefly cover everything else, the graphics are far better than most shooters on the market and still run at an unwavering 60 frames per second throughout. Explosions are bigger, shiny stuff is shinier, textures are sharper, draw distances are expanded, and such; I rarely found an instance where I was openly critiquing the visuals. Sound design shows a similar level of polish. Few games have the kind of audio which manages to successfully replicate the chaos going on here, yet you can still easily identify distinct sounds; guns pop and crack ceaselessly, grenades clink ominously to their resting places, superior officers bark order after order, and when a rare silence falls, the tension is unbeatable. Brilliance through and through.
So whether you'll enjoy Modern Warfare 2 depends on what you're buying it for. If you just want the Campaign, you'll love the gameplay, but the story will leave you scratching your head, and it still can't hold a candle to the original MW. If you're in it for Spec-Ops and multiplayer, though, this is easily the hands-down unbeatable shooter package for this year and is worth your $60 bucks ten times over. Let's just hope the series doesn't suffer from Halo syndrome and completely lose touch with it's campaign mode, though.
Now allow me to cover some of the controversy real quick. The much publicized airport mission gave me mixed feelings. As it stands, it seems quite unnecessary, but had IW given the story a little more love, I think, in context, it could have been much more powerful.
As for the PC... Well, if I was getting it for PC, I'd be angry as hell, so allow me to simply say I support you guys. Stick it to the man.
E: Polar said I could make a new thread btw
--
So, Modern Warfare 2. Rather than waste time by filling lines with general introduction, as you'll have to have been living under a sunken bridge to not have heard something about it, I'll get straight to the fun part. As Infinity Ward has divided the game into three "pillars," I'll cover all three individually and then deal with generic stuff like graphics afterwards.
Campaign! (Call of Duty 4 spoilers here.)
After the awesomeness that was Call of Duty 4, and subsequently, everything we saw from gameplay previews and trailers, it seemed as if the only way to go was up. Now don't get me wrong, it's still a buttload of fun and miles better than pretty much every other FPS on the market, but numerous head-banging story decisions and, if anything, a little decay of interest in the new modern setting really detracts from what could have been mind blowing.
On the story side, we pick up 5 years after Call of Duty 4. Turns out that killing Zakhaev did more harm then good; you've essentially turned him into a martyr for the Russian rebellion, and now a new guy, Makarov, has taken up the reins and made things even worse; eventually, he gets the Russians riled up enough to commence a direct attack on U.S. soil. The path up to that point and beyond starts out interesting, but then throws all logic out the window and falls into a bunch of action movie cliches and out-of-nowhere betrayals. As great as they are at orchestrating jaw-dropping intensity, Infinity Ward really just doesn't seem to grasp the nuances of good storytelling. Characters get very little (if any) motivational backstory, development, and such; the plot, already thin enough to almost fall apart, is told almost entirely through scattered pieces of dialouge and mission loading screens. Quite a few "you-are-there" sequences, a la CoD4's nuke scene, come in to play, but this time to little effect. While I'll be the first to support this kind of storytelling, there's little storytelling going on in any of these scenes; it seems as if Infinity Ward said "hey, people liked this kind of scene! Let's do it ten more times! That should be ten times the praise!" Instead, it causes the sequences to lose their sudden impact; not only do none of them cover scenes with the same weight, the sheer freshness of the scene has quickly worn off.
In short, the story is underdeveloped, cliched, and a general mess. I hope to god IW can salvage this for the inevitable sequel.
However, there's also the part where you actually, you know, play the game, and I'm happy to say that this is still mind-blowing. Every mission has at least one "HOLY FUCKING SHIT" moment, and many have several. Combat is fast, frantic, and yet fluid. A much wider variety of weapons and equipment come into play, with pretty much every new mission introducing a new toy to play with, keeping the experience fresh throughout. Infinitely respawning enemies are all but gone, and your allies will take a bit more initiative to move forward. At times, the pacing does drag slightly as you mow through terrorists seemingly for the sake of reaching the next checkpoint, but by the time you notice that, another brilliant set piece is just around the corner. Like before, the gameplay styles alternate between methodical covert-ops with the British and all out urban warfare with the Americans, and both are handled expertly, transitioning smoothly enough so as to not overwhelm the player while differing enough to keep them from being bored. However, while there are many more great, great moments, none of those moments quite match the best ones from CoD4. The Sniper mission with Captian MacMillain still proudly holds its place twenty miles above the rest. And yes, it's short. Personally, I completed the campaign on Hardened in about 6-7 hours, and I'm sure Veteran adds another hour or two. Ordinarily I'd complain more, but it's more as if the game takes all the awesome and packs it into a short time, rather than spreading it out thin over a longer game.
Basically, IW takes everything that was wrong with CoD4's Campaign and fixes it, while amping up the good things four times over, but loses some of the first game's spectacle in the process.
Spec-Ops!
Any self-respecting CoD4 player knows and remembers the Mile High Club epilogue. Well, take that, add in a bunch of similar missions, allow 2-player cooperative play, and a couple of liters of awesome and you get Modern Warfare 2's Spec-Ops mode. Rather than having a cooperative campaign, you'll simply play through areas taken from campaign maps, hunting down bad guys, securing intel, defusing bombs, and the like. Oh, and all the awesome ideas Infinity Ward couldn't fit into the storyline go here, too. As you complete missions on varying difficulties, you gain "stars" as a reward, and unlock new missions. But is it any fun?
While I'm tempted to just say "Hell yeah!" and move on, it bears some explanation. First of all, you're either going to play this with a partner and love it or play it by yourself and hate it. Co-op is a must here, as it adds a whole new dimension to the traditional MW gameplay. Assuming you do so, you'll have a blast; while most of the environments are lifted from the Campaign, they get new objectives and modified layouts, freshening up the experience just enough. Additionally, you'll get some truly creative (somewhat) original segments. For example, you probably remember the AC-130 mission from CoD4. Well, it's back in Spec-Ops, except now, you've got one player actually on the ground while the other has to man the gunship and play escort-man. And yes, it's awesome.
As gameplay is pretty much identical to the Campaign (minus the jaw-dropping set pieces,) I won't go over that again, although you do get the added layer of tacticality a second player brings to the mix.
So yeah, so long as you've got some other asshole with you, Spec-Ops can easily stand on its own with the other two modes.
Multiplayer!
And now the reason this game's going to sell so many fucking copies to so many fucking twelve-year-olds. CoD4's multiplayer, as you likely know, was a surprise hit, bringing both the addictive "kill dudes -> unlock shit -> shit lets you kill more dudes -> more shit gets unlocked" ideology and the brillaint perk system to multiplayer shooters, while seamlessly translating the high-octane intensity of the Campaign. Now, I'll just go ahead and say that the multiplayer is by far the best part of this package, and potentially makes MW2 the best multiplayer shooter I've ever played. Ever.
So, as a likely CoD4 player, you know the basic drill. Choose your weapons, choose your perks, choose your attachments, shoot some kids in the face. This time around though, everything is more balanced than the latest Starcraft patch; Martyrdom and Juggernaut have been reduced to secondary "death" perks, used as a means to get sagging players back into their groove; grenades are much easier to avoid/throw back, and tons of other grenade-replacing options (such as the always-fun throwing knife) ensure that you'll spend less time worrying about that damn grey icon on your HUD and more time splattering adolescent brains over the walls. There are buttloads of more weapons, and even more new attachments... Which now have their own upgrade systems. Doing well with a red dot sight earns you a holographic reflex sight, for instance. In a similar vein, using a perk well will give you a "pro" verison of the perk, adding a secondary function. These improvments are minor enough that they don't give veteran players an advantage, but noticeable enough that it gives you yet another extra drive to keep playing, upping the MUST-GET-MORE-STUFF addiction factor another couple hundred times. And then there's the laundry list of new kill-streak rewards; no, none of them are more overpowered than the rest, and I have yet to see a nuke.
Standard gameplay is still fast and frantic. Guns hit what they're aiming at and hit hard. The weakest guns won't take more than 10 bullets to down an enemy, and even spray-n'-pray machine pistols have near pinpoint accuracy. Any time you're not shooting at someone, chances are you're either reloading, being shot yourself, or being flanked (and subsequently shot.) Yet, it never gets overwhelming; you always know where you're going, what you're doing, what you're shooting at, and so on.
In essence, it creates its own unique gameplay style away from the ROCKETLAUNCHERRUSH of Halo, the vehicular dominance of Battlefield, the mad rocket-jumping of Unreal, and the exhausting tacticality of Rainbow Six. It's twice as fun and twice as balanced as CoD4.
And to briefly cover everything else, the graphics are far better than most shooters on the market and still run at an unwavering 60 frames per second throughout. Explosions are bigger, shiny stuff is shinier, textures are sharper, draw distances are expanded, and such; I rarely found an instance where I was openly critiquing the visuals. Sound design shows a similar level of polish. Few games have the kind of audio which manages to successfully replicate the chaos going on here, yet you can still easily identify distinct sounds; guns pop and crack ceaselessly, grenades clink ominously to their resting places, superior officers bark order after order, and when a rare silence falls, the tension is unbeatable. Brilliance through and through.
So whether you'll enjoy Modern Warfare 2 depends on what you're buying it for. If you just want the Campaign, you'll love the gameplay, but the story will leave you scratching your head, and it still can't hold a candle to the original MW. If you're in it for Spec-Ops and multiplayer, though, this is easily the hands-down unbeatable shooter package for this year and is worth your $60 bucks ten times over. Let's just hope the series doesn't suffer from Halo syndrome and completely lose touch with it's campaign mode, though.
Now allow me to cover some of the controversy real quick. The much publicized airport mission gave me mixed feelings. As it stands, it seems quite unnecessary, but had IW given the story a little more love, I think, in context, it could have been much more powerful.
As for the PC... Well, if I was getting it for PC, I'd be angry as hell, so allow me to simply say I support you guys. Stick it to the man.
E: Polar said I could make a new thread btw