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Modern Warfare 2 may have just rendered every other FPS on the market irrelevant.
November 17, 2009 | 2:38 AM PSTWhat the Game's About
It wasn't supposed to be that game. The odds were stacked against Infinity Ward in more ways than one as the industry marched toward the now legendary 2007 holiday season. Activision was against moving the bestselling Call of Duty franchise out of the familiar and profitable confines of the World War 2 setting into the unproven arena of contemporary combat. After overcoming that hurdle, they had to face the Halo 3 hype machine. As far as the gaming populace was concerned, it was Bungie's year. Sometimes things don't quite pan out as expected. Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare annihilated expectations. Combining a cinematic campaign with groundbreaking multiplayer, Call of Duty 4 dominated the competition at retail and online to become one of the bestselling and most played first-person shooters of all time.
Today, the situation is very different. This is Infinity Ward's year to lose. Modern Warfare 2 is the most highly anticipated game in years and expectations are through the roof. Forget annihilating them, just meeting them would be an impressive victory. To meet that challenge, Infinity Ward has launched a three-pronged assault of campaign, cooperative and multiplayer gameplay. That's a lot of content to go through, so rather than risk getting caught up in the hype and pumping out a gushing review as soon as possible, I took a step back and spent a good week with the game before I even started writing anything down. Gains have been made and losses suffered in comparison to the original Modern Warfare, and when the dust settled I couldn't pick a favorite between the two. They are different games, with different strengths and weaknesses. If sales figures and Xbox Live stats are anything to go by, you've probably already bought the game, and if preorder sales indicate anything, you were probably planning on it, reviews be damned. So I'm not going to bother to tell you to buy Modern Warfare 2, because it's obviously a fantastic game. I'm just going to say that you should hang on to your copy of Call of Duty 4 too.
What's Hot
The Call of Duty gameplay formula has both fans and detractors, but it's hard to argue against the raw intensity and cinematic spectacle that Infinity Ward creates with it. The game gives you just enough freedom to let you think you're the one pushing the action forward, when really it's the other way around. Meticulously scripted events transition seamlessly from noise in the background to the focus of your attention and back again, funneling you from one epic set-piece to another, each one more insane than the last. The gunplay at the heart of the whole thing is extremely satisfying, with sounds, animations, and damage modeling that all come together to make the weapons feel suitably heavy and lethal. Other shooters like the Halo titles give you more freedom to play around with the combat and more emergent gameplay, but for sheer adrenaline overload, nothing touches Modern Warfare 2.
Shooting people in the face is obviously the core gameplay mechanic, but Infinity Ward has done a masterful job of positioning the action around constantly changing objectives. You'll sneak through blizzards into enemy bases before shooting your way out on snowmobiles, blast a mounted mini-gun through the hostile streets of Afghanistan, fight your way through a Russian gulag, escort armored vehicles through suburbia, make marine insertions, and you won't believe what else. Some objectives are repeated a few times but the different locations, level layouts, enemy types and weapon load-outs all change the experience enough every time to keep things exciting. Even when you're just making your way from point A to point B, fighting through streets of Middle Eastern warzone, the shanty towns of Rio De Janeiro, and the boulevards of the United States all feel noticeably different, so the shooting never gets boring. The high points of the campaign for me were the South American levels, simply because they looked, felt and played unlike any urban environment I've encountered.
Call of Duty 4 revolutionized the FPS genre by integrating persistent RPG mechanics into the competitive multiplayer experience. Suddenly earning kills and winning matches were worth so much more than bragging rights. Modern Warfare 2 doesn't innovate as much as its predecessor did but the multiplayer is still an amazing case study on the power of positive reinforcement. Almost every single action you perform in the game will net you some experience points, the currency with which you upgrade your weapons and skills. Shoot someone, +100 points. Capture a point, +150 points. Hell, die a few times in a row, finally eke out a kill, +150 points. There's a constant stream of pop-up messages to pat you on the back for your efforts, no matter how terrible you or your team might be doing. And that feeling of constant progression, of always getting closer to the next goal marker makes the multiplayer stupidly addictive and insanely rewarding. If you thought that the "Achievement Unlocked" message was a satisfying sight, wait until you start leveling up and completing the challenges associated with each weapon and upgrade. You'll be hearing the signature "Level Up" guitar riff in your sleep.
Barring a few tweaks and refinements, the actual multiplayer gameplay hasn't changed much since Modern Warfare, there are just a lot more new toys to play with. New weapons and upgrades are a no-brainer, but the new upgradable perks and unlockable kill-streaks add new wrinkles to the customization element of the game. Every perk in the game now has a PRO variant, an upgrade that enhances or complements the original benefit with a new one. Some of the PRO benefits are far more interesting than the initial ones, so there will be a lot of instances when you'll have to sacrifice the use of a perk you really love for one you don't just so you can upgrade it and reap the benefit you really want. The system really forces you to make tactical decisions about what perks to use and put a lot of thought into your custom classes. In Modern Warfare I had two custom classes that took me all the way to level 55. This time, I had filled out every custom class slot by the time I hit level 20. Kill-streaks are back with a vengeance, as there are now over 20 available to unlock as you level up. You're only able to unlock three at once, but the sheer variety of allows players to build around their strengths and roles on a given team.
Knowing your role on the team is vital to success in Spec Ops mode, the biggest new addition, the high point of the entire package and reason enough to buy the game as far as I'm concerned. It could be considered Infinity Ward's 'answer' to co-op mission modes like Horde and Firefight, in the same way a nuclear bomb could be considered an "answer" to a hurled rock. Yes, the central goal of keeping each other alive and gunning down waves of enemies is repeated more than a few times throughout the 23 missions that the mode is composed of, but Infinity Ward has leveraged their talent for crafting unique objectives and "borrowed" a few epic set-pieces from previous titles to make Special Ops feel like a fully developed, 'best of COD' campaign. As a matter of fact, it will probably take you longer to work through Special Ops than it will the proper campaign, and you'll probably have more fun along the way since you'll be able to bring a buddy. Playing through the campaign on Veteran is about as much fun has having your scrotum smashed with a sledge hammer, repeatedly, but with an extra gun at your side and a functional human brain behind it, the absurd challenge is not only completely entertaining, but actually satisfying.
Communication is key as you and your partner tackle missions that range from marching down a suspension bridge being torn apart by an aerial assault, weaving through wrecked cars as enemies rappel down around you and helicopters attack from the skies to a stealth-based sniper mission obviously inspired by the now legendary Call of Duty 4 mission that forces you to crawl through the snow and time simultaneous headshots to avoid detection by guards and their vicious pets. If one of you goes down then the other will have a certain amount of time to revive you while you try and defend yourself from the "last stand" position. Spec Ops really hits its stride when Infinity Ward makes full use of the fact that there are two people playing to create experiences that just can't be matched by the single-player campaign. I'd argue the high point of the entire game, all modes, is the AC130 Spec Ops mission that puts one player on the ground behind enemy lines and the other at the controls of the AC130 gunship. With no revives and pitch darkness to work in, both players have to communicate every movement to keep the poor guy on the ground alive. It's intense, clever and incredibly fun. The missions are fairly short, basically just the epic set-pieces without the build-up, but they're all killer no filler and absolutely perfect for when you only have an hour or less to play.
What's Not
Despite the epic scope of the set-pieces and the variety of mission objectives, the single-player campaign is a big disappointment. The storyline makes no fucking sense whatsoever, rendering the entire context for the action and the events that take place within absolutely meaningless. The first few missions in the game are fantastic and do a great job of setting up a new terrorist threat for the heroes to combat. Then all of a sudden we take a left turn to Tom Clancy ghostwriter town and have Russia attacking the United States in response to a terrorist attack they think the Americans committed. From there things start spiraling out of control at an alarming rate before hitting rock bottom at the game's climax with one of the most pointless and ineffective plot-twists in the history of modern narrative. Did M. Night Shyamalan write this? It's a shame, because Infinity Ward obviously had the goal of making players feel something and react to the game, as evidenced by the by now infamous airport scene, the rendering of Washington DC as a devastated war zone along with other scenes of American cities getting a proverbial curb-stomping. But without any coherent reason to invest myself in the events taking place, the best they could get out of me was a twinge of cognitive dissonance before I pulled the trigger in the airport.
Which brings me to the next problem: This game has the wildest, most incongruous tonal swings of any game I've ever played. I'm not American, so maybe the imagery hits my Southern neighbors a little harder than it did me, but going from gunning down civilians in an airport to shooting missiles off the top of a burger joint just felt silly. Most of the suburban missions felt like a tongue-in-cheek tribute to Red Dawn, which was completely at odds with the harsh, gritty tone of the Rio De Janeiro levels, the Russian Gulag, or every other setting in the game.
Finally, there's the pacing, or the complete lack of it. Putting your pedal to the metal from start to finish is fine and dandy if you want to replicate the experience of an 80s action movie, but it's completely out of place in a game attempting to present some semblance of authenticity, if not gritty realism. Call of Duty 4 succeeded because it interspersed the epic, action-packed set-pieces with more methodical, stoic moments for the player to reflect and absorb the events taking place. There's a reason that people remember dropping bombs from the AC130 and sneaking through Chernobyl in a Ghille suite more vividly than they do the "climactic" No Fighting in the War Room mission. All these problems put together left the cumulative experience feeling like little more than a blur of random gunfights.
As stated, the competitive multiplayer is addictive, rewarding and incredibly entertaining but it can also be pretty damn frustrating at times thanks to some balance issues. The spawn system is still completely broken. Laughably, Infinity Ward actually included a payback experience bonus for killing the enemy that just killed you, and it only takes a few rounds to realize that dollar bills are flying off your body every other time you die. They're basically highlighting the fact that the dude you killed a few seconds ago just respawned around the corner and killed you. The balance issues are less problematic but still a little annoying. Every attack has its counter, usually in the form of a perk, but in the case of the kill-streak rewards, most of the effective counters are earned further up the level hierarchy than would be ideal. If you earn the cold-blood perk and its PRO upgrade, you're relatively safe from the predator missile and helicopter mini-gun, but everyone without the perk is basically dog meat because even a five-year-old retard with no hands could hit the red boxes that illuminate your position on the map. At least in Call of Duty 4, the computer-controlled helicopter missed some of its shots and the bombing run required a teammate's UAV to be effective. These new kill-streak rewards are basically just guaranteed kills that feedback into more kill-streaks. They don't break the game, but they do make completely one-sided matches a relatively common occurrence compared to other shooters.
Final Word
If you're a fan of the Call of Duty gameplay formula, Modern Warfare 2 has just rendered every other FPS on the market irrelevant. There's nothing here to make converts out of those who hated the original Modern Warfare, but for the rest of us, no other shooter out there comes close to offering the same level of cinematic spectacle and multiplayer breadth.
Except for Call of Duty 4. Competitive multiplayer may completely outweigh every other element of the package for some gamers, and that's fine. But there are still plenty of gamers out there that associate the Call of Duty brand – at least the Infinity Ward titles – with expert cinematic storytelling and a riveting single-player experience. Modern Warfare 2 fails to deliver a single-player experience up to the standards that the franchise is known for, and that's a big disappointment. Fans looking for that element of the Call of Duty experience need look no further than their copy of Call of Duty 4…assuming they haven't sold it yet. Oops.
While the cumulative experience derived from the campaign may be disappointing, the underlying gameplay is still fun and the set pieces are still exciting, at least the first time you play through them. The addition of the masterful Spec-Ops modes goes a long way to making up for the uneven campaign though, and the competitive multiplayer is as addictive as expected. If you have an Xbox Live or PSN connection, then your status is going to be pretty predictable for the next several months. It's not perfect, but Modern Warfare 2 lives up to the hype.
It wasn't supposed to be that game. The odds were stacked against Infinity Ward in more ways than one as the industry marched toward the now legendary 2007 holiday season. Activision was against moving the bestselling Call of Duty franchise out of the familiar and profitable confines of the World War 2 setting into the unproven arena of contemporary combat. After overcoming that hurdle, they had to face the Halo 3 hype machine. As far as the gaming populace was concerned, it was Bungie's year. Sometimes things don't quite pan out as expected. Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare annihilated expectations. Combining a cinematic campaign with groundbreaking multiplayer, Call of Duty 4 dominated the competition at retail and online to become one of the bestselling and most played first-person shooters of all time.
Today, the situation is very different. This is Infinity Ward's year to lose. Modern Warfare 2 is the most highly anticipated game in years and expectations are through the roof. Forget annihilating them, just meeting them would be an impressive victory. To meet that challenge, Infinity Ward has launched a three-pronged assault of campaign, cooperative and multiplayer gameplay. That's a lot of content to go through, so rather than risk getting caught up in the hype and pumping out a gushing review as soon as possible, I took a step back and spent a good week with the game before I even started writing anything down. Gains have been made and losses suffered in comparison to the original Modern Warfare, and when the dust settled I couldn't pick a favorite between the two. They are different games, with different strengths and weaknesses. If sales figures and Xbox Live stats are anything to go by, you've probably already bought the game, and if preorder sales indicate anything, you were probably planning on it, reviews be damned. So I'm not going to bother to tell you to buy Modern Warfare 2, because it's obviously a fantastic game. I'm just going to say that you should hang on to your copy of Call of Duty 4 too.
What's Hot
The Call of Duty gameplay formula has both fans and detractors, but it's hard to argue against the raw intensity and cinematic spectacle that Infinity Ward creates with it. The game gives you just enough freedom to let you think you're the one pushing the action forward, when really it's the other way around. Meticulously scripted events transition seamlessly from noise in the background to the focus of your attention and back again, funneling you from one epic set-piece to another, each one more insane than the last. The gunplay at the heart of the whole thing is extremely satisfying, with sounds, animations, and damage modeling that all come together to make the weapons feel suitably heavy and lethal. Other shooters like the Halo titles give you more freedom to play around with the combat and more emergent gameplay, but for sheer adrenaline overload, nothing touches Modern Warfare 2.
Shooting people in the face is obviously the core gameplay mechanic, but Infinity Ward has done a masterful job of positioning the action around constantly changing objectives. You'll sneak through blizzards into enemy bases before shooting your way out on snowmobiles, blast a mounted mini-gun through the hostile streets of Afghanistan, fight your way through a Russian gulag, escort armored vehicles through suburbia, make marine insertions, and you won't believe what else. Some objectives are repeated a few times but the different locations, level layouts, enemy types and weapon load-outs all change the experience enough every time to keep things exciting. Even when you're just making your way from point A to point B, fighting through streets of Middle Eastern warzone, the shanty towns of Rio De Janeiro, and the boulevards of the United States all feel noticeably different, so the shooting never gets boring. The high points of the campaign for me were the South American levels, simply because they looked, felt and played unlike any urban environment I've encountered.
Call of Duty 4 revolutionized the FPS genre by integrating persistent RPG mechanics into the competitive multiplayer experience. Suddenly earning kills and winning matches were worth so much more than bragging rights. Modern Warfare 2 doesn't innovate as much as its predecessor did but the multiplayer is still an amazing case study on the power of positive reinforcement. Almost every single action you perform in the game will net you some experience points, the currency with which you upgrade your weapons and skills. Shoot someone, +100 points. Capture a point, +150 points. Hell, die a few times in a row, finally eke out a kill, +150 points. There's a constant stream of pop-up messages to pat you on the back for your efforts, no matter how terrible you or your team might be doing. And that feeling of constant progression, of always getting closer to the next goal marker makes the multiplayer stupidly addictive and insanely rewarding. If you thought that the "Achievement Unlocked" message was a satisfying sight, wait until you start leveling up and completing the challenges associated with each weapon and upgrade. You'll be hearing the signature "Level Up" guitar riff in your sleep.
Barring a few tweaks and refinements, the actual multiplayer gameplay hasn't changed much since Modern Warfare, there are just a lot more new toys to play with. New weapons and upgrades are a no-brainer, but the new upgradable perks and unlockable kill-streaks add new wrinkles to the customization element of the game. Every perk in the game now has a PRO variant, an upgrade that enhances or complements the original benefit with a new one. Some of the PRO benefits are far more interesting than the initial ones, so there will be a lot of instances when you'll have to sacrifice the use of a perk you really love for one you don't just so you can upgrade it and reap the benefit you really want. The system really forces you to make tactical decisions about what perks to use and put a lot of thought into your custom classes. In Modern Warfare I had two custom classes that took me all the way to level 55. This time, I had filled out every custom class slot by the time I hit level 20. Kill-streaks are back with a vengeance, as there are now over 20 available to unlock as you level up. You're only able to unlock three at once, but the sheer variety of allows players to build around their strengths and roles on a given team.
Knowing your role on the team is vital to success in Spec Ops mode, the biggest new addition, the high point of the entire package and reason enough to buy the game as far as I'm concerned. It could be considered Infinity Ward's 'answer' to co-op mission modes like Horde and Firefight, in the same way a nuclear bomb could be considered an "answer" to a hurled rock. Yes, the central goal of keeping each other alive and gunning down waves of enemies is repeated more than a few times throughout the 23 missions that the mode is composed of, but Infinity Ward has leveraged their talent for crafting unique objectives and "borrowed" a few epic set-pieces from previous titles to make Special Ops feel like a fully developed, 'best of COD' campaign. As a matter of fact, it will probably take you longer to work through Special Ops than it will the proper campaign, and you'll probably have more fun along the way since you'll be able to bring a buddy. Playing through the campaign on Veteran is about as much fun has having your scrotum smashed with a sledge hammer, repeatedly, but with an extra gun at your side and a functional human brain behind it, the absurd challenge is not only completely entertaining, but actually satisfying.
Communication is key as you and your partner tackle missions that range from marching down a suspension bridge being torn apart by an aerial assault, weaving through wrecked cars as enemies rappel down around you and helicopters attack from the skies to a stealth-based sniper mission obviously inspired by the now legendary Call of Duty 4 mission that forces you to crawl through the snow and time simultaneous headshots to avoid detection by guards and their vicious pets. If one of you goes down then the other will have a certain amount of time to revive you while you try and defend yourself from the "last stand" position. Spec Ops really hits its stride when Infinity Ward makes full use of the fact that there are two people playing to create experiences that just can't be matched by the single-player campaign. I'd argue the high point of the entire game, all modes, is the AC130 Spec Ops mission that puts one player on the ground behind enemy lines and the other at the controls of the AC130 gunship. With no revives and pitch darkness to work in, both players have to communicate every movement to keep the poor guy on the ground alive. It's intense, clever and incredibly fun. The missions are fairly short, basically just the epic set-pieces without the build-up, but they're all killer no filler and absolutely perfect for when you only have an hour or less to play.
What's Not
Despite the epic scope of the set-pieces and the variety of mission objectives, the single-player campaign is a big disappointment. The storyline makes no fucking sense whatsoever, rendering the entire context for the action and the events that take place within absolutely meaningless. The first few missions in the game are fantastic and do a great job of setting up a new terrorist threat for the heroes to combat. Then all of a sudden we take a left turn to Tom Clancy ghostwriter town and have Russia attacking the United States in response to a terrorist attack they think the Americans committed. From there things start spiraling out of control at an alarming rate before hitting rock bottom at the game's climax with one of the most pointless and ineffective plot-twists in the history of modern narrative. Did M. Night Shyamalan write this? It's a shame, because Infinity Ward obviously had the goal of making players feel something and react to the game, as evidenced by the by now infamous airport scene, the rendering of Washington DC as a devastated war zone along with other scenes of American cities getting a proverbial curb-stomping. But without any coherent reason to invest myself in the events taking place, the best they could get out of me was a twinge of cognitive dissonance before I pulled the trigger in the airport.
Which brings me to the next problem: This game has the wildest, most incongruous tonal swings of any game I've ever played. I'm not American, so maybe the imagery hits my Southern neighbors a little harder than it did me, but going from gunning down civilians in an airport to shooting missiles off the top of a burger joint just felt silly. Most of the suburban missions felt like a tongue-in-cheek tribute to Red Dawn, which was completely at odds with the harsh, gritty tone of the Rio De Janeiro levels, the Russian Gulag, or every other setting in the game.
Finally, there's the pacing, or the complete lack of it. Putting your pedal to the metal from start to finish is fine and dandy if you want to replicate the experience of an 80s action movie, but it's completely out of place in a game attempting to present some semblance of authenticity, if not gritty realism. Call of Duty 4 succeeded because it interspersed the epic, action-packed set-pieces with more methodical, stoic moments for the player to reflect and absorb the events taking place. There's a reason that people remember dropping bombs from the AC130 and sneaking through Chernobyl in a Ghille suite more vividly than they do the "climactic" No Fighting in the War Room mission. All these problems put together left the cumulative experience feeling like little more than a blur of random gunfights.
As stated, the competitive multiplayer is addictive, rewarding and incredibly entertaining but it can also be pretty damn frustrating at times thanks to some balance issues. The spawn system is still completely broken. Laughably, Infinity Ward actually included a payback experience bonus for killing the enemy that just killed you, and it only takes a few rounds to realize that dollar bills are flying off your body every other time you die. They're basically highlighting the fact that the dude you killed a few seconds ago just respawned around the corner and killed you. The balance issues are less problematic but still a little annoying. Every attack has its counter, usually in the form of a perk, but in the case of the kill-streak rewards, most of the effective counters are earned further up the level hierarchy than would be ideal. If you earn the cold-blood perk and its PRO upgrade, you're relatively safe from the predator missile and helicopter mini-gun, but everyone without the perk is basically dog meat because even a five-year-old retard with no hands could hit the red boxes that illuminate your position on the map. At least in Call of Duty 4, the computer-controlled helicopter missed some of its shots and the bombing run required a teammate's UAV to be effective. These new kill-streak rewards are basically just guaranteed kills that feedback into more kill-streaks. They don't break the game, but they do make completely one-sided matches a relatively common occurrence compared to other shooters.
Final Word
If you're a fan of the Call of Duty gameplay formula, Modern Warfare 2 has just rendered every other FPS on the market irrelevant. There's nothing here to make converts out of those who hated the original Modern Warfare, but for the rest of us, no other shooter out there comes close to offering the same level of cinematic spectacle and multiplayer breadth.
Except for Call of Duty 4. Competitive multiplayer may completely outweigh every other element of the package for some gamers, and that's fine. But there are still plenty of gamers out there that associate the Call of Duty brand – at least the Infinity Ward titles – with expert cinematic storytelling and a riveting single-player experience. Modern Warfare 2 fails to deliver a single-player experience up to the standards that the franchise is known for, and that's a big disappointment. Fans looking for that element of the Call of Duty experience need look no further than their copy of Call of Duty 4…assuming they haven't sold it yet. Oops.
While the cumulative experience derived from the campaign may be disappointing, the underlying gameplay is still fun and the set pieces are still exciting, at least the first time you play through them. The addition of the masterful Spec-Ops modes goes a long way to making up for the uneven campaign though, and the competitive multiplayer is as addictive as expected. If you have an Xbox Live or PSN connection, then your status is going to be pretty predictable for the next several months. It's not perfect, but Modern Warfare 2 lives up to the hype.
February 8, 2010
