Man, I never thought today would finally get here. Well, it’s here, the most anticipated game of 2009, Infinity Wards Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 was released at midnight last night, and believe me, I was one of the several hundred people standing in line freezing outside of Gamestop to pick this bad boy up. Well, with all of the anticipation and build up of the game over the last several months, you’d better damn well hope that this game is going to blow your mind. Well, let’s just take a look.
Modern Warfare 2 takes place 5 years following the events of the first game. Basically, the Ultranationalists have seized Russia. Vladimir Markov, one of the lieutenants from the antagonist of the first game, begins staging terrorist attacks all over Europe. Modern Warfare 2 begins here with you playing Army Ranger Joseph Allen fighting in the middle east in an attempt to stop these terrorist attacks. After displaying your skills, General Shepherd recruits you to go undercover as one of Markov’s actual soldiers. Now, at the beginning of the game, you are asked if you want to skip a terrifyingly immoral mission. If you play it, you’ll find that under Markov, you are tasked with doing something horrible. In the end, he makes it look like the Americans unleash terrorist attacks on Russia and you can imagine how thing would escalate from here.
Throughout the rest of the game, you will play various characters in both the Special Forces that are trying to stop Markov, to Army Rangers tasked with defending the United States from Markov’s counterattacks. Basically all hell breaks loose with some really dramatic events taking place, followed with some serious plot twists and finally some cameos from characters of the previous story and climaxing in one of the most epic endings to a game I’ve ever seen.
The campaign in Modern Warfare 2 is single player and should take you roughly 7-8 hours to complete. But in addition to the campaign, a Special Ops game mode was included that allows split-screen or Xbox Live multiplayer putting you and a friend in some seriously challenging situations that you will have encountered through the campaign. There are roughly 25 different challenges and you will earn between 1 and 3 stars upon completing them based on your performance. Once you have enough stars, new challenges will become available to you. These are extremely fun and I feel this was an excellent addition to the game!
The campaign itself never feels repetitious and the length of the game I feel is perfect. Each mission gives you something new to do like chasing a convict through the alleys, taking non-lethal shots, swimming underwater, stealth and sniper missions, and driving vehicles like snow mobiles, choppers and humvees. On top of that, you’ll travel to a variety of locations across the world including your own local neighborhoods, the capital building and Whitehouse, Afghanistan, the streets of Brazil, Russian snowy fields and even an old jail.
There are also a ton of achievements including some funny ones like the Colonel Sanderson Achievement for killing 7 chickens in under 10 seconds. Hell yea.
Of course Modern Warfare 2 is a first person shooter, and you get to play as many different characters throughout the campaign, but none play any differently than the others, but this certainly does not mean you aren’t going to love every minute of your game play experience. The levels are so well designed and challenging the entire way through that you’re just going to be screaming the entire time as you get those wonderful headshots, or witness another of your team mates run forward and stab a knife into an enemies throat.
Now to the majority of you out there, the Multiplayer is the only reason to play this game. Thankfully, everything from the previous game has been brought back in all of it’s glory with a host of new maps to challenge us all. In addition to the traditional leveling up and gaining access to new weapons and equipment, we now gain special abilities as we get larger kill streaks, such as the ability to use a predator missile attack, or to call in a gunship. Gametypes include a Free-For-All, Team Deathmatch, Search and Destroy, Demolition, Domination and Capture the Flag, so you’re sure to never run out of things to do.
The PC version no longer can host dedicated servers which means mods and community made maps are also out of the picture which I know has a lot of people upset even to the point of boycotting the game, which is just ridiculous considering how epic of a game they are missing out on. Finally a new feature was added so that if your host drops, the game no longer is cancelled, it is simply switched to a new host, which is a definite improvement over the first game.
While not as visually appealing as the Unreal Engine 3, the graphics in Modern Warfare 2 are nothing to complain about. There isn’t any cut-scenes per-se, but the remaining in-game graphics are stunning, and never suffer from frame rate and texture popping issues. Infinity Ward assures us that while the game is running on the same engine as the previous title, improvements and optimizations have still been made.
The games fully orchestrated sound-track will keep you hooked and the music is wonderfully composed for each situation throughout the story. The voice acting is of course fabulous as well, as many of the voice actors of the previous title have returned to voice their role again.
The story alone in Modern Warfare 2 simply blew me away. You just won’t believe the crazy stuff that happens and what you’ve got to do to attempt to stop it. That alone to me is worth the 60 bucks for the title, but on top of that, you’re graced again with hours upon hours of multiplayer fun, and the new Special Ops mode will have your blood pressure rising and your heart racing as you attempt to complete the intensely challenging missions. Was the most anticipated game of the year worth the wait? Hell yea.
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[...] release of Call of Duty? No, not really – You’re pretty much getting the final missions to the Modern Warfare story, with some new spec ops missions and multiplayer levels. But just because there isn’t much [...]