Summary: This game sucks, do not buy it. Play the single player campaign if someone gives you the game. The multiplayer totally sucks.
How does a game with a solid franchise, good customer loyalty, and a massive marketing budget crank out a game with horrible on line experiences? Simple, they can. The publishers are probably still riding the whole Pitfall wave they started out with on the Atari, and figure that we would buy this game happily for $60 and be satisfied.
Like all mainstream and first person shooters released to a mass market audience in the last few years, Call of Duty, Modern Warfare 2 has the single player/multiplayer dichotomy. The gaps between the two in this case however, are staggering.
Single Player Play
The first person production values are awesome. I mean you have the voice talent for the Secret Service Guy for Life dude from 24, the protagonist from the Rome series on HBO, and the voice of the latest military recruiting ad campaigns whose name I cannot remember, but he is a good actor as well as a shill for the military industrial complex. I mean, this is some serious voice talent recruitment. Usually you get one or two known voices, but these guys have three. There are probably some I cannot recognize, but the talent in the voice over is good.
The plot in the single player campaign is excellent. The writers took some chances with one of the missions, and you will know which one I am talking about when you play this game.
The weapons in this game make sense too. And it makes a difference which one you pick unlike in some first person shooters where there is basically just four weapons: the pistol; automatic rifle, sniper rifle, and bazooka. In CODMW2, the selection of the rifle you use can make the game quite difficult or quite enjoyable depending on your selection. Pay attention to the sights on the weapon which are indicated when you position yourself to select it. The authors tempered the ammo supply well too, so you actually need to pay attention to how much you use and not just fire blindly into the action.
Vehicle play in this game is immaterial as there are only a few missions where you get in a vehicle, and half the time you do it, it is to go fast in one direction for a few minutes because you are chasing an objective, or being chased. You are a passenger in the other half of the vehicle trips, and I do not believe you can die while in them, rendering your decisions moot.
The AI in this game is quite advanced too. The enemy is not predictable, and not terribly dumb. I never found myself anticipating a computer bad guy, and their use of weapons is intuitive, just as if someone finally said, “Hey, how about we spend some time writing some subroutines into the AI for this game.”
The plot got confusing at times, but you generally understand that you are saving the world, and I believe there were one or two different protagonists throughout the game so you didn’t play one lone wolf who single handedly saved the entire fucking world with a gun, which was refreshing. Here, two individuals saved the entire fucking world with a gun. But overall, I really enjoyed the single player game, which is unusual. Normally, the single player mode in the games I play are just warm ups for the multiplayer. Which leads me to the next section, which if you are still reading this, will be an exercise in how to keep calm while excoriating a multiplayer game.
Multiplayer Sucks Ass
Big hairy blistered ass. Wow did this suck. How did a game team write and produce such a beautiful single player experience and have next to none of it translate to the multiplayer? How? I mean, I am not a computer programmer and could never even begin to write games, so to the extent that makes my judgment hypocricial, it is. But come on!!
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