Unconventional Updates

Saying “If you like Call of Duty 4, then you’ll love Modern Warfare 2” is a little redundant. In fact saying anything about Modern Warfare 2 is fairly redundant seeing as it is probably the most talked about game at the moment. Rather than jump on the bandwagon of a straight review, I’ll talk more about the specifics, if you want a more general review then head over to somewhere like Gamespot where people are paid to spend hours glued to the screen.

First up I’d like to talk about Special Ops. Special Ops adds a whole new dimension to the game. If there was anything wrong with Call of Duty 4 then it would have to be the unbelievably short campaign, and Modern Warfare 2 continues this trend. That said, the campaign is anything but bad. I would guess that the reason for the length would be the amount of time they took up paying attention to each detail because just like CoD4, each level is brilliantly crafted and designed to be immersive. The voice acting is great, the dialogue isn’t cheesy, the story is engaging and it retains that filmlike quality. But it eventually ends, which is where Special Ops comes in. Whilst Special Ops was considered more an extra, I see it as where the game really is. Special Ops contains a load of extra missions for you to complete on your own or with a friend and it really adds to the replayability factor of the game, making it less of a game played only for its multiplayer value.

Within Special Ops there are a variety of game modes. One of which stretches the whole FPS genre slightly with a race. Racing snowmobiles to be exact, which is a lot more fun than it sounds. It is by no means a polished competitor to specialised racing games, rather it is a simple matter of accelerate, brake and reverse. It is more akin to go-kart racing that racing racing. Which in my opinion where the fun really is. Other modes involve the simple task of releasing that murderer we all have within us and just killing wave after wave of enemies. Or sneaking past enemy lines without being detected. And of course the dreaded escort missions. Why any developer thinks escort missions are a good idea is completely beyond me, they are freaking irritating.

As for general gameplay, several tweaks have been made to the overall feel of combat. A graphically realistic yet irritating and scientifically unsound watered down blood effect is used when hurt, replacing the old red around the sides look of CoD4 and 5. As Sandmonkey said at the time “Why would you have blood on your eyes?”, a good question, and why does it fade? Personally, I find it very annoying as it distorts your field of view, which makes it very difficult when surrounded on a hard level when your vision is constantly blurred. On a good note, Last Stand has been replaced with Final Stand, which varies from gametype to gametype. In Co-op, you first collapse and you are given a pistol to shoot bad guys whilst crawling around. This lasts until you’re shot again, at which time you lose the pistol and you crawl around very slowly waiting to be revived by your partner. You cannot die in Special Ops unless both participants are in final stand or the one in final stand is left for two minutes to bleed on the ground. In head-to-head game types final stand involves collapsing and crawling as usual, but you can use your primary weapon to fend off attackers, albeit with very slow aiming. If you survive in this state for a certain amount of time, you just get back up and resume fighting rather than dying. I think this is a good upgrade. The addition of crawling and the use of a weapon other than a pistol that you probably didn’t have two seconds ago actually makes the last stand make more sense, at least to me anyway.

If you have a (real) console or a PC then you would be stupid to buy another game over this one. If you are a PC user you should know about the lack of dedicated servers which means you will be the victims of some really really painful connections. Oh and you’re capped at 8 vs 8, which is nice. But still, the rest makes it worth it.

Renegade