Game Reviews | Game Previews

Summary

First let me start by saying I'm a 52 year old gamer and it's difficult for me to find time to play on a consistent basis because I have a job and a life. With that said, MW 2 is a very addictive game and I found it hard to quit. I completed the single player in one afternoon. Game is very intense with good action. Don't really get the point of trying to find all the intel? Really takes away from the flow of the game searching for the laptops. Also, the airport mission is pretty disturbing and really an unnecessary part of game that could of been left out. They do give a warning prior to starting the mission which allows you to skip with no harm done. Hello! As soon as you give the warning, every kid in the world is going to play the mission to see what it's about. Otherwise the game is excellent with a good storyline and likable characters. It takes place five years later after MW 1 ends. You play as multiple characters throught the game in a few different parts of the world, including the United States as the Russians have invaded our country. The game doesn't really tie things up at the end which I understand MW 3 will pick up. I suggest playing MW 1&2 prior to playing 3 so you have a clue about the story line and the returning characters. All in all, this is an excellent game that keeps you rivited. I can't wait to play MW 3.

Summary

As with all Call of Duty games, it's just recycled gameplay of the last game but with new weapons, more customization, and some other slight changes. There haven't been that many changes to Call of Duty since Call of Duty 3 to Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare.

Presentation: A story that takes place after the original Modern Warfare and a very short campaign at that but that's not what this game is about so...

Gameplay: Short campaign, only noteable thing about campaign is the character Ghost, also voice of Gaz in the first game. The multiplayer is just as fun and better than CoD4 and WaW before it. With great weapons, cooler perks and abilities than before.

Graphics: This graphics engine should stop being updated and used, it's already begun looking old. It doesn't look really bad it just doesn't look jaw-dropping. It's good at best.

Sound: One of the other great things about Call of Duty is that they take it all so seriously and it shows. The explosions, voice acting, soundtrack, and gunshots all sound awesome.

Lasting Appeal: People still play this game to date but Infinity Ward gave up on banning hackers from MW2 a long time ago. But there's still trophies.

Summary

My friend had always been telling me about how great MW2 was, and how much I'd love it if I played it. So I tried it out. It sucks you in at first, trying to make you believe it's the best game you've ever played. Well, in fact, it isn't. The story follows multiple soldiers as they pit themselves up against South American weapons dealers and the henchmen of the Russian villain Makarov. The story is fairly interesting, but doesn't really affect the game that much. You can pay attention to the mission briefing dialogue, but it won't matter much if you flip to the next channel while the game is loading. The ending is actually pretty good, having the main character accomplish something while still leaving a decent cliffhanger. The weapons weren't varied that much, though. There were probably over ten machine guns in a game and one or two of everything else. The game fails once you beat it. It doesn't offer the fantastic replay value that a game like Halo Reach might have, and it leaves you wondering if the twenty to thirty bucks you spent on it was worth it. The levels are good a couple of times after you beat it, but after a few days it begins to get a little old.
Spec Ops is what you have left after you beat the story. It is a separate game mode that pits you up against various challenges that will test your skill in unique situations. Some of the missions are cool, such as having you sneak through a snowy forest while trying not to alert enemies, pitting you up against wave upon wave of enemies, and two player missions. One of the two player missions involves one player on the ground and the other manning the predator cannon in the air, pushing the two to use teamwork to accomplish their mission. This is fun, but it isn't something to raise the game rating by a couple of points.
Despite my bad comments about the game, Modern Warfare 2 is still an awesome adventure that will entertain you until the very end. With it's stunning action, amazing visuals, and varied level settings, MW2 rightfully deserves an 8 in my eyes. But coming from me, rent it first. See what you think of it before you go out and waste thirty bucks on it.

Summary

Ah, Call of duty 4: one of my favorite games of all times. You pratically told the whole world how FPSs should be made: an imersive storyline, great characters, unbeatable multiplayer, COD4 deserves all the praise it has ever gotten. It was so good that it didn't need a sequel. Yet along comes a sequel, Modern Warfare 2. And guess what? It SUCKS. And before you start sending me death threats saying my opinion is wrong and that I deserve to die for ripping on probably the most over-hyped and disapointing games of all time, NO. The game sucks,ok? And if you take time to read this review, I'm going to explain why I think the game sucks.

First, you have the campaign mode which follows the typical "*insert number of years* since last game" idea. Basically, after the death of Zakhaev in COD4, Ultranationalists took over Russia anyway, declare Zakhaev a hero and are taken over by Vladimir Makarov who for some unexplained reason, feels like taking on America. For most of the game, you will be playing as Sergeant Gary "Roach" Sanderson, a member of an elite, multi-national counter-terrorist unit known as Task Force 141 basically tasked with taking down Makarov.

The gameplay itself still feels like COD4 which I view is a good thing for ANY sequel, to feel remeniscent of its predecessor. But it's spoiled by a number of things, the first being the length of of the campaign: the campaign on average is about 4 - 8 hours long depending on what difficulty you choose: fairly short for a game in todays world. It would have been nice for it to have been at least another few hours longer. I also had a few problems with character development. With the exception of the Task 141 characters and MAYBE Makarov, most of the characters, especially the US ranger characters, are given little to no character development at all, they just tell you to do everything because they can't be bothered to do any of it themselves. I also have a problem with the plot twist which I won't spoil. Let's just say, I think it's something that has been done to death in recent years and just doesn't impress me anymore. I also noted that at times the checkpoint system can put you DIRECTLY IN FRONT OF A GROUP OF ENEMIES.

So we've established that the campaign could be improved but what about the other two modes? Special ops is basically a co-op mode which sees you partner up with a friend (and it MUST be with a friend if you play online; special ops doesn't let you join anyone random like other co-op games) or going solo to complete a variety of missions. These missions are very fun and are good fun to play with a friend...... offline. Online, it becomes a very different game: a game with you trying to battle the CRIPPLING lag you get in almost every game you play with a friend. Sometimes you get lucky and the lag isn't SO bad but 9 times out of 10, you're really going to get some serious lag. I also have to gripe about the 2 missions that NEED two people to play them. These two are of course the ac130 stage (ripped straight from COD4) and the chopper gunning stage. These two missions MUST have two people to play: one to shoot at enemies from above and the other to run around and try not to die (almost impossible on the hardest difficulty). Which begs the question: if you don't have anyone to play with, why not just make your partner AI controlled? Mind you, it would probably be ungodly stupid so maybe that's for the best.

So we know that the campaign is mediocre, special ops is ok but is usually ruined by serious lag, but what about the multiplayer? The most hyped up part of the game? Here's a hint: IT F***ING SUCKS! Why? First off, the ballancing system for the weapons is just BROKEN: most guns are just completly overpowered. For example, the M4A1, the Famas, the scar-h, the m16, the acr, the UMP 45, the RPD, the spas-12, the aa-12, the ranger, the model 1337, the g18...... you know what? Screw it: PRATICALLY EVERY GUN IN THE GAME IS OVERPOWERED. Even the snipers are broken: sometimes you can aim for the head, shoot, hit but they won't die! It seems random: most of the time they die, other times they don't. The only weapon that seems to be balanced is the FAL.

While we are on the issue of balancing, I should also mention the perk system. The perk system has been upgraded so now if you complete a few acchievements with any perk, you upgrade it to a pro version. For example, sleight of hand pro not only increases your reload speed like regular sleight of hand pro, it now lets you aim down your gun sights a lot faster. This is fine and a good system BUT the issue is simple: some of ther perks are overpowered and can be exploited in various ways. For example, commando pro increases your knife distance (which I already thought was pretty far) AND takes away falling damage. This, combined with marathon pro for unlimited sprint and lightweight pro for faster sprinting means the possibility of people running around faster than Usain Bolt and stabbing you in the back FROM ABOUT 10 FEET AWAY. I'm sorry but that knife distance is just flat out stupid. Then there's one man army which let's you switch classes without respawning first but at the same time, if you try switching to your current class, it refills your ammo, grenades and everything. THAT IS ABSURD.

Then there's other ballancing issues like the tactical insertion for example, a piece of equipment that let's you spawn wherever you want when you die. This is fine if it wasn't for the fact that when you respawn, you get your tactical insertion back. This, combined with silenced weapons, cold blooded pro for not being detected by any killstreaks and ninja for not appearing on the new heartbeat sensors makes that problem known only as boosting even worse (more on that in a bit).

So yeah, themultiplayer sounds pretty bad. But do you want to know the scary part? It gets worse, believe it or not! Which leads to my next issue with the multiplayer: numerous glitches and exploits including being able to get unlimited care packages (since patched), "elevators", the infamous "javelin gltich" (patched) and of course, the infamous yet-to-be-patched-but-most-likely-never-will-though-everyone-knows-about-it rock glitch, allowing you to glitch inside a rock on one map and still being able to shoot out. But it gets WORSE. Hackers have been popping up all over the game lately with always at least one guy in the lobby with an aimbot, using the UFO mode, wallhacking, unlimited ammo and invincibility. In fact, it's gotten so bad, Infinity Ward themselves supposidly can't fix it.

But that's not the worse part. Do you really want to know the worst part of multiplayer? The killstreak system. Goddamn, I HATE THE KILLSTREAK SYSTEM IN THIS GAME. The problem being is that pratically every killstreak is overpowered. That, combined with the fact that kills from killstreaks count torwards the next killstreak and that most killstreaks rack up more kills than every death in WWI and WWII combined add the problem of boosting and finally one killstreak that actually ends the game early, ARE YOU STARTING TO SEE THE PROBLEM? Pratically every killstreak in the game needs to tonned down. Or better yet: how about you just make it so kills from other killstreaks don't count torwards your killstreak?

So yeah, this game is seriously bugged up. And this is why I PLEAD to you one thing: DO NOT PLAY THIS GAME.

Final score:

Graphics: 4/5

Sound: 4/5

Gameplay: -8/5

Entertainment: 1/5

Overall: 1/20

Summary

As with millions of other gamers on the planet, I really like the 'Call Of Duty' games. Or I should say I really like the Infinity Ward-developed 'COD' games. The last game we received in this series was 'COD: World At War' from Treyarch studios. The game sold very well, of course, but got some mixed reviews and I thought it was a shoddy product. Of course, a good cure for Treyarch's crappy 'COD' games are to play Infinity's Ward's games. They are the original developer and if Activision wasn't so greedy, they would be the ONLY developer. Infinity Ward are clearly the caretakers of this series and deliver an excellent game every time out.

The reason for that is the amount of detail that they put in their 'COD' games. The games look amazing, usually have a good story (more on that later), have huge action set-pieces that are very exciting, have excellent online multi-player, and tend to push the first-person shooter genre forward to new levels. One of those new levels is the new, 'Special Ops' mode. But more on that in a bit.

Let's start with the campaign. 'COD:MW2' takes place 5 years after the original 'Modern Warfare'. To go into all the twists and turns that this game takes would take me an hour and ruin the plot surprises for you. Instead of doing that, I will just say that I have yet to play a game with so many, "Wow, wtf?!!" moments (in a good way, of course). The storyline can be dis-jointed at times and is the typical Tom Clancy-esque tale mixed with some FOX's '24' tv show. The game really sets the pace early on in the game with a very unexpected level where you play as an undercover russian terrorist going into an airport. If you are lucky to avoid the hype of this level and haven't heard about what happens (I did avoid the spoilers on the internet), it will be a shocking and disturbing level for some. So much so that the game even asks you if you want to skip the level during the campaign.

The level of production here is absolutely top-notch and that helps with the storytelling aspect of the game. The music and visuals really bring the first-person view storytelling technique to powerful levels. And nobody does it better than Infinity Ward. Like I said, the story can get convoluted and it jumps from character to character which I can't stand. But in the end, the game has so many crazy moments that it draws you in regardless of the confusing 'Tom Clancy-esque' plot that we have seen in countless other games & movies. Unfortunately, the game is very short. The campaign won't take you more than 8 hrs. to finish. The game is fun to play for those hours, but I just wish their was more of it.

Thankfully, even after you finish the campaign, you have barely scratched the surface of what this game has to offer. To anybody who played the original 'Modern Warfare', you will be happy to hear that the excellent online-multiplayer is back and better than ever. It's still as addicting as it was with it's experience points and perks system. There are TONS of different things you can unlock and outfit your character with. There are also tons of different game-modes to jump into, so there will be something for everyone. So if you are into online-FPS' and haven't given this series a shot yet......well, you are in for a treat. Go get this game now.

The third aspect of this game is the brand new, 'Special Ops' mode. This is an excellent mode where you are thrown into different situations and earn stars depending on what difficulty you complete them on. The first one has you running through the training mission again. The 2nd has you defending an area from waves of enemies, trucks, etc. The 4th has you as a sniper trying to sneak past patrol units with dogs in a snowy forest. Those are just a few of the examples, but the mission variety makes the mode fun. You can also play it with another person in co-op fashion. In fact, some missions require you to play with a partner.

The addictive nature of the 'Special Ops' mode involves collecting stars that unlocks more levels as you move forward. You can go back to previous levels and play on harder difficulties to gain additional stars. While the mode is not anything revolutionary, it is fun and a welcome addition to the series.

Whenever Infinity Ward makes a new 'COD' game, it's always going to be in the running for 'Game Of The Year' and 'Modern Warfare 2' is no different. My only complaints on the game would be that the campaign is too short and is a bit convoluted at times. Other than that, this game is almost perfect. It looks and sounds fantastic, has great online multi-player, a really fun campaign, and a great new mode ('Special Ops'). If you are a fan of first-person shooters at all, this is about as safe a purchase as you can get. The decision on whether to add this to your collection should be a no-brainer.