Ah, Modern Warfare 2. The most anticipated game of the year despite there being so many other good games. So I gave the single-player campaign a try (I don’t really play online games, a solid SP experience is a lot more important to me) because the hype is so huge and CoD4 was kinda solid (though I didn’t finish it because I played it on the PS3 and I realised that I couldn’t play an FPS on a console to save my life). And, sadly, “just a try” was enough to finish it. So I’ll talk about my experience with the game.

Just for reference, I played the PC version.

Read on!

The good
It’s always better to talk about what was good in a game first. And Modern Warfare 2 isn’t lacking too much in the “good” department. Solid shooting mechanics above most modern FPS, the way guns shoot is quite realistic and there’s a bunch of them each which have a different feel. The overall control are really easy to use once you find what each button does (and the game is sure to tell you everything you need to know). Once you get everything right, the game plays really well, and you pretty much always have an action for every situation. The controls and overall gameplay really is good, no doubt about that. It doesn’t do anything new, but it doesn’t need to.

Another fun part is certain of the battles. Stealthily picking off nazis in a snowstorm was pretty fun, though the best parts were definitely the areas where you are fighting in and around the White House and various other areas in the US. It offers really different areas than other war games of the sort, and maybe even familiar locations for Americans. And the most climactic parts of the games were during those segments. And they were great moments indeed. I also really like using UAVs, really fun stuff for some reason.

The graphics are really good too. The character models are a level beyond those of CoD4, and some of the areas just look magnificent. Maybe not the best graphics of the generation, but really damn close to it.

The bad
While the game has a lot of good (I might not have written much, but don’t worry, that’s a lot of good), there’s also  lot of bad. And if you know me, you know I talk for a long time  about bad stuff in games. So let’s get started right away with one of my biggest problems.

The length is pathetic. Seriously. I decided to give it an honest try, and… 5 hours later it was done. 5!!! HOURS!!! Why did this happen? I was sucking an immeasurable amount of ass in the game and dying nonstop, yet I finished it in 5 hours. I even purposely died a few times because I was testing things out. I played for about 3 hours on my first evening. Then, I go back to it the next morning, play 3 or 4 missions, and then… the most anti-climactic scene ever. I look at it and think “Fuck, this scene is horrible, hopefully it gets back to the action soon”. And then the scene ends. “Finally!”, I say. And suddenly the credits start rolling. Is this a fucking joke? Barely any of the story was told, the cutscenes sucked so that doesn’t help, and seriously there’s just no closure. It just stops in the middle of something. To be completely honest here, MW2 is the least satisfactory experience I’ve had all year. There’s great moments and all, but why just stop telling me the story in the middle? And why such a short campaign?

And all the characters suck in the game. There’s literally not one character you’ll end up liking in there. They’re all just… a bunch of lame guys with no personality screaming at you all the time. And you can’t identify to your own characters because they never say a damn thing.

Another thing that really bothers me is the difficulty. It has the same problem as most “hard” games in the industry in recent years. It’s not hard, it’s cheap and annoying. Despite me loving the part at the White House, the area just before is just… lame(Despite looking awesome)… They throw everything at you to try and kill you. Enemies sniping you in buildings, grenades coming from everywhere, enemies hiding where you can’t possibly see them… and all along you don’t get any help. Sometimes you have allies but they’re pretty much all useless and enemies barely ever target them. Most of the time you’re stuck alone against armies of enemies .And it really doesn’t feel like you’re ever part of an army, because you basically end up killing every enemy on your own becase all the other characters are useless. Indoor levels don’t have that problem as much which is good, but the “war zone” areas are just a clusterfuck of things shooting and exploding that you just can’t avoid unless you already know what’s coming at you. And how are they expecting you to defend a house on your own without any help and a ton of enemies against you? The only way is to continually die until you know everything the enemy will do and get rid of them before they get you. Or get lucky. It really gets tedious. Infinite continues help a bit, but the tedium remains.

I guess I’ll just mention the airport scene. It’s probably the stupidest scene in modern gaming. It’s kinda disturbing that the developers thought about that scene in the first place. Considering what the cutscenes are in the game, they could have just said “our undercover agent infiltrated a terrorist organization, went and killed a bunch of innocent bystanders in an airport with the terrorists, and the terrorist unexplicably found out he was a double agent and killed him”, and it would have been the same, just without all the controversy. Sure, there’s an option not to see that scene at all, but it’s still… I don’t know, just really weird and completely random. But I guess it’s good for them since controversy equals more sells.

Oh, and the ice climbing level. Why the heck was anyone hyped for that? It was basically IW proving that they can’t do controls for anything OTHER than FPS.  It controlled horribly and definitely wasn’t fun. Nothing to add here.

Overall
MW2 might be great for online, but the single-player… it’s horrible. Great areas and missions ruined by annoying difficulty, a bad story with lame characters, and the worst ending I’ve seen in a while. Of course, this just confirms a MW3 since MW2 barely went through any of the story. I hope that, by then, they’ll be able to… completely revamp the single player experience. Seriously, there’s nothing really good in the single player experience. The basic gameplay is great, one of the best FPS engines out there, no doubt about that, but the game really offers nothing to people who like single player. I’m sure it’s one of the better online experiences of the generation, despite the lack of balance from what I’ve heard. But that’s really not my scene.

Final word: If you don’t plan on playing online, do not buy this game, just rent it, and oonly if you played the CoD4 single player.

jobocan Console, Games, PC, impressions, ps3, xbox 360