Negative Gamer Review: Modern Warfare 2 Single Player (Xbox 360)
Brief disclaimer: This review will be covering only the single player portion of the game. It is my opinion and a number of other writers for the site agree that reviewing the multiplayer portion of Modern Warfare 2 after only a few days of its general release would be disingenuous. We’ll be talking about this in greater detail soon but for now you’ll just have to bear with us.
The Modern Warfare 2 campaign, just like previous Call Of Duty games, jumps between multiple characters in different locations across the world. In this instalment of the franchise you’ll move between members of the US Army Rangers and the fictional Task Force 141. The TF141 missions tend to be the more interesting ones, sometimes featuring vehicle sections or a stealth element. Conversely the Ranger missions are more about all out warfare and straight up infantry combat. The plot covers the usual military themes of betrayal, obedience, sacrifice and political intrigue. On paper it’s all pretty boilerplate material, wrapped up in the linear FPS experience we’ve come to expect from the franchise.
I love this theme park, it’s a shame the ride keeps breaking down
Where other titles specialise in cover-based combat or procedurally generated AI behaviour, Modern Warfare 2 takes the “rollercoaster” approach to shooter design. Rather than have a system where enemies dynamically respond to the player’s actions, Modern Warfare 2 is exceedingly linear. Enemies pop up and shoot until they die, occasionally chucking a grenade or rushing the player to spice things up. When this design decision is well executed, it can have fantastic results and for most of Modern Warfare 2 that’s the case. At its peak the game conveys an unrivalled sense of moving from one breathtaking set piece to another whilst constantly under fire.
The downside is that when it frustrates, it frustrates on a level I’ve not experienced for quite some time. There are points in the game where it starts to feel more like a bullet-hell shmup than a first person shooter. A combination of irritating difficulty spikes and unfortunate checkpoint placements had me closer to throwing my controller than I’ve ever been before. To further compound the problem, the solution is not to methodically clear the area of enemies as you would in other, similar games. The best way to get past the game’s most frustrating segments is to simply run as fast as you can to the nearest checkpoint and pray that you don’t take too much damage. It was a problem in Call Of Duty 4 that has reared its ugly head again, albeit much less frequently.
I’m the protagonist and so’s my wife!
Switching between multiple characters is nothing new for the Call Of Duty series. However, Modern Warfare 2 seems to revel in its multiple protagonists to the point of self-parody. Four different characters get at least one full level a piece and for me that became a problem. Due to the small amount of time I had to spend in each character’s shoes, it diminished the impact of the events that take place around each character.
There are certainly a number of positive results from using the multiple character approach. It allows the player to visit a greater number of environments without having to extend the length of time over which the story takes place. The problem isn’t with the concept of multiple characters, it’s with the execution. To me it started to feel gimmicky and became a crutch to excuse a disjointed narrative.
They told me it was “a good size”
Modern Warfare 2 is a very short game, even by the standards of other modern shooters. A straight run with very few deaths can result in a total play time of around five hours. Short games aren’t inherently problematic but for me the game’s short length amplified my previous complaints. The multitude of playable characters would have passed without comment if I’d had more time in their shoes. As I briefly mentioned in the introduction, a common theme of military fiction regardless of the medium is the theme of sacrifice. I found it hard to feel that sense of sacrifice when all that’s at stake is the life of a character I’ve developed no attachment to.
This amplification of the game’s shortcomings also applies to the aforementioned difficulty spikes. In a five to six hour campaign, every moment of irritation is magnified. Even if the sum total of the game’s frustrating moments only comes to around half an hour, that’s still half an hour that the game doesn’t have to spare.
A few other points worth mentioning:
- The Spec Ops co-op mode can be played alone. However since it is clearly intended to be a co-operative experience, it will be reviewed alongside the competitive multiplayer.
- The enemies have perfectly accurate guns with unlimited range. You do not.
- If you can get through the first favela level without swearing then you are a better person than me. If you decide that playing through it a second time on a harder difficulty would be fun, then you are a more masochistic person than me.
There’s something a bit primitive about the Modern Warfare 2 campaign, at least in terms of its scope and structure. The lack of freedom in terms of how each encounter can be approached and the brutally effective enemies reinforce the sense of being in a shooting gallery rather than on a battlefield. However, I was consistently taken aback by how impressive each set-piece is and the breakneck pace at which you are hurled from one encounter to another. In short, Modern Warfare 2 does an excellent job of presenting very shallow gameplay in a way that still manages to impress. The payoff for this linearity is an occasionally emotive and consistently engaging story that I was driven to see through to the end.
You should play this game if…
…you want an extremely traditional and linear FPS experience with immaculate presentation and fantastic set-pieces.
Final score
Well presented, well paced but ultimately shallow combat characterises the moment to moment experience of the campaign.
Images: Giant Bomb
I think you’ve been very generous with your review here. The campaign is unashamedly short and just a generic war shooter.
The plot is told to you with basic voice-over, but during combat so you never know what’s going on. Every cool thing from MW1 is used and repeated until it becomes a joke (count how many times you’re running, “die” then SURPRISE you’re not dead). This shallow, unrealistic and badly told plot combined with the not-quite-right feeling settings (those nice American homes you go through, look around, they just don’ look like real, lived in houses) makes the “controversial” level even more worthless. It’s about as deep as a cat’s drinking bowl and as such, looses any kind of deep meaning beyond “this makes me feel a bit uncomfortable”.
IMHO it’s just mindless, Hollywood action that reeks of both smugness (every car number plate reminds you IW made the game) and an attempt to “push it to the limit”, where all it’s really pushed the title is into the realm of generic FPS.
so far I’ve only had a bash on my brother-in-law’s PS3. We had a run through the last few levels passing the controller, and while i could understand what i was looking at could be impressive to some people I was pretty much bored of it after 20 minutes.
PSN was down also, which made me feel all warm inside with my superior paid for XboxLive. Like a fever.
i liked the campaign for some of the exact reasons everyone else hates it:
1. shortness: i have little time, and there are lots of other games waiting. Also, it was over before i could ruin my experience by over-analysing the game.
2. its generic. Actually you could say that about EVERY game that comes out minus the odd XBLA/PSN game. Plus, its like McDonalds: you know beforehand how its going to taste. And i was in the mood for exactly that brainless kind of action.
I’ve yet to play the game but the review does seem generous if based only on you final line
“You should play this game if…
…you want an extremely traditional and linear FPS experience with immaculate presentation and fantastic set-pieces.”
It seems odd that anything ‘generic’ would recieve such a reasonably high accolade.
I’m sorry but all the negative press this game has gotten just convinces me it’s NG.
I don’t think the review itself was being overly generous, but I think the score was. While reading through the article I saw that it was linear, the characters were a bit shit because there were too many, it was really short, and there were random difficulty spikes, and I was expecting to see a -5, not something that equates to “mostly perfect”.
I realize this is NG and you’re supposed to highlight the flaws and things that would irritate us about the game, and perhaps the positive aspects outweigh that. I’m sure what it does, it does very well. And don’t get me wrong, I feel like the review itself is probably spot on. I just think the score doesn’t coincide.
@Glassninja: NG reviews are funny like this. The bulk of the text should be a description of the thing you may find annoying. This isn’t an exact science by far (as you can see by my comment, I think the story telling is crap). We’re not robots, so there is always going to be some level of personal opinion added.
How much these things impact your enjoyment is what defines the score. So while Mark’s said some things are terrible, obviously he really like the game, and the score reflects that accurately.
Also, for those interested, as well as leaving comments here we do have section in the forum for you to write your own reviews. More opinions are always better than one :)
Its alright, but nothing to write home about.
Check your brain at the door if you want to enjoy the plot, which is pretty convoluted and is just a means to tie together these large, set piece events that are supposed to be shocking. I think they went overboard, as the game just left me feeling numb and cynical by the end, with some characters behaving in irrational ways as excuse to create still more set pieces and chase scenes. I think the first was much better in terms of pacing and scale, and the second will require far more in terms of a suspension of disbelief, if nothing more than in Infinity Ward’s depiction of international relations. If the real world worked in such ways, America would have invaded Saudi Arabia 11 times over by now.
Difficulty spikes are abound, and a lot of trial and error will be present in your first play through as you learn the layout of the levels and the placement of enemies and their movements.
I think the issue here is that there are a lot of different ways by which you can critique a game, or indeed any piece of art/entertainment (delete as your pretensions dictate).
It all boils down to expectations vs results for me. I played MW2 in a pretty similar mentality to the way I watch Die Hard. Am I expecting a lengthy dissertation on man’s inhumanity to man? To be honest no. What I expected was a fairly gung-ho, action game. When I took the game on those merits, it gave me most of what I was looking for which led me to give it a -2.
I’ll be honest, I did fret for a moment about exactly which score to pick. However when I thought back to how excited I was when I played and how the game drove me to its conclusion, I decided that it deserved a high score.
Also, can I just say that perceiving a score broadly equivalent to 8/10 as ‘too high’ is a fucking awesome thing to do. I’m not even being sarcastic, i fucking loathe how anything below perfect is commonly perceived as a cruel blow to a game’s developer. Glad to see that isn’t happening on this site:)
I agree that the story is terrible compared to MW1 but I love Spec Ops and Multiplayer… Nobody really played MW1 until the day before MW2 was released because of the campaign now, did they?
Great review Mark, summed up most of my thoughts exactly.
I enjoyed the game in the same way I enjoy a good Michael Bay film, pretty explosions and over the top situations which I got in abundance. The only thing missing was Will Smith in a vest.
I’m actually enjoying playing the game again on a higher difficulty level but then in my opinion there’s more excitement in this games 5 hours than there is in most other first person shooters I’ve played this year.
Bring on Modern Warfare 3: The Return of Ghost is all I can say.
I just finished the Campaign last night and for me the two most frustrating issues were (to a greater degree than Mark at least) the awful balancing/pacing of the gameplay and the train wreck they call a plot.
There were some sections (on Hardcore) that were nigh unplayable. Everyone’s said it before, but the first Favela sequence almost made me quit playing all together.
Now for the story…without giving spoilers; it’s absurd.
One of the things I liked about COD4 was the “it could happen” quality to the story. I always felt like I was playing an action movie version of an alternate present storyline with real characters and situations. As Wardrox has said above, it’s like for MW2 they made it their mission statement to go so over the top that they’ve abandoned any semblance of credibility for a Michael Bay directed Tom Clancy film. With the exception of a couple of levels, the locations in the game feel like amusement park environments instead of lived-in cities or neighborhoods. I had to play the game at low volume for the family’s sake, but when the game was wrapping up its final moments I didn’t feel any catharsis or attachment what so ever.
Ironically the voice acting is exceptional in MW2. I wish they could have gone down a more modest and grounded path for this game, but thank God the multiplayer is still addictive as ever. If you’re buying MW2 for the single player experience, you really should wait for it to hit the bargain bin for all of the reasons everyone’s already stated above.
Player66:
‘There were some sections (on Hardcore) that were nigh unplayable. Everyone’s said it before, but the first Favela sequence almost made me quit playing all together.’
Actually, I found the Favella level irritating but not much harder than doing the rest ofthe campaign. I am playing on Veteran and MW2 requires different tactics to MW1. In MW1, enemies infinitely respawned until you got to a certain point so you had to advance constantly. In MW2 there are a set number of enemies, and so it is possible – necessary, even – to take a much slower pace and make sure you do notleave anyone alive behind you.
I completely agree that the plot is a huge disappointment after MW1 – I am on the first mission of Episode 3 and I still have no idea who I am fighting!
And, yes, its all about the multiplayer. I am doing the campaign mostly for two reasons: I want to know what happened after MW1, and I want the gamerscore. With the first making me resort to wikipedia, the only reason I am trying to complete the campaign is for the gamerscore (I am a completionist :P).