CoD: Modern Warfare 2 (PC, 2009)

Written by JC DuBois | 23 November 2009

Overview

As I believe I've mentioned before, I personally rather enjoy World War II era games, despite the general consensus that they've been played out these days.  The Call of Duty series was always a spectacular example of what could be done with good writing, solid setting, and well thought out controls in the WWII FPS genre.  More recently though, CoD launched into a new era – that of Modern Warfare.  The first game in the MW series took gamers by storm, completely smashing through fears that moving Call of Duty to a modern setting would destroy the series.  Now, two years later, it's time for Modern Warfare 2, the follow up installment that more or less picks up right where Modern Warfare left off.

Review

Like the man once said, the world's in great shape.  Five years after radical Khaled Al-Asad set off a nuclear blast on his own nation's soil, in the process killing over thirty thousand US troops, and the subsequent deaths of both Al-Asad and the man who supplied the bomb to him, Imran Zakhaev, times have changed.  Zakhaev, once the leader of the Ultranationalist party that was attempting to restore the old Soviet Union, has now been posthumously proclaimed the Hero of the New Russia.  World tensions are high, but aside from ongoing US action in Afghanistan, there's no OPEN warfare yet…

Modern Warfare 2 directly continues the storyline started up in the first game, picking up after the global pressure cooker has had a good five years to build up steam after the detonation of a nuclear weapon, even if it was on Middle Eastern soil.  Like the first game, you take several roles over the course of the game, the most frequent being Gary "Roach" Sanderson, part of the multinational, ultra-elite Task Force 141, currently led by one Capt. "Soap" MacTavish.  You might remember that guy.  The second major lead is Private James Ramirez, US Army Rangers.  Of course, that's not the full list of characters you play throughout the course of the game, only the two 'main' characters.

As the story goes, Vladimir Makarov, one of Zakhaev's former lieutenants, has launched a campaign of massive terrorism in Europe proper.  General Shepherd, who commands both Task Force 141 and the battalion of Rangers Ramirez is part of selects one of the rangers to take part in a deep cover operation designed to infiltrate Makarov's group, and flush him out into the open.  Without spoiling, things don't all go quite as planned, unfortunately, and the net result is that Russia is left with a great deal of civilian corpses on their hands, and direct proof of American involvement.  As it happens, while this was going down, Roach and Soap were in another part of Russia attempting to recover what amounted to a skeleton key to the US early detection network.  They were, fortunately, successful in doing so, so, nothing to worry about, right?

As is to be expected of the Call of Duty series, the characters that you meet, interact with, and fight alongside of throughout the course of the game are exceptionally well written.  It was an interesting treat to get to see Soap given a full NPC characterization treatment, and a great way to help maintain consistency and continuity throughout the Modern Warfare series.  You also get a sense of his development too – and of how much of his own character and leadership style that he's now drawn from Capt. Price.  While other characters introduced in the game don't have quite this same level of depth, which is thanks to development done in the first game, as a whole they're well executed and have reasonably distinct personalities.

As for the storyline itself, I do have to admit to being a little disappointed, at least in a couple respects.  Now, don't get me wrong here, folks – I thought it was a great game, pretty well told and very well crafted.  With that said, though, I thought it had a primary issue with being too short.  Beyond that… I dunno, something just felt like it was missing in the overall execution of the plot line.  I mean, the storyline did play with the frantic pacing of a good Tom Clancy novel, but while the separate forces tales did dovetail pretty well, there was just something off about the overall integration of the plot.  Also, I just can't understand the big story twist.  It didn't make sense, not from a purely practical point of view, at the very least.  Given the overall thrust of motivation that led to it, I just can't bring myself to accept the way that it was played off.  It just didn't feel right.

Then again, there's a lot to the storyline of Modern Warfare 2 that is specifically designed to not feel right to you, the player.  Now, if you're wary of spoilers, and you haven't heard about the airport, I'm going to suggest that you skip the rest of this paragraph.  For those of you still here, I'd like to focus on one particular example – out of several possible ones.  Let's talk for a moment about you going deep undercover to infiltrate Makarov's organization.  The concept of this level was a very simple one: five terrorists, including you, walk into a busy airport terminal, and proceed to turn anything and everything that moves into hamburger with heavy squad assault machine guns.  This is not a scripted movie sequence, similar to President Al-Fulani's execution in the first game.  It's a full fledged level, and you yourself are in control of your character as you gun down a shitload of innocent bystanders.  To give you an idea of the concern generated by this level, understand that Infinity Ward felt the need not only to make it optionally skippable, but to confirm with you – twice each time you play the level if you don't tell it to stop asking – that you really are comfortable with that you're about to do.  Well, comfortable might not be the best choice of word for it, but you get the idea.

Skip this paragraph too, those that don't want spoilers.  For everybody else, needless to say when word leaked out about this days before Modern Warfare 2's release, there was a major uproar.  How DARE they force the player to make a conscious choice to murder innocent people, especially the impressionable little child likely to be playing the so obviously for children video game!  Setting aside for a moment the fact that Modern Warfare is hardly a game meant for kids, what exactly is different between this level in Modern Warfare 2, and any of a thousand movies which feature the senseless slaughter of thousands?  The easy answer is conscious choice, of course, but I'm afraid that I find that to be sidestepping the question.  The real question here is, is the player mature enough to understand what is really being shown here, and what should really sting is that the airport massacre is a bare taste of reality – of how utterly monstrous we humans can be.  Personally, I applaud Infinity Ward for having the balls to do this level – even if it was skippable, and came with big warning notices slapped all over it.  We're long past the point of G.I. Joe and Cobra always ejecting from their planes to safety here, folks, and war means the death of civilians, whether accidental or deliberate.

Like its predecessor, Modern Warfare 2 sets a high standard for graphics work, and by extension demands a big, beefy rig to run it at the proper settings.  Now, this review is based on the PC version of the game, so if you're running on the 360 or PS3 take standard console limitations into account.  With that said… damn, this is one hell of an awesomely done game.  Modern Warfare 2 makes use of Infinity Ward's IW4.0 game engine, which in turn is based off an engine developed by id Tech.  The character models are gloriously sharp and detailed, with extensive, extremely well done textures for everything.  I'd have been a happy, happy dragon if Dragon Age: Origins had gone to these sort of lengths in their character modeling.  Infinity Ward did an awesome job on Modern Warfare 2, improving in every way over the first game's already stellar stats.

Gameplay wise I'm also very happy – or at least I was, once I fixed the severely messed up control scheme.  For some reason, they felt it necessary to completely change around some of the major command keys they'd setup in the first game, instead of keeping everything consistent.  With that said, though, responses were overall fairly snappy, and felt pretty well balanced.  What I wasn't so happy with was the enemy AI.  Supposedly, it's a new AI that allows individual enemies to take a more individual action, instead of following scripted responses and reactions.  In reality, it seemed more like all they'd done was turn the difficulty scale way up and turned your aiming accuracy way down.  I'm sorry, but when I have an enemy that's standing still sighted for a dead-center headshot with a sniper rifle, the shot should not be miraculously going wide.  Not because the enemy moved, mind you, but because for some reason the bullet appears to hit the wall just off the crosshair mark.  This seemed to happen particularly frequently when I was using a gun equipped with thermal sights.

I also noticed that it took significantly more ammo to put opponents down permanent like in Modern Warfare 2.  An enemy that takes half a clip, aimed down the sights, center mass should be dropping like an anvil pushed out of a plane at thirty thousand feet, not bending over for a moment, then straightening and going on fighting like nothing happened.  I could, I suppose, write that off as body armor when it comes to the real military troops… but a bunch of random militia men wielding Uzis and AK-47's?

On the subject of weapons balance, Modern Warfare 2 actually provided a decent array of choices, just like its predecessor.  From the rock solid M16A4 workhorse to my personal favorite the M21 EBR, there's a reasonable amount of choice to be had.  These options are further improved by the presence of different sights and under slung secondary weapons.  For instance, the M16A4 can be equipped with an under slung grenade launcher or shotgun, and one of several targeting scopes.  I almost always swapped my secondary weapon out for a FAL rifle when I could find one with an ACOG scope, as it made a surprisingly solid sniper rifle that could still be accurately fired from the hip.  In addition to the standard array of pistols and rifles, you also have the option to equip heavier launchers, and even command remote-controlled Predator drones and their fly-by-wire missiles.

I found that they did a better job on this one with the music – in no small part because they tapped legendary movie composer Hans Zimmer to do the sound track.  One of my problems with the first game was that there weren't really any distinctive themes for any of the levels.  That's not true this time around, fortunately, and there were a couple good themes, especially on the latter levels.  On the voicing side of things, they did a great job, with a fair amount of the cast from the first game returning for Modern Warfare 2.  For instance, in what I'm certain was a tongue-in-cheek joke, one of your team members is named Ghost.  A character who's face you never, ever see because he constantly wears a skull mask.  Said character is voiced by the same VA as Gaz from the first game.  I WONDER IF THEY'RE TRYING TO MAKE A HINT?…

I haven't played any of the multiplayer in Modern Warfare 2 – and bluntly, folks?  I have absolutely no intention to, either.  This is something that I wanted to touch on before closing out this review, and that something is the fact that Infinity Ward, in their infinite insanity, decided two things about MW2.  First, they've decided to completely remove anything resembling dedicated server support from the game, and that includes the developer console system.  Second, and much worse in my personal opinion, is that they've made Modern Warfare 2 a Steam REQUIRED game.  I bought my copy of MW2 in a brick-and-mortar store, own the disks… and I was FORCED to install the Steam service in order to install the game, and am forced to log into Steam even when all I want to do is play the single player story.  Um… I'm sorry, but this is not acceptable.  Supposedly, these two moves were made to cut down on the number of hackers and cheaters in the multiplayer experience… And even a cursory look around will find that PC owners are absolutely livid with the choice.  The new matchmaking service IWNET has proven to be horribly unstable, riddled with hackers, and already – only a few days after release – the source of at least two Trojan worms being distributed through the IWNET network.

I will never, EVER connect to a Modern Warfare 2 multiplayer game, or ANY multiplayer game that requires me to go through Steam.  I absolutely do not trust their services, and with the limited by necessity exception of MMORPGS, nor do I like the idea of any company having the power to tell me that I can't play a game that I purchased a physical copy of without first connecting to their servers.  What happens, then, if/when Steam goes out of service?  My personal search for a method of decoupling my copy of MW2 from Steam's control will continue for now, and I HIGHLY encourage anybody reading this review to look for a way to do so as well.  If not for the fact that I never had any real intention of playing MW2's multiplayer, I'd never have purchased the title in the face of Steam getting its grubby little mitts on it.

Overall

I wish I could say that Modern Warfare 2 was a great game.  I really do.  In fact, I had been going to, after the first couple play through of the game.  The series has proven to be consistently excellent over the years, and this installment is GOOD… but not great.  The single player game really is too short, honestly, and the inclusion of the so called Special Ops missions – missions where you can theoretically play with one other player and push through some non-story related scenes – just are not worth the loss of another 3-4 hours of story that it could have had instead.  The plot is well written and told, but to me lacked something that I can't quite name – only know that it was, indeed, missing.  The ending was abrupt and a blatant opening for another game, and given Activision's running history of beating game series to death through sequels, sequels, and more sequels, is not entirely an encouraging sign.

On the other hand, it was fun.  There are a number of moments that force you to sit back and really think about what's happening, instead of just plowing through the never ending horde of enemies.  There are some serious moral choices and consequences, as implied by the Airport scene, and much of the scenery of the US campaign portion forces you to just stare in shock when you first see it.  Gameplay is pretty well balanced, enemies that take far too much punishment and seem excessively accurate aside.  Also, this being a 'near future' universe, we get a taste of not just modern technology, but hints of what might be coming along soon.

However, because of the horrible handling of certain aspects about the PC version, I find I can't fully recommend it to anybody looking to play anything other than the single player story.  I will not, in any way, shape, or form, support Steam's growing power in controlling what I can and can not do with a game that I purchased.  Infinity Ward's actions in forcing players to use the proprietary service IWNET, as well as destroying the ability to create mod packages that can be added to the game, are ill-advised at best and potentially suicidal at worst.  I was able to purchase and enjoy the PC version because my primary interest in the game was the storyline and gameplay itself.  However, I have a feeling that those interested in the multiplayer side of the game would be far better served by buying the xBox 360 version – especially given that Infinity Ward has announced that all DLC content to be made available for Modern Warfare 2 will be coming to the 360 well before any other platforms.