Charred Reviews: Modern Warfare 2

Aloha fellow Gamerioters.
It's been a long while since I've done an article here, but I simply didn't have much to write about. Ever since I quit WoW 2 months ago, I hardly did any gaming in general. Some of you might remember my last blog entry here, A Week Without WoW, where I totally got into singleplayer gaming. I asked the Gameriot Community to give me some good titles, which I would play & review after, yet I've hardly had any time to spare.
Shortly after I published that article, I stopped gaming in general, simply because university was taking up all my time.



Anyhow, despite that, I was still eagerly awaiting the release of Modern Warfare 2, since I had loved the original MW so much.
Last week ofcourse, I almost immediatly went to the shop to buy the game. The guy in the store facepalm'd when I asked him where I could find the MW2 copies, since the stand was right behind me (for some reason I had never noticed it after walking through the whole store twice). When I picked up my copy, I was kinda shocked to see that it'd cost me €59.95. I bought it in a major retail store here in Belgium, so I assumed the price would be correct.

Details aside, I still had to wait a bit longer to play the game, since I doubted I would enjoy trying to play it on my laptop, with only a touchpad to aim with.
Back at home, I immediatly plugged in the disc in my stationary & started installing. After easily completing the whole installation, I was ready to lock & load! Or atleast I thought so.
I had a total déjà-vu from my F.E.A.R. 2 adventure when the game already had to patch for 30minutes, despite it being released for not even 2 days.
After the update had finished, the first crashes came up, without ever even having seen the main menu. Steam got stuck on "Completing Installation", though luckily, I easily solved this by simply rebooting my computer. After that, I could finally load up & begin the singeplayer campaign!

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 - Singeplayer Campaign

Let me warn you beforehand that there will be some major spoilers in what's written below. So if you plan to still buy the game & don't like to read spoilers, you better skip some parts and only read the conclusion.

I was really enthusiastic when I began playing. The game was looking awesome (luckily thanks to having a solid system, I could play it with every video option turned up as high as possible) and I was really pumped up. I had read a few negative reviews about the game, but I never really pay much attention to them.
Perhaps my disappointment wouldn'tve been so big if I had actually listened to what some reviewers had said. I finished the game in a mere 3hours 30minutes on regular (excluding the very last scene, more info below). I really sat down for a minute and wondered if this was an actual sequel or just an expansion pack.

Before beginning my negative rant, let me first of all say, the game was still really intense as I was expecting it to be. I really enjoyed the game as long as it lasted.
Unfortunatly, that would directly conclude my list of positive features in the game.

Other than that, there isn't awfully much positive to be said about the MW2 singleplayer.

First of all, throughout the whole campaign, I had numerous crashes that I didn't manage to fix. During the whole thing, I believe every 30minutes or so, the game crashed & had to be rebooted. A couple of times, it even errased the progress I made in the previous mission, thus I had to redo the whole mission.
Most of these were DirectX problems. I tried some of the fixes I found on the web, but nothing really helped. On top of that, these problems still persist in the multiplayer (read below).
The worst part would be when the game crashed again on the final mission. After you crash your boat down the waterfall, some special mission (simular to the MW1 ending), should load. Some scripted events happen & you end up killing Shepherd. Unfortunatly for me, I never managed to get to see this, since unlike the previous crashes, simply rebooting the game wouldn't do anything in this case. So uptil now, I still havn't played the actual MW2 ending myself, only watched it on Youtube.


Secondly, the duration. Like I said, it took me three and a half hours to complete the game. I did it pretty fast I guess and perhaps I should've taken a higher difficulty. Yet most people will complete the whole thing in 4-5 hours.
What I really do NOT understand at all is, knowing how short the game is, why on earth did they end the game halfway the storyline? The game begins with Makarov being the main villan and aside from the controversial mission "No Russian", you never even get to see the guy in-game. At the very end of MW2 you get to kill your own general, who for some reason decided to kill you in one of the last missions. Makarov is still unharmed & walking free. The game stops halfway the main storyline & tells you to stick the €60 you just payed up your ass. If this was a €30 expansion pack, I really wouldn't have a problem with it. But this is far from what was made out to be, the long awaited MW2 sequel.
I can't stress enough that this game simply has every characteristic that belongs to an expansion pack. Stopping the game halfway is one thing. But doing so while knowing the whole campaign barely takes 4-5 hours to complete is just to much for me to swallow.

To end my rant about the singleplayer, if you have been watching all the sneak previews that have been released over the course of this year, you basicly have seen about 50% (perhaps even more) of the good missions this game has to offer. Other missions that they didn't preview are mostly not to special in my opinion (like the part based on the MP map Favela was rather annoying even). Other than the oil platform & the fight in American Streets, there weren't so many exciting things that I hadn't seen in previews yet.


Modern Warfare 2: Special Ops

I'm not really sure if I should even try to dedicate a few paragraphs to this section. To begin with, there isn't really any fun in playing this on your own. I only enjoyed this slightly when playing co-op with a friend.
Maby if we would've continued, there would be some new & interesting missions, yet the two missions we completed (the stealth & sniper defense) were simply taken out from the singleplayer and were piss easy.
We completed the sniper defense with ease on Veteran on our first try. We screwed up the stealth mission a few times, but with some vent communication this was a walk in the park.
Nevertheless, I always found co-op a really fun thing to do (I used to have so much fun with the Half-Life Co-op Mod), but after those two levels, we instantly headed back to the multiplayer.
Even if there were any new missions (maby on higher levels), it simply isn't thát entertaining at all. Good to play once in a month I guess.


Modern Warfare 2: Multiplayer

Just like with the singleplayer, the multiplayer gives me mixed feelings.

The Good:

First of all, there are some major improvements compared to the original MW multiplayer. The biggest one would be that they managed to fix the nadespam. Though this partially might be due to the fact that thanks to the awesomeness of peer2peer, most TDM games only hold 10 players per game.
Other than that, I really love the way they pimp'd the game. The perk leveling system is a pretty nice idea & encourages players to try out all sorts of different perks, rather than always sticking with the few that are best.
Other than that, I find the multiplayer to be really polished & entertaining, with all the different bonusses you get for special kills you make, accolades, different titles etc... Small things and in general pretty worthless, but they really add up to the global gaming experience imo.


The Bad:

Like many people anticipated, not having dedicated servers would be absolutly terrible. And trust me, it really is just that bad.
I honestly cannot comprehend why on earth, aside from Infinity Ward litterally stating they don't give a f*ck about PC gamers, they would use a p2p system over the dedicated server system, that has been the main thing to do in online FPS PC games for ages.
Some people might've seen this image already that has been spread around the web:



Yes, it really is as horrible as this chart makes you think.
Examples? I personally love to play the map Derail. Yet I hardly ever get it and as far as I know, there isn't any way I can force this, except from a private match (incase I'm wrong, feel free to tell me so).
Or like when I feel like doing some sniping, I hope on maps like Estate & ofcourse Wasteland. Find Game, Wasteland on my screen, Merging Lobby, JK another round of Rundown.
I personally ******* hate Rundown more than anything and I got no way to avoid it on a permanent base.

Other than that, there are the standard issues this chart describes. No possibility for custom maps, mods (CoD4 Promod anyone?), only up to 18 players, no leaning (I really don't get why this is related to dedicated servers? Anyone that can explain?), etc... It's just a terrible decision they made and I'm hoping that this will be changed in the upcomming patch.

Another problem is numerous crashes or games simply falling apart just when they are about to start. Lobby created, 10 players, waiting for the game to start and poof, back to the menu screen with some weird-ass notification.
The Steam system where you can  join a friends' game is broken like **** to. I've had numerous times where my friend tells me the game is far from full & even has imbalanced teams, that when I try to connect to his game I get the notification "Server Full". We can only pray this will be fixed asap or even better, just give us damm dedicated servers already and these problems wouldn't never have occured.

And I havn't even spoken about the biggest problem that peer2peer brings us. The lag is horrible. It really is. And in 90% of the games you play, you will be spiking constantly at the most inconvenient moments.
Perhaps some people have seen this clip already:


This might be a very severe case, yet it often spikes out like that for a shorter while.


Conclusion: Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 is a great game in general, but it still bears some major flaws. The singleplayer campaign is more like an expansion pack rather than a stand-alone sequel. It doesn't even last half as long as its predecessor and stops halfway the main storyline. The multiplayer looks really nice in general, but the peer2peer console ported gameplay ruins all the fun.


My apologies for any inconvenient spelling errors or whatsoever, as you might see, this blog isn't done for Eurospective anymore, thus our favorite grammarnazi Shader isn't correcting it!