Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2
Single-player Review
Single-player Review
The single player in this game is a mixed bag. We get the proven format of the previous modern warfare installment providing a fast paced action game with a big arsenal of both hand held and some less common weapons such as the mounted minigun. It has a smooth, enjoyable game engine with very few noticeable annoyances. As it stands, the single player is so good that I have two problems with it: that for no apparant reason objects and barriers are not climbable (a problem even more apparant in multiplayer), and that enemies tend to spawn in places that they simply shouldnt'.
All that being said this game is vastly dissapointing for the hype that it generated and whilst factoring hype into a review is probably not appropriate I'm going to do it anyway -- I'm just that badass. This game is not even 1/10th the game it could and should have been. Let's begin with duration issues. What sort of half assed developer sells a game for 110$ RRP and only implements six hours of gameplay? If you have had any experience playing anything from the FPS genre you can finish this game in under five hours unless you play on the hardest difficulty setting, which itself will not impact the gaming experience but force you to use trial and error a little more.
Making matters worse, the most common excuse given by the teeming mass of fanwhores out there supporting this horrible practice is that though it may be short it is of great substance. lul. This game is best described as Modern Warfare I minus everything that made that campaign great. They even had the gall to take out the tilt and dedicated server features (a multiplayer problem, I know) out because they could not be bothered to port the game to the PC properly. Wait. Sorry. The game was balanced for enjoyable features.
Perhaps the best aspect of this game is the voice acting which has some familiar voices and some fresh ones, all providing believable and even enjoyable performances for or ears. Yet when I consider the effort spent on the amazing voice acting performances, I wonder if they were not better off having no audio at all and spending the saved money employing someone more capable than Muhammad the local chicken shop owner to write the story. The story is like a James Bond film without James and without the story ever being adequately explained. You're on the receiving end of disjointed snippets of dialogue from random characters talking about subjects that at first seem to be completely unrelated to anything and require you to work that broken part of your brain that is imagination to sticky tape these dialogues into a coherent story. I failed.
Finally we have the graphics. Well... not much to be said here other than that this is no Crysis, but it is still good enough to compete with any new release.
This game is a perfect example of why hype is bad for the gaming industry's quality, if not economic viability. Most of the great games of the past ten to fifteen years have been from completely unexpected or at least of relatively smaller sources. We might compare the fountain of bile that is Bungee and its Halo progeny to the well established and frankly amazing studios of Bioware (with releases such as Mass Effect) and note further examples of poor quality overhyped games to well rounded genuinly entertaining games of lesser 'respected' origins.
Multiplayer review later...
Fred-o-meter: 2.5/5 Freds
All that being said this game is vastly dissapointing for the hype that it generated and whilst factoring hype into a review is probably not appropriate I'm going to do it anyway -- I'm just that badass. This game is not even 1/10th the game it could and should have been. Let's begin with duration issues. What sort of half assed developer sells a game for 110$ RRP and only implements six hours of gameplay? If you have had any experience playing anything from the FPS genre you can finish this game in under five hours unless you play on the hardest difficulty setting, which itself will not impact the gaming experience but force you to use trial and error a little more.
Making matters worse, the most common excuse given by the teeming mass of fanwhores out there supporting this horrible practice is that though it may be short it is of great substance. lul. This game is best described as Modern Warfare I minus everything that made that campaign great. They even had the gall to take out the tilt and dedicated server features (a multiplayer problem, I know) out because they could not be bothered to port the game to the PC properly. Wait. Sorry. The game was balanced for enjoyable features.
Perhaps the best aspect of this game is the voice acting which has some familiar voices and some fresh ones, all providing believable and even enjoyable performances for or ears. Yet when I consider the effort spent on the amazing voice acting performances, I wonder if they were not better off having no audio at all and spending the saved money employing someone more capable than Muhammad the local chicken shop owner to write the story. The story is like a James Bond film without James and without the story ever being adequately explained. You're on the receiving end of disjointed snippets of dialogue from random characters talking about subjects that at first seem to be completely unrelated to anything and require you to work that broken part of your brain that is imagination to sticky tape these dialogues into a coherent story. I failed.
Finally we have the graphics. Well... not much to be said here other than that this is no Crysis, but it is still good enough to compete with any new release.
This game is a perfect example of why hype is bad for the gaming industry's quality, if not economic viability. Most of the great games of the past ten to fifteen years have been from completely unexpected or at least of relatively smaller sources. We might compare the fountain of bile that is Bungee and its Halo progeny to the well established and frankly amazing studios of Bioware (with releases such as Mass Effect) and note further examples of poor quality overhyped games to well rounded genuinly entertaining games of lesser 'respected' origins.
Multiplayer review later...
Fred-o-meter: 2.5/5 Freds
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