Yesterday was the official release date of Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2, and like Halo 3: ODST’s release, I took a screenshot of my friends online during prime time last night to see how much of a hold Modern Warfare 2 has taken on them. While not 100% like Halo 3: ODST’s release, 10/13 isn’t too shabby. We’ll see what happens next week with the release of Left 4 Dead 2 and Assassin’s Creed 2. But in any case, today I will share my impressions of Modern Warfare 2, after playing about four hours of it last night. Ugh, and I have a headache for staying up too late. Haven’t done that with a game in a while, but it was worth it…
I’ve been playing Call of Duty since the second one, and prior to popping in Modern Warfare 2 last night, I was just like, “Yeah, I know it will be good” but wasn’t super enthusiastic about it. Then I put the game in and my 360 blew up. Well no, not that crazy, but more like my mind was completely blown. This is game of the year material right here folks, and barring some ridiculous reason for Left 4 Dead 2 or Assassin’s Creed 2 being better than Modern Warfare 2 when they release next week, I’m pretty certain I have my game of the year for 2009. Don’t even wonder if you should buy it. If you have a system that can play it, buy it. It’s ridiculously good. There’s a reason why it’s going to be the biggest selling game of the year – it’s managed to not only be as good as Call of Duty 4, but even better. How can you improve on such a stellar title already?
The game is broken up into three modes: Campaign, Spec-Ops, and Multiplayer. Campaign picks up on the story five years later from Call of Duty 4, but in all honestly, it’s not really a big deal if you haven’t played the first. I haven’t played far enough into the campaign yet, but from what I understand, the campaign is going to be quite the thrillride on its own. And on top of that, enemies no longer infinitely respawn – a complaint many had about previous Call of Duty campaigns.
Spec-Ops is a totally new mode to Call of Duty, and in a sense, it’s Modern Warfare 2′s co-op mode. In this mode, you can choose from over 20 missions that you can take on yourself or with a partner online or splitscreen. The missions are all varied, and have various objectives ranging from defending a bridge for 4 minutes, to assaulting a town and taking down all the terrorists in a certain amount of time. One of the missions I tried felt like the Terrorist Hunt mode from the Rainbow Six: Vegas games, although I was disappointed that only up to two players could partake in it. Players can earn up to 3 stars in each Spec Ops mission, and the star number often indicates the difficulty. For example, the training mission at the beginning of the game is a Spec Ops mission – completing the course gets you 1 star, but completing it under 35 seconds gets you 3 stars. Similarly, the “Terrorist Hunt” mission I tried had a 1 star setting of 30 terrorists to kill, 2 stars for 40 terrorists, and 3 stars would spawn 50 terrorists. The Spec Ops missions are an excellent addition to the game and are very replayable. I wasn’t able to find any sort of Leaderboards for them though, but maybe I didn’t look hard enough. My only complaint about them would be the lack of four player support.
I spent most of my time last night in the multiplayer. I played a couple of the campaign missions and once I switched to multiplayer, I had a really tough time playing anything else. The game still featured the mechanics that fans loved in Call of Duty 4, but things are even more improved. Modern Warfare 2 incorporates Street Fighter IV’s banner and logo system, so you unlock emblems and titles for your player that you can display in-game based on performing certain feats. Modern Warfare 2 also now has customizable kill-streak rewards, death-streak rewards, and all sorts of new gear and abilities that make this the most enjoyable multiplayer game I’ve played since perhaps Call of Duty 4. The scoring system has changed, awarding points for doing various things outside of merely killing opponents, such as revenge (killing an opponent that killed you first gives your team score a boost), killing an opponent who is about to get a kill streak, etc. The numbers just fly up on the screen and it feels just like an arcade game. There’s so much more I want to talk about for the multiplayer, but I’m going to hold off here and put them into a guide that I’m writing up now. Stay tuned!
Yeah, when I took one look at the multiplayer, my mind was immediately and completely blown. Go buy this game if you are reading this and haven’t. Really. You aren’t a complete person without this game. o_0
Also, espion4ge, in your previous article you talked about ‘ideal range’ in shooters. It seems they handled your favorite range (medium) extremely well with this one, more so than with CoD4. About 50% of all the weapons available in multiplayer are assault rifles, and I believe Assault Rifles have more unlockable attachments than any other category of weapons.
ya – i am very happy with the assault rifles so far in the game, and once i figure out the maps, i think i can become a killing machine once again! we will have to party up at some point, but that actually reminded me of one annoying “feature” I discovered last night that is new to modern warfare 2 – the blocking of party chat.
while i can understand that it was done to prevent cheating with players on opposing teams talking to each other, often times i’ll play with a friend or two but don’t care to talk to the rest of the players on my team (nor even listen to them). with the blocking of party chat in modern warfare 2, they should have at least allowed us to form squads and only communicate with others in our squad. this was a pretty big oversight on their part actually. hopefully there’s a workaround to this in the future besides simply muting all of the other players…
Yes, I totally agree. This morning I was playing a few rounds of Team Deathmatch with one of my friends, and I found it incredibly annoying that I had to go in and mute every single one of the other people who joined the game. Not to mention the fact that (he is someone I know IRL) we couldn’t talk about things outside of the game, like things that have recently happened to one of us in real life. I don’t want or need people I don’t know in the least to hear about my personal life, and I surely don’t want to hear them complaining that I’m “going off topic and not being tactical”.
This is one game that sorely needs the squad system CoD:WaW put into place. :/
4.7 million first day sales. Sick.