This game feels really half-baked. I don’t know if there was any intention to make the game look that way, but I felt like I was playing a demo version of the full Call of Duty game. It’s just lacking in every gaming aspect possible.
The campaign is very short, and the characters are not memorable. The single-player missions are short and rather straight-forward, save for 1 or 2 exceptions, and I found it difficult to engage in the process. Part of the reason why is the plot: there is too much focus on the Middle East (not a fan of the setting personally), whereas the original Modern Warfare 2's scheme of things was international. The antagonists are forgettable too, to say the least. They are big, they are evil, and their motivation is primitive: "kill, rule, be bad."
Amongst the old characters, there are only Captain Price and Nikolai. Don’t you think that if the game is called Modern Warfare, refers to the original Call of Duty games, and is a reboot of the series overall, there should be more to that? Everyone else are new characters, and they severely lack any development whatsoever. You don’t grow any sort of attachment to them, and you can’t care less about their fate. It feels like the game is trying to distance itself from the original trilogy despite sharing its name and then right before the credits, it suddenly starts teasing the return of classic characters. And the next thing you know – Modern Warfare II goes back to the series’ roots, trying not to focus on the events of a previous instalment.
The most striking example of the new characters’ emptiness is one of the main heroes named Alex. He just… exists. He looks like the most generic Hollywood action movie special agent, he doesn’t have any backstory, he doesn’t provide much TO the story, there are some hints of being attached to Farah [i]for some unknown reason[/i], and his story lacks any sort of depth whatsoever in the end.
You may say, "What depth do you expect from a Call of Duty game?" and I provide an answer: every other character has some sort of trait that is related to war, let it be PTSD or something simpler like doubts out of the "Am I really doing the right thing?" category or even the dark and dry sense of humor; the list goes on. Alex though? He doesn’t have anything like that.[spoiler]He also dies in the end without any drama, and no one remembers him afterwards. Like, at all. What was the point of his character arc again?[/spoiler]
The missions suffer from the same problem as the antagonists: 90% of them are bland and plainly not interesting.
Playing them on higher difficulty is impossible without restarting checkpoints numerous times due to the fact that the AI of your enemies is bonkers: they can see you from kilometers away, they deplete your health in 3 bullets, they sometimes don’t even react to flash grenades, and their reaction time is beyond human. Meanwhile your allies’ AI is beyond stupid: they practically can’t do anything. They don’t cover your back, they don’t watch flanks, and they don’t do anything AT ALL. You just can’t trust your teammates in the campaign: you have to do everything by yourself.
The online aspect of the game is underwhelming too. Spec Ops, which are required for getting all the achievements, barely have any players, and you have to wait for an hour or two to get enough players at some of the operations. Yes, you can’t launch a mission with only 2 or 3 people: the lobby MUST have 4 people in it in order to start.
You failed the mission, and someone didn’t vote “yes” for the replay and decided to bail out? Say goodbye to the 1 hour of your life: you have to find people again and restart from the very beginning.
I didn’t bother playing the regular online modes, but the thing I noticed is the presence of a lot of paid content, that being skins, agents, and such. For the price that is way higher than what I got the game for from the beginning. The game didn’t even have a decent, stable post-launch support: it ended fairly quickly once the next Call of Duty released. There were almost no DLCs, and it was practically abandoned months after release, transferring the main focus to Warzone.
And despite Warzone separating itself as a different game, Modern Warfare’s size is still 224 gigabytes.
“Maybe it has Warzone bundled in?” no, because the final size is 180 GB, and Warzone requires another 40 GB download. Trying to access it from the main menu screen transfers you to a Call of Duty Warzone page accordingly. Like… what was the exact idea here?
Keep in mind that the game costs $20 [b]on sale[/b], whereas I was lucky enough to get it for $7 at an exclusive March offer. For $7 it’s an alright game, but I can’t imagine spending more than that on a game of such quality.
The soundtrack provides nothing exceptional; the gunplay is… alright, and it's also one of the last COD games that has real-life weapon names. The optimization is great, the voice acting and dubbing are good too, and that’s probably all for the good things this game has.
The result? It’s an alright one-time experience. Would I want to replay this game? God forbid no, Modern Warfare 2 exists for such reason.
