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(this review was originally written January 5, 2023)
Scene: A dramatic snowmobile chase in the dead of frozen Russian tundra. My character, "Roach", has just infiltrated an enemy camp, and is now making his daring escape. Russian soldiers are hot on my tail, firing wildly from their own snowmobiles as we shoot downhill. An entire orchestra assaults my ears as my partner shouts aggressively: "More tangos on the rear! Pin the throttle! Go! Go! Go!" The escape helicopter is in sight, but it is going to land on the other side of a large chasm. The only way across is to jump a natural ramp that has formed at the cliff face. I near the ramp, pressing the W key as hard as I can. The music reaches a dramatic crescendo as...!
...as I slightly misjudge the angle, land a little bit behind clear ground, and get stuck in the snow. The music stops, but my oblivious partner keeps shouting. He tells me that there's no time and they're right on our tail as I spend the next minute or so trying to pull my snowmobile back up to flat ground. Clearly a bit of stuck-out level geometry has caught the front, so I reverse, swerve to the side, and move around it after some fiddling. Immediately the dramatic music resumes, the enemy soldiers jump up behind me, and the game keeps going with its scripted chase sequence as though nothing happened.
This keeps happening in Modern Warfare 2. The campaign, "For the Record", is a perfectly arranged stack of setpiece encounters and explosive spectacle that collapses instantly the second you touch it. It is a game that does not want to be played. You are constantly being told exactly what to do at any given moment - either by objective markers or your commanding officers - and any slight deviation from the intended path is met with violent retribution. At its worst, the "stealth missions" literally involve you sitting in one spot, looking at a guy through a scope, waiting for your partner to tell you to shoot. Then you press the left mouse button and follow him until he tells you to stop, rinse and repeat. It might as well be a series of quick-time events.
Scene: My squad and I are storming a gulag. We're trying to free a prisoner who the villain, Makarov, has some kind of history with. At one point, the baddies I was trying to kill get shot down by my allies before I can get to them. A little frustrated, I experiment with hiding in a safe corner and doing literally nothing while my (invincible?) allies do all the work. I make it through two entire checkpoints this way - not pressing a single button - before getting bored. I return to the battle and go back to shooting Russians, but the magic has drained out of it. What am I even doing here?
I feel bad picking on the plot of Modern Warfare 2. I have many nitpicks, like that the only distinguishing traits the characters have are their accents, but I suspect the obvious counter to them is "who cares about the story in a Call of Duty game?" But I picked this one specifically because I expected it, of all possible CoDs, to put the most effort into the campaign. The Steam reviews frequently mention 'the story' as a high point, and the developers obviously want you to pay attention to it (judging by the amount of time you spend in only-sometimes-skippable cutscenes). So I think it's a real knock against the game when I say that, in my opinion, the story is mostly pretty stupid.
It's not ALL bad. There's a cool multiple-perspective thing where you jump back and forth between characters and locations. If I cared about any of the characters, this might have been exciting! There is a lot of dialogue, but it's all gruff monologues about how War is Hell or shouted commands to go here and do this. No time is wasted on trivial things like explaining what's going on or why you're shooting these people in particular. (Or, say, why your allies joined the military, what they care about, if they have families...) I thought this was because I skipped the optional 'intel' collectibles, but I went back to get some and it turns out they don't actually contain any intel. I got the broad strokes of what was happening through contextual clues, but I couldn't follow the why.
Scene: We are attempting to defend the roof of Burger Town for some reason or other. The enemies swarm from below us, attempting to take our position on the high ground. After a couple failed attempts to snipe them one-by-one from the rooftop, I notice that there are only two ways up to the roof, they're both ladders, and they're right next to each other. Crucial: enemies cannot shoot you from ladders. I stand in a position that can see both ladders, wait, and shoot whenever I see a face pop up. A comical pile of ragdoll bodies accumulates on the floor of Burger Town. Oblivious enemies continue to climb up, ignoring their dozens of comrades who just died in the exact same way they're about to. I complete the objective without taking a single hit.
Midway through Act II, I noticed something surprising: occasionally, in the little gunfights seemingly intended as padding between key setpieces, the shape of a video game started to emerge. When the developers take their thumbs off the scale, letting you face down a bunch of guys with nothing but a gun the way nature intended, Modern Warfare 2 can actually be very fun. This culminates in Mission 14, "Whiskey Hotel"; at this point, you've been playing for long enough that Modern Warfare 2 is comfortable challenging you, and the titular hotel makes for an interesting combat location. I was thinking, while playing it, that I wouldn't mind if they made a whole game out of that stuff. A shooter, but in first person? I wonder why no one has tried that before.
Unfortunately, it doesn't seem like the people making the game agreed. Spoilers ahead: After Whiskey Hotel, the game ends with: a monotonously extended base-defense mission; a dramatic escape where the enemies shoot each other (so you don't have to); ANOTHER god damn stealth mission; and a vehicle section where you can barely use your gun. The "final boss", if you can call it that, is basically a cutscene. I understand why you'd want to open with a bunch of big empty spectacle, if you think you need it to hook a player who doesn't understand the controls yet. I don't understand why they keep bringing it back, forcing the core loop of the game to struggle for air as it collapses under a mountain of setpieces.
...Ok, all this is unfair. I picked Modern Warfare 2 because of what I'd heard about the "No Russian" part, which made me think it was more campaign-focused than the other games in the series. But even so, everyone knows Call of Duty is a multiplayer man's game first and foremost. In truth, then, I have no idea if Modern Warfare 2 is any good. In fact, I don't even know what it means for a multiplayer game to BE good, in an existential sense. I feel like the quality of my multiplayer gaming has nothing to do with the quality of the game and everything to do with the quality of the other people. If multiplayer can make even watching The Room fun, does it really MATTER if a game has fun multiplayer? But still, I understand it's a big part of the game's identity. So -
Scene: I am running around the map "Rust". A friend and I are shooting at each other, a 1v1 competitive match. I mostly got my ass kicked, and ultimately lose, 35 to 58. I had a good time anyway.
5/10