The Gown Student Newspaper at Queen's University Belfast

REVIEW: Call Of Duty – Modern Warfare 2 Review (PS3, Xbox 360 and PC)

It’s on track to becoming the highest selling game of all-time – but does Modern Warfare 2 live up to the hype?

BY ANDREW SCOTT

“You’re queuing up at 7 in the morning for a GAME?!” – This was the taunt that greeted me from my bemused mother when she was informed that I would be taking the car and joining a queue of over a hundred others in the winter chill outside the usually desolate Sainsbury’s at Holywood Exchange. Yet while initially she thought I’d lost my mind, a quick look at some facts shows that I was just one of many. In the last year, the gaming industry took in £4 billion in revenue. To put that into perspective, that’s more than DVD and movie ticket sales combined. And when it comes to the gaming blockbusters, there are few franchises that can stand up next to the Call Of Duty series. Modern Warfare 2 was already the most pre-ordered game of all-time, and a last minute price cut by Sainsbury’s – slashing the RRP of £54.99 to a low of £26 – meant that they sent far more through their doors in a few short hours than they would usually see in a whole day.

But all of this ultimately means nothing unless the game itself is actually any good. Call Of Duty 4: Modern Warfare excelled itself with an action-packed single-player mode, a host of weapons and a multiplayer mode that can only be described as revolutionary. For Modern Warfare 2, all developers Infinity Ward had to do was to keep this winning formula, add a few bells and whistles and add even more features to the multiplayer. So the question – does Modern Warfare 2 live up to it’s predecessor? More importantly, does it live up to the massive hype?

For me, Modern Warfare 2 certainly betters it’s predecessor, and while hype is always a cruel mistress, it largely manages to justify the amount of talk that has surrounded it’s release. The single-player mode is brimming with set-pieces that would break the budget of any Holywood movie – case in point, turning the White House into a crumbling, bullet-riddled warzone. If the single-player has any injustice, it’s that it is criminally short. Even by first-person shooter standards, traditionally the preserve of multiplayer gaming, Modern Warfare 2′s five or six hour campaign is over in a few nights work, and with a loose storyline you’re often wondering what exactly was the point of the whole thing after all. Consider the campaign mode to be the Transformers 2 of the gaming industry – there’s a lot of explosions, macho-posturing and cryptic army codewords, but very little substance.

However, most players won’t care – and that’s because they’ll be loading up the games much praised multiplayer mode. The first Modern Warfare showcased a unique online system of perks and rewards, introducing a previously unseen element of strategy to a style of gameplay which essentially boiled down to ‘shoot them before they shoot you’. Furthermore, an online ranking and reward system, giving the player access to new weapons and upgrades the better their performances, gave the game an almost dangerous level of replayability. So what does Modern Warfare 2 offer? In short, pretty much more of the same. There are new perks, new rewards, new maps and, most significantly, a new cooperative mode which offers two players a number of challenges to complete in set time limits. This mode in particular offers a welcome change from the brutal and often unforgiving competitive online modes, and ensures you’ll be wiling away even more hours than you had set aside already. Suffice to say, Modern Warfare 2 offers one of the most complete multiplayer experiences ever.

The game is not without it’s flaws – the single-player campaign is short and the story disengaging, the graphics look dated compared to other shooters released this year such as Killzone 2 and you could argue that the multiplayer is essentially the same as Call Of Duty 4. Furthermore, much of the media attention on the game has focused around the inclusion of a questionable playable act involving an act of terrorism – while the option to skip this is available, you can’t help but feel the whole scene was put in for shock value alone. Yet at the same time, it offers a brutal depiction of terrorism through the eyes of the terrorists themselves, and in many ways this adds to the disturbing nature of this level and the ultra-realistic depiction of war found throughout the whole single-player campaign.

Nonetheless, despite a number of flaws, Modern Warfare 2 can easily be considered one step ahead of it’s predecessor, and certainly one of the most capable shooters available on the market right now. The single-player is short but action-packed, and the multiplayer…well, that speaks for itself. If you missed out on the opening day offers you may be looking at spending a fair amount of money on Modern Warfare 2; but it’s as deserving of your cash as any other title released this year, and if you enjoy shooters, this is an essential purchase for your console or PC.

Tags: Andrew Scott, Call of Duty, Gown, newspaper, qub, Queen's, queen's university, student, The Gown

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 16th, 2009 at 6:18 pm and is filed under Arts + Ents. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.