The Duty that Calls to Me Every Year
It's not bad, not bad at all.
Now, in my review of Black Ops, I ripped on it for being an exact replica of the older Call of Duties. Treyarch is not my favorite CoD builder. Infinity Ward released this game to an onslaught of criticism of how dated and copy-pasted it looked. Indeed the graphics are pretty bad, but then again, the game is running off of the Doom 3 engine. But you can tell what's what, and you're not in the game for the graphics, but instead there for the gameplay.
The campaign is extremely brief, offering a good four hours of more-or-less recycled themes. Main characters die. Russians are always ready to invade everyone, anytime. You get to make things go boom. However, the game does tie up very well near the end, providing a satisfactory ending (maybe) to the Modern Warfare franchise.
But the real meat of this cash cow lies in its multiplayer, which has been polished to a mirror shine. Its still satisfying, arcadey warfare, where near anyone can have fun blasting away opponents. And you can finally play the juggernaut, which makes me happy. The guns sound great, the snipers in particular sound very powerful. Quick scoping is still really terrible, but few people are really good at it. Kill streaks are unique and pretty useful.
All in all, the game is a polished clone of the solid Modern Warfare titles. It's nothing new, but it's really solid. Aside from the graphics and repetition, I can't find much really wrong with this game. B+