I really want to like the Modern Warfare 2 campaign, but it’s a travesty. The multiplayer is good, but the campaign is terrible.
For the good, the game looks fantastic! I once stopped mid-game to check out reflections off wet but uneven surfaces because it just looked so good. The guns feel and sound right. At the core, the game feels like what we’ve come to expect from a COD game. And while it’s early to draw too many conclusions from multiplayer (it tends to take a few weeks to get a solid feel for how that’s playing out and let the developer rebalance equipment), the multiplayer feels really good. I particularly like the new prisoner rescue mode where respawning is turned off but players can revive fallen teammates. It’s a good balance between the always-rushing mode of free respawns and the modes with no respawning like Search and Destroy. The multiplayer maps are nothing spectacular. A few appear to be well thought out and nicely balanced while others are already proving to be too prone to spawn killing, but those smaller, more frustrating maps seem to come up in the rotation more often than the others.
Unfortunately, multiplayer is missing the theater mode that several previous games have included for going back and capturing clips and images from previous matches. And the spec ops missions can’t be played in split screen. On the Series X, it can be difficult to tell when someone has joined your party or if everyone in the party was brought with you from one menu to the next because it really only shows your party when on one particular screen. On PC, the game has some major crashing issues that I’m sure they’ll be fixing, but crashes can be pretty severe and take out more than just the game.
As for the campaign, the story is atrocious. It starts off with promise, and since they’re rebooting/retelling the Modern Warfare story to keep things from getting quite so crazy this time around, they already have good material they can use, so the story SHOULD be an easy win here. But no. At the halfway point of the game, you find that most of the missions up to that point (and all the lives taken along the way) were literally for nothing. What’s more, the people who sent you on those missions knew that even if you were successful, it was entirely pointless. The story gets worse from there. By the end, those in charge go from quibbling over the legalities of interrogating, detaining, or killing one person (after killing countless individuals, including military personnel of an allied country, getting to him) to the same people committing open acts of war against allies and publicly slaughtering civilians in foreign countries looking for the same guy they said couldn’t be detained. But it’s okay, I guess, because the special forces from the allied country slaughter US civilians on US soil with no repercussions. On top of all that, there’s no conclusion to the story set up at the end of Modern Warfare 2019. Apparently, that story played out in Warzone, or something, so those of us who play through these campaigns multiple times don’t actually get the satisfaction of a cohesive story.
So if the story didn’t live up to the franchise’s very flawed standards, was the campaign at least fun to play? Yes… until it wasn’t. I really enjoyed playing the first half. Then I got to the “Fast & Furious of Urzikstan” mission, which is an ill-conceived mess where a sizeable force relies upon the single person who fell out of a helicopter to commandeer their own vehicle, beat everyone who already had vehicles to the target while commandeering multiple vehicles along the way, and pretty well single-handedly do everything. It’s the mission nobody ever asked for. When you get to scavenging and crafting menus in the last 3rd of the game, you know the game has gone off the rails. It’s not that these mechanics shouldn’t be in the game, necessarily, but to introduce completely new game mechanics so late in the game is a problem, and it destroys the pacing of the game entirely. The game goes from fast-paced action, storming enemy held ground to stop an impending attack, to slowly moving around a map unable to attack anyone for half an hour. The mechanic returns in the end game and is all the more frustrating when you literally can’t attack anyone but end up at a checkpoint with armored enemies covering every possible route. But hey, if you’ve been wanting a COD game where you get to take on armored enemies using only a box cutter and smoke traps, you’re in luck. And if you wanted a game that throws you unarmed from an elevator directly in front of two armored enemies shining flashlights in your eyes who will completely ignore the fact that they saw you so long as you duck behind a cart fast enough, this is it. Unfortunately, the late game is all about extreme trial and error because there’s no way to predict what you’re supposed to do or how the NPCs will react. It’s like the developer didn’t think about user experience. As much as I’ve ridiculed the first MW2’s ending, mashing X repeatedly to pull a knife from my chest, at least that didn’t require 15 different attempts to figure out what the game expected me to do. Replaying the game on the realism difficulty exposes more glitches that make the game feel like it wasn’t completely tested. The biggest difficulty in the game ends up having nothing to do with defeating armored enemies or vehicles but is just getting the game triggers to work correctly. This seems to be a bigger problem on the Series X version than PC, but they both have their issues.
It's a shame. The original Modern Warfare trilogy is some of my favorite gaming of all time and is good enough that I’ll still go back and replay all three of those games. With this iteration, I’ll finish unlocking the last few achievements, but there’s nothing that will draw me back to this mess after that. I don’t care how much they spent hiring actors for the campaign, is it any wonder that only a tiny percentage of the COD players skip the campaign completely and just move straight into multiplayer when the story is this stupid?