I originally had high hopes for MW2; especially after playing the Modern Warfare ‘reimagining’ since its release. Unfortunately, the amount of bugs, hiccups, and lackluster gameplay (thus far) leaves this two steps shy from a dumpster fire in my opinion.

Don’t get me wrong, I certainly had fun in the single-player campaign and while there were issues in that realm, the overall gameplay smoothed over some of the bumps in the road. At least that’s how things turned out during my experience; some of my friends had more speed bumps and potholes along the way.

Where things go downhill for me is in the multiplayer world. Even after it auto-installs updates after every time I open Battle.net, it doesn’t seem like much is being fixed. Small arms fire is still able to penetrate a couple of layers of (what appears to be) concrete, constant episodes of lag during play (no matter what my graphics settings are or when I play), a broken ping system, a rather quick ‘inactivity kick’, the cheating bullet sponges, small number of maps and a plagued private match framework that makes me want to napalm the game from my SSD. While it’s fun from time to time, it is maddeningly frustrating on too many occasions.

I was also excited for Co-op mode since I loved playing it in the last MW…this was bittersweet as some of the ‘feel’ was still there, but most of it seemed rushed. We use to be able to sit down and play through wave after wave of enemy AI while having a blast doing so, but now the limited Co-op games seem to have nothing but speedrunning in mind.

Finally, I am not sure who designed half of these maps, but some of them have to be some of the worst-designed maps within the COD franchise. Yes, I am talking about Santa Sena Border Crossing.