Review | Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2

Format: Xbox360/PS3/PC | Genre: FPS | Publisher: Activision | Developer: Infinity Ward | Release date: 10/11/09 | RRP: £39.99-£54.99

By Sam Giddings

This review, and its associated score, refers to the single-player component of Modern Warfare 2.  We’ll be looking at the multiplayer separately, later in the week.

In every way, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 is a blockbuster of a game.

From the chest-thumping bravura of its protagonists, all the way to its grandiose set-pieces and meaty explosions, this is loud, brash and stupid.  Thankfully, it’s also hugely entertaining.  Modern Warfare 2 sets off at a rollicking pace, and doesn’t let up until its perversely poignant (and deliberately slower) conclusion.

It’s clear that Infinity Ward has, with Modern Warfare 2, tried to do what many sequels do: increase the body count, upstage the previous iteration’s stand-out moments, and in every way fill the screen with spectacle.  Almost without exception, Modern Warfare 2 achieves this, but at a slight cost: the veneer of plausibility that made the original Modern Warfare so compelling has been shattered.  This sequel stretches credibility to the outer limits of what is acceptable, even for a blockbuster, but successfully glosses over it with fun, frenetic and unrelenting action.  This is both Modern Warfare 2’s greatest strength and the source of its minor shortcomings.

Infinity Ward seems to understand what drives the action: the campaign is short, even by the realigned parameters of current gaming.  I finished it on regular difficulty in about five hours or so, although it will take considerably longer on higher difficulties.  This reduction in length allows the plot – such as it is – to bound along and reach a satisfying conclusion, without ever outstaying its welcome. To say that there’s a lot of action jammed into the campaign is to understate things somewhat.  Such recklessly imperative progression is served well by two underlying factors.  Firstly, each level or mission itself is brief and direct, again underscoring the forward momentum.  Secondly, the established Call of Duty tactic of supporting an over-arching plot by switching between characters allows the narrative to launch from one breathtaking event to the next.  In one level alone, I cleared an historical building in America’s capital and saved the Washington monument from destruction by manning a helicopter-mounted machine gun, then got shot down and forced into a last stand at the crash site.

This mechanic also enables us to revisit old faces, new locations, and offers up the requisite – and satisfying – twists and turns.  There are more on-rails moments in this outing, more flashy, gaudy and superfluous bangs, and more moments of sheer pyrotechnic lunacy – but that’s generally a good thing.  Visually, it holds up under such intense technical scrutiny.  There are no framerate hiccups, no graphical glitches or screen tearing.  The explosions are dazzling and terrible in their beauty, and all the particle effects and equipment features work amazingly well.  It hasn’t raised the visual bar in the same way as Call of Duty 4, but to say that is to lavish praise upon the forerunner, not denigrate the efforts on show here.

//Minimum impact
The cost to the central themes, though, is realism.  The antecedent retained some elements of plausibility – while there were inexhaustible supplies of tangos to be downed, Call of Duty 4 had a plot that retained connections to the real world, and some tight, well-scripted fights. Conversely, Modern Warfare 2 features perhaps the most jaw-droppingly implausible terrorist incursion since the film Red Dawn.  The story is woolly at best, it must be said.  Some events seem to have minimal explanation or reason, instead sacrificing narrative for a more primal connection of adrenaline-based interaction.  The missions themselves are more tenuously woven into a whole, and occasionally the risk Infinity Ward has taken falls short.

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