Well I was pretty skeptical about this game, with all the no dedicated servers and limited player caps, but I was absolutely suprised by MW2, some ways good, some ways completely rage inducing, which is why this review will be a 2-parter, one for the single-player and one for multi-player, i’ll do single-player first.

I’m not much of a single-player gamer, in most cases single-player games are just pointless, just AI cannon fodder enemies that you get no satisfaction from killing between the various bits of story, my personal opinion is that it would be better to watch a movie, or play a multi-player game. But Modern Warfare 2 isn’t actually a game at all. It’s actually a first-person movie that lets you control the camera and shoot stuff occasionally, and the gameplay is generally pretty bland, shoot some guys from cover here, shoot some guys from cover there, I don’t expect much more from a call of duty game. But the plot of this 4 hour movie is amazing, I didn’t actually finish the first modern warfare (got bored on the swamp level) but damn, this is better than most good movies. The plot is alot like a tom clancy book, filled with terrorists and Russians fighting America with a giant conspiracy behind it. The real reason this movie is so god damn great is because it excels in 2 places that other movies fail so much. The first is that it’s unpredictable, most movies these days you can just fucking guess the entire plot from the first 30 minutes of the movie, for example, in transformers 2 when mecha-jesus (optimus prime) dies, I was tempted to leave the theater on the spot, because it was painfully obvious he was going to come back in some jesusesq way at the end and deliver everyone from their sins. I was tipped off as to what the end of the game was, and forgotten the characters involved but i knew there was some sort of betrayal, but damn when said betrayal happened I did not see it coming at all. The latter way this movie excels is that it makes you care about the characters more. There are several subtle things they do to make you feel a bond with the characters, such as when you do certain things, characters will react in different ways, I know it isn’t really a revolutionary programming trick, and requires nothing more than an ‘if x than y’ statement, but it made you feel like the characters were more like people than just AI’s. Also the giant map variety (from icy cliffs to oil derricks to an old russian castle) makes you feel like you’ve gone to hell and back with these characters.

So really, this is an exceptionally amazing movie, but as a game it is pretty mediocre.