Double Take: another look at Modern Warfare 2
Editor’s note: Frequent Silicon Sasquatch podcast guest (and PC enthusiast) Spencer Tordoff has more than a few things to say about his experiences with Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. With our review now live, we felt his commentary would be the perfectly compressed chaser to our long-winded critique.
I’d like to preface this by saying I have no interest in Modern Warfare 2′s multiplayer component. The betrayals of Activision and Infinity Ward have come and gone; the damage is done, and for once I feel like I have nothing to say on the topic.
However, the single player portion continued to intrigue me. I loved the campaign in Call of Duty 4, as well as the previous Infinity Ward-crafted stories of Call of Duty 1 and 2. Procuring a copy of the latest game to continue the Modern Warfare storyline felt like a good idea, like an olive branch offered to a quarrelsome friend.
To the studio’s credit, the single player was certainly an exciting experience. Indeed, it never stopped the excitement. Even when I hoped the game would slow down a bit and let me get my bearings, there was non-stop, full-on action. Too much perhaps, and out of some necessity.
As it turns out, Modern Warfare 2 is a hideous patchwork beast assembled from the successes of its predecessor — stitched together with threads of blasting sound, unrelenting fury and boring cliché. Only a few moments weren’t copies of some pulse-pounding Call of Duty 4 scene. Did you enjoy Modern Warfare’s sniper segment? Now there are two. What about a stunning mid-air leap to a helicopter? Check. Vehicle escapes? Three. First-person reception of an execution-style pistol round? Two. Spectacular character death scenes? One (and a half). Every little facet that made Call of Duty 4 special was copied and plastered all over Modern Warfare 2′s campaign, and unconvincingly so.
Spots that Infinity Ward couldn’t properly put a primer coat over were painted in thick shades of camp. Modern Warfare 2 runs the gauntlet from the popular good-guy-turns-bad betrayal to the Cold War-era Soviet invasion of the United States fantasy, à la Red Dawn, Red Alert 2 and World in Conflict. The only moments where this abomination is remotely reminiscent of classic Call of Duty were the sections from the perspective of the U.S. Army Ranger, which fell victim to the already-mentioned Russian invasion absurdity. Even old videogame clichés were pursued, including the obligatory character voiced by Keith David, and the vaguely-justified motion sensor. No ironic stones, it seems, were left unturned.
I dubbed Call of Duty 4, without hesitation, both my favorite game and the best action movie of 2007. Tragically, Modern Warfare 2 was for me the worst action film of 2009, a year that saw Transformers 2 in theaters. When the dust settled from my straight-through six-hour campaign session, I knew why the pacing had been kept so frantic: Such haste temporarily distracted me from all the sameness; it shifted my attention from the growing feeling that I had experienced all of this content before in previous games and films.
Once the credits stopped rolling, Modern Warfare 2 laid threadbare at my feet. The challenges were somewhat amusing, but easily abandoned, and the graphics hadn’t improved in two years. In all, well… it felt like a Treyarch game.
Thankfully for Treyarch, Modern Warfare 2 has set the bar nice and low. Perhaps the World at War developer can take the crown from Infinity Ward; it seems the old guard has forgotten how to wear it.
December 16, 2009 - 3:35 pm
Anytime your story is compared to “Red Dawn,” you know you’re in troubled waters.
December 24, 2009 - 2:27 am
Reviewing this game as a single player experience is sort of pointless, no? If you want single player value, buy something like World of Goo, which oddly has a better story and more life to the game. The meat of MW2 is in the multiplayer whether you like it or not; it’s the game’s series’ selling point at this stage of affairs and no amount of “IW betrayed us” moaning will change that.
Case in point, I’ve spent less than 1/7 of my playtime in the campaign mode and spec ops, and that’s someone who actually beat the campaign twice. It is a great (albeit bug ridden) multiplayer experience. Some of the game modes are a bit of a clusterfuck to be sure, but the overall brilliance in design philosophy is there. Mixing and matching perks with your custom classes is an extremely fun exercise; whether setting up noob tube spam with Danger Close or a “knife psycho” with Marathon/Lightweight and the tac knife, you can basically play the game the way any way you can think, though your effectiveness varies lobby to lobby.
With the exception of Akimbo 1887s and the occasional lag spike, I never feel cheated by the gameplay. Some knifer catches me around the corner, I’m more cautious. Some sniper drops me from his nest, I flush him out. I get caught by a killstreak reward, I pull out a cold blooded class. The weapons are great, for the most part. Unlike certain favorites of COD4 (frankly I remember that game being all P90/M16/.50 cal) MW2 really allows me to use the weapons I prefer. I swear by the M4A1 for it’s higher fire rate at the expense of slightly greater recoil compared to the ACR while my buddy maintains the opposite bias for himself. That’s a luxury that many multiplayer games do not allow for (coughUnrealsludgeguncough). Even the allegedly flexible PvP Arenas of Warcraft don’t allow the user such freedom (resilience, how I loathe thee).
Either way, my response is growing quite long, so I will just say this. Reviewing a game as just a part of something is a disservice, and I’m sort of disappointed the website allowed it to go through. I thought the policy was to play games thoroughly, and while I understand Aaron’s review provides that, I don’t understand why this review even exists. Now that my gears are grinding, I think I might start a music site that reviews the album liners and cover art…
December 24, 2009 - 2:49 am
OK, I sort of came to the realization that this is not a review, per se. I still contend it’s nitpicking and a rather fruitless endeavor: you would have to be very thick to pay $60 for a game that can be finished in under 6 hours.
December 24, 2009 - 3:58 am
My editorial was by no means a dirge bemoaning the choices made by Infinity Ward and Activision regarding the PC version of Modern Warfare 2. As an Infinity Ward fan, I hoped the new narrative would be as high-quality as its predecessor’s campaign. I was disappointed. I was asked for my thoughts. The multiplayer (console port though it might be) is most certainly well-made and entertaining – I’m merely not interested.
Were Modern Warfare 2 advertised primarily as a multiplayer game, then discussing a tacked-on single player component (à la Unreal Tournament’s campaign) might be fruitless. It was not; nearly every piece of marketing I saw for MW2 (with the exception of multiplayer teasers/trailers) focused on its campaign. MW2′s single player was inarguably more of a selling point than cover art or album liners, though it felt as substantial as either.
The copy I played was borrowed, by the by, but Call of Duty 4′s campaign easily seemed more worthy of retail price than its successor’s, despite being of similar length.
December 25, 2009 - 6:50 pm
Hey man — if you’re trying to tell me I wasted sixty bucks on four hours of Pokémon Snap, YOU ARE MISTAKEN.
December 24, 2009 - 7:51 am
It’s a multiplayer product. Period. Really, you are going to argue otherwise? Are your expectations for everything you purchase as a consumer based on advertising campaigns? As Aaron said in his review, when I check random gamertags to seehow far they are in the campaign, most haven’t completed the first act. In fact, I comparing games to many MW2 players I find that it is quite a common feature to have games like Madden, FIFA, COD, Halo with low gamer scores and nothing else; this is the market that fills the coffers of publishers. Regardless of how they built their reputation, it’s still an entertainment business and single-player deemphasis in series like COD is going to be the norm. I fully expect MW3 to make a huge stride to some type of MMO type model; whether people pay for it remains to be seen, but that is definitely the direction they’re headed.
Furthermore, is MW2 even exceptional in this regard? Halo 3′s campaign, for all intents and purposes, was a pile of garbage. Bungie sank all their time into massaging the multiplayer experiencing, that much is clear; so why the contrarian scorn for MW2 when Halo pulled the same crap 2 years ago?
It’s actually apt to compare ODST at this point, as that game also had a woefully short campaign. Gameplay wise, it shows its age; it isn’t nearly as polished and interesting as MW2. Yet there is no doubt that the characters in ODST are far more compelling with a nice narrative that sucks you into the game. Meanwhile MW2 is all sound and fury; spectacular set pieces and that’s about it. Frankly, that’s what I expected and I’m surprised that someone seriously expected IW to not borrow heavily from previous games.
My point in this is that the contrarianism from the “core” players is amusing me to no end. What happened to the days of solid gameplay and controls were the praiseworthy aspects of game design? All this fixation on story is really starting to rub me the wrong way. Video games possess pedestrian narratives, and even the notable ones like Bioshock would barely qualify as cheeseball science fiction that is horrendously derivative. If I want something to challenge my brain I will pick up a book.
Finally, why are some gamers eager to abandon the core principles of gameplay so we can seek some level of cultural worthiness like cinema has? Your Transformers 2/MW2 comment strikes me as total absurdity; who bloody cares how MW2 might compare to a film, that’s not what games are. You would think dozens of shitty game to film adaptations would have given gamers some clue about the nature of their favorite medium, but no, we are always looking towards god damn films for validation. This is mainly through narrative structure, which I can’t believe has actually fooled people into thinking is a worthwhile pursuit; hint, Heavy Rain looks to be the exact thesis of those heinous Sega CD games. But omgawd it’s cinematic, fapfapfapfapfapfap!!!111
December 24, 2009 - 12:46 pm
So, I was to forget the precedent set by each and every previous game from Infinity Ward and simply assume their latest title to have a Frankenstein’s monster for a campaign because of “single-player deemphasis?”
Huh. ‘kay.
I didn’t want an amazing film, I didn’t want a brilliant narrative. I wanted the campaign to be good – a story plausible enough to drive the action, a balanced action experience without too many gimmicks. It was not. For all your loathing of Halo 3, at least the campaign wasn’t packed full of mini-games and stunts. It was just Halo. That seems okay by me.
December 25, 2009 - 6:57 pm
“It’s a multiplayer product. Period.”
I don’t think that’s fair in the slightest. The game’s advertising showcases the single player and Spec Ops modes extensively. The main menu is divided equally between modes. Just because the majority of people play multiplayer exclusively doesn’t mean the game wasn’t built to accommodate for other play preferences.
As a die-hard COD4 multiplayer addict (well, I got to about rank 45 on my first prestige, so I’m not totally insane about it) I found MW2′s multiplayer didn’t hook me. It wasn’t because of the glitches, or the jerks on Xbox Live, or anything like that; it was the fact that it feels so much like the original. For how much of a landmark COD4 was in competitive multiplayer, MW2 felt to me like backpedaling.
In fact, it’s the single player and Spec Ops modes that really shined for me. The variety and depth of the Spec Ops mode completely caught me off-guard; I’m still working towards earning every last star, and I’m loving it.
And say what you want about the ludicrous story, but from a pure design perspective the campaign has the best level and confrontation design I’ve ever seen in a Call of Duty game.
After all, Call of Duty earned its prestigious reputation primarily by demonstrating its powerful narrative ability in the first-person shooter genre, and I think preserving that legacy is something that means a lot to Infinity Ward.
December 25, 2009 - 7:29 am
It was not OK. Atrocious level design. Weak story. Master Chief is probably the most bland, boring character in any video game franchise. How people would even care what happened to that soulless git is beyond me.
December 25, 2009 - 7:00 pm
Sorry you don’t like Halo 3! I thought it was a lot of fun.
December 25, 2009 - 7:10 pm
I feel like now that there are so many replies to this, I have to contribute something.
So here’s my question: Among the three games we all agree have shitty plots (varying in their shittiness of course), which would produce the best fan fiction stories?
And which would make the best transition to soft core pornography parodies? Possible titles would be: the obvious Gears of Whore, the similar-but-slightly-less-obvious Balls of Duty: Modern Whorefare 2 and the unexpected Hey-hole 3: Ho-DST.
December 26, 2009 - 2:55 pm
Halo: Reacharound
Cholo: Gangbangs Evolved
Stall of Duty: Modern Gloryholes 2
I’m here all week folks.