Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2
Platform: Xbox 360 (reviewed), Playstation 3, PC
Publisher: Activision
Developer: Infinity Ward
Release Date: November 15, 2009

Today we have Infinity Ward’s masterpiece Modern Warfare 2.  The video review runs for a total of 10 mins and covers the 3 most important pieces of Modern Warfare 2 : The Campaign, Special Ops and Multiplayer.

Campaign mode has a total of 18 missions running over three acts.  All missions are very well layed out and designed with excellent cut scene movies explaining what has happened and what they expect you to do in the next mission.  It might be a little bit hard to pick up and understand the story at first but slowly everything will fall into place, especially when you run through the game a second time.  One mission which was not well received in Modern Warfare 2 is called No Russian.  When you start-up Modern Warfare 2 for the first time, your given an option to not play and skip this level, as it’s quite gruesome.  It has you killing innocent civilians in an airport.  Now if you do decide to skip this you will not miss out on any achievements.  BUT you will miss out on the MAIN point of the story.  THIS in my opinion is what makes the game.  And remember, its only a GAME.   I would recommend, playing it and experiencing the full extent of what Infinity Ward are trying to achieve.

Moving right along, the game has four difficulty levels, for new comers, recommended levels would be Recruit & Regular for the more hardcore first person shooter gamers try your hand at either Hardened or Veteran.  Veteran is not as hard as the original Modern Warfare was.  And you can sustain a few good hits before dying.   The AI on each of the levels are quite smart they don’t do anything amazingly smart like flank, they do take cover and protect themselves, some unfortunately do come running right at you and making them simple targets to pop off.  Mostly do camp and wait to be picked off.  On the flip side we have the AI team mates that assist you during missions. Now the good thing is that these guys are actually very smart, assist in kills and do a bit of work especially in Veteran.  As your well aware that even though it’s a team effort in getting objectives and missions out-of-the-way.  Most of the time the emphasis is on you to move up, get the kills, flank etc. One of the best things is that the major NPC’s going into battle with you will not and can’t be shot down by enemy fire.  So you don’t have to worry about baby sitting them.  If you do however shoot them they will die and it will cause you to reload from a check point.

I will not give away anything in terms of spoilers but I would recommend running through it at least twice as there will be things you will miss on your first time through.  One such thing is enemy intel.   These are scattered through all 18 missions and there is a total of 45 to collect.  The enemy intel are laptops that are similar to the COG collection in Gears Of War,  some are hidden quite well and some you can’t miss.  There is nothing really exciting about collecting them.  You dont get anything really in terms of audio information, files to read etc, which is a little bit of a let down, as here is where Infinity Ward could have added some extra insight and back story to the game to make it feel even more immersive.  But unfortunately this hasn’t happened, all you get for collecting the intel is 2 achievements, one for collecting half of them and another for collecting the full amount.  Nothing really worth wasting your time killing yourself trying to get unless you want a perfect 1000/1000 points / Trophies.

I wont bore you with a lot more information the video review does cover a lot of information as well.  The next two options I will skim through here is the new 2 player mode Special Ops.  Now you can play Special Ops on your own as well, but there are certain missions that require you to team up with a friend over live or split screen and cause some major damage.  Missions consist of many types of modes, such as wave defence similar to horde in GOW2, stealth missions, Snow Mobile racing and reach a goal by shooting your way through.  There are many more and are well worth taking a look at. 

There are a total of 5 sections all containing 5 subsections / missions.  These missions are taken straight out of the main campaign (you don’t do the full mission from the campaign but a section of the mission is used.  There is 3 levels of difficulty, regular, hardened and veteran.  Completing each special ops mission for example on veteran will give you 3 stars, stars are used to unlock the higher sections such as ALPHA, BRAVO, CHARLIE etc.  There is a total of 69 stars to collect and many achievement/trophies to gain along the way.  The most fun is special ops is had with a friend and done on Veteran this is where true friendships can be made and also lost 😉  ONE thing that could have been improved in Special ops is to allow up to 4 players / team mates to take part in the missions.  I think the more the merrier, more mayhem and more screaming for help = MORE FUN !!

Finally Multiplayer online,  the amount of stuff to cover here is too much to explain.  I will leave the video review to explain this.

So now sit down relax put your feet up and enjoy the vide review by MasterAbbott.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p3zUBP0OhaY]

Hope you enjoyed the review and video review.

Capsule Computers gives Modern Warfare 2 – 9.5 Capsules Out of 10.   This is a must for any Call of Duty fans, if you enjoy your first person shooters you cannot get any better than this. As with all games there are a few minor hiccups with the game but, they don’t get in the way of you having the BEST time of your life !!

Thanks for reading, let us know what you thought of this review here or in the forums.