I recently played the original Call of Duty Modern Warfare days before the release of the new Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 and I was viewing some statistics from the game. I was looking at the amount of kills I had and the amount of wins until I found something that shocked me at first, but then I realized that it really wasn’t as crazy as I thought. The game said that I had played it for over 11 days. Now if one were to think of that, that’s over 256 hours of doing something that doesn’t benefit me or any other person. I began thinking and I came to the conclusion that it really was beneficial. I met some really cool people and became friends with quite a few of them. I wasn’t the only person to enjoy this game. Thirteen million people had purchased a copy of the game and spent numerous days playing the game, as well. With this amount of people already playing the series and a record number of pre-sales for the game already announced, the hype and anticipation for the game was astronomical. My expectations for the game were also very high because even though the first game had its flaws, I was expecting that Infinity Ward (the company that made the game) would fix those problems. Luckily, they were able to fix most of those problems and make an extremely fun and satisfying game.   

  The games plot is a continuation of the original Modern Warfare, and has the player take the control of the character Gary “Roach” Sanderson. The player also takes control of four other characters throughout the game but they are used mainly as ways to jump from one country to another without the main character having to fly around all the time. This is useful because the game jumps to a different country in almost every different mission. The player jumps from Afghanistan, to Russia to Brazil to America and the travelling doesn’t stop there. The jumps can be confusing at some points if the player does not pay attention and such an element can deter from a player’s understanding. As far as overall story, I would say the story is a little bi-polar. The story tries to be this big Michael Bay type movie with big explosions and big fight scenes, like when the players are flying around a war torn Washington D.C. in a helicopter while being shot at by RPG’s,  but the game also switches gears with missions like “No Russian”. 

  The “No Russian” mission has been sparking controversy ever since the mission was leaked online a few weeks before the game’s release. The mission takes the player into a fictional Russian airport in which the player is an undercover American spy who is trying to get information about the Russians who are planning to attack the United States. The player starts out in an elevator with a few other people who aren’t identified right away. When the elevator doors open, the leader—Makarov—tells the player “No Russian” and he and his fellow Russians begin shooting the innocent people in the airport. At first I didn’t realize what was really happening but when I found out I paused the game and realized I was walking through an airport killing innocent people. The game gives the player an option at the beginning of the game to skip the level entirely before you play it and also gets the option of skipping the task during the level, but I decided that while the mission is very intense and might be looked at as wrong, I continued the level without firing a bullet, because the mission was simply a depiction of war. War is a dirty thing and all the mission does is show the evils of war and the levels that people will go to get what they want, so in that aspect the level achieves what it was trying to do.  

  As far as how the actual campaign plays out, the game play is better then the previous Modern Warfare in some ways, but has some flaws in its pacing and length which makes it inferior overall. One of the main issues with the campaign is the length. I was able to finish it in about four and a half hours on the normal difficulty. Playing the game on the hardened or veteran difficulty will make the game a little longer, but on such a big game I was excepting the story to be a little longer. The game’s enemies can also get bothersome on some of the higher difficulties because of their ability to know where your character is at all moments, making areas that have a lot of enemies quite difficult to navigate.

  Another issue was the pacing of the campaign. The game crams in so much action and sometimes the pace is just so frantic that it gets difficult to follow the main story. One thing that the game does do well is providing you with helpful teammates. Your teammates will shout out important information like where your enemies are, which becomes very useful when the fights get more hectic. These are only minor complaints, however, because the real reason that most people bought this game, including myself, was for the multiplayer, which comes through in a big way.

  Another positive of the game is its gorgeous graphics. During some of the missions I was in awe of just how amazing the game looked and it really added to my enjoyment.

  The biggest surprise that I had while playing the game was the Spec Ops mode. The Spec Ops mode is a single and co-op mode that puts players in situations that were in the game, like the snowmobile part, and makes players do specific things like race through the level in a certain amount of time. The mode has the player earn up to 3 stars on each of the 23 levels based on their performance or on what difficulty the player chooses. This mode ends up clocking in at a longer time than the actual campaign and will have players coming back to play even after they earn all 69 stars with some of the missions, like one in which you and a friend must take control of an AC-130 and use it as support fire as the other goes through the level on foot. This mission is one the best moments in the game and was a really great surprise, as coming into the game I had no clue what the Spec Ops mode was.    

  Of course the real reason I bought the game was for the multiplayer, which is by far the best mode in the game. The first thing I noticed when playing the game was the balance in each of the levels, something that was a big problem in the original. In the first Modern Warfare, many levels allowed the player a few ways to get to a destination, which made your opponents’ moves easily predictable. In this game though, there is quite a bit of depth in most of the levels with most levels having at least two—even three—ways to get to a specific destination. Some levels are lacking, however, like the Wasteland map, and this makes for an overall better experience. 

  The ranking system from the original Modern Warfare returns as well as some of the weapons and perks from the original. The game’s new weapons and perks are a nice bonus because it gives players more to play for than just wins and kills. The perks can have effects added to them in this game when a player uses the perk enough, which can be useful. With all the different ways a player can customize their weapons and classes, it was important that the creators make the game balanced, and thankfully, they did. For every attack there is a counter attack and this leads to easily the most balanced and well put-together multiplayer experience. The sheer amount of content in the multiplayer mode is amazing and this is most evident in the new and improved kill streaks.

  In the last Modern Warfare, there were only three things that a player received when they accomplished a kill streak: a UAV for three kills in a row, an airstrike for five and a helicopter for seven. This time around though, players can customize their streaks to have something different every time. A player can have a counter UAV for three, attack helicopter for three and then have a tactical nuke for twenty five kills in a row that end the game automatically for your team. The amount of things you can pick from for each kill streak is amazing and this adds to the strategy of the game even more.   

  Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 is one of the best first person shooter experiences that I have ever played. The game found a way to add much more depth and strategy to the multiplayer experience and a way to get rid of some of the more annoying factors from the original game, like the over use of grenades and the very straight forward multiplayer maps. The addition of the Spec Ops mode was a nice surprise that provides the player with hours of more fun than I expected. The single player mode is lacking with its rather short campaign but if someone bought this game just for the single player experience, I would question their reason. The meat and potatoes of this game are in the multiplayer mode, and overall, the game provides one of the best first person shooting experiences to date.