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Like your grandmother, your dog, and some hillbilly living somewhere up in the remote Smoky Mountains I too have picked up a copy of CALL OF DUTY: MODERN WARFARE 2. The game is widely tipped to be one of the biggest- if not the biggest hits in video game history. The first game made a bunch of people rich, so you can rest assured that time, money, talent, and effort were put into this sequel to capitalize on the success of the first title.
I've played about two hours of the campaign (which is probably about 1/3 of it) and a couple of hours of multiplayer so this definitely isn't anything approaching a full review. But I do feel like I have to say something about it, and that something is HOLY FUCKING SHIT.
Believe the hype. MW2 is an amazing video game. No, it does not reinvent the FPS genre but who really expected that. What it does is refine the pure action-oriented FPS experience to a new level. If you thought the first MW was cinematic, dramatic, and thrilling...wait until you play through the second scenario that finds you climbing up a sheer ice wall to steal some kind of satellite part from an airfield in the middle of a snowstorm. And then you escape in a high-speed snowmobile chase. Or in the mission "Wolverines!" (yes, a RED DAWN reference) where you're fighting through the suburbs of Virginia and have to hold down an area between a Taco Bell and a TGI Fridays- their facsimilies, at least.
Multiplayer is fun, but I suck at it. I don't see how people can somehow always kill me. The core system from MW is back, with perks and experience. There's airstrikes and care packages. Lots of different play modes, so I can see this one sticking around for a couple of years.
Spec Ops mode is an arcade-style shoot'em up. It's pretty fun, but I haven't really dug into it yet. It's going to add A LOT of replay value like the RE4 additional missions.
And then, there's the already infamous "No Russian" mission that's part of the campaign mode. This game is going to catch hell for it once it gets into wider distribution. If you haven't already heard (and this is a minor spoiler so close your eyes if you have to), your character is an undercover CIA agent embedded in a cell of Russian terrorists. They stage an attack on a Russian airport and you are a part of it- you have to win the trust of the terrorist leader, so you have to participate. Before the mission, the CO tells you that you're going to lose a piece of yourself. And the game actually lets you skip the mission if you don't want to do it at all.
But if you do, you're going to miss one of the most chilling, terrifying, and significant moments in video game history. This is brilliant, brilliant stuff that directly engages the player in a kind of moral dialogue that sort of questions the whole FPS mentality. I bet you didn't expect that, did you? You walk with these terrorists slowly and methodically through the airport literally mowing down crowds of people. You'll see a wounded guy holding his stomach crawling for cover before one of the terrorists shoots him. A woman running up an escalator is gunned down and slides down to your feet. There's bodies and blood everywhere.
The media and politicians are going to try to spin this in such a way that it glorifies violence or promotes killing. It doesn't. It's sick, brutal, uncompromising, and absolutely horrible. It calls into mind Columbine, Virginia Tech, Fort Hood, and 9/11. It makes you realize that maybe being an invincible guy with a machine gun isn't so great after all. If you're like me, you'll actually feel something about it even though it's a game and nobody's really getting hurt. It just feels wrong, like something very human is compromised. I'd love to see a board game attempt to do something like that- too bad it's practically not possible.
It's strange though, how effective it is. I can't think of another video game that had this much of a gut punch in it. Deciding whether or not to kill the Little Sisters in BIOSHOCK is farcical compared to the impact of this sequence. A couple of days ago, I had to make a decision whether or not to poison the water at President Eden's behest in FALLOUT 3 and kill off all the mutants and ghouls, but it wasn't anything like pulling the trigger on a bunch of regular people running in terror.
It's simply video gaming at the absolute peak of its potential circa 2009. Think what you will about the rest of the game, but this is the important part and the part that moves the kinds of emotions and responses that video games can create forward. It's another step toward video games becoming as sophisticated and rich as cinema.
Anyway, I'll be on tonight playing if anyone wants to jump on. Crackedlcd75 is my handle. I'm an easy kill.
