Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 Multiplayer Review: "Incomplete, Confused, And A Missed Opportunity"

I was promised a new dawn of Call of Duty. A paradise land that was a beautiful blend of nostalgia and cutting-edge action. Some sort of wonderland from Lords of the Rings. But could you imagine if Gandalf and Co. put up with a year of slaughter in the vanguard of their adventurous party, just for them to turn up in Wigan? And then they get kicked out after three minutes because they came to Wigan with friends. Well, that’s Modern Warfare 2.

It’s arguably the biggest gaming franchise in the world and this year Call of Duty opted to rewrite history by creating a reworked reboot of the iconic game from 2009. Brilliant. We could safely say that the prospect of reliving those after-school nights with your OG squad was quite tantalising.

However, Modern Warfare 2 doesn’t live up to the hype generated by its ancestors and predecessors and instead, serves as a buggy rendition of Call of Duty riddled with confusing developer muscle flexes and a palette that we’ve become way too accustomed to.

Brown, Grey, and Tired

We’ll kick things off with how Modern Warfare 2 looks. From the second you log onto MW2, your headache begins. The grey, streaming service-esque UI is a complete mess and begs the question "why?". If it’s not broken, don’t fix it.

In contrast to games gone by where you get the simple selection of Multiplayer, Campaign, or Special Ops, we’re now met with an over-convoluted bombardment of options, and the main playlists are hidden behind a quick play tab. I’m all for trying this new Prisoner Rescue mode, but it doesn’t belong on the main hub when the ever-popular Search and Destroy and Hardpoint are tucked away. It’s almost as if the designers have new toys and decide to throw them all into the game. Toy Story proved that you can’t go wrong with plain old Woody, there’s nothing wrong with the simplicity that has worked for just shy of two decades.

Then there’s the weapon gunsmith hub. Considering that the developers have openly admitted to making Modern Warfare 2 for a much more casual audience than those who pour their life into the game, the gunsmith is as contradictory as you could ever imagine. 

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NICKMERCS might not be the most reliable source of feedback in the world, but his recent views on Call of Duty have summed it up quite well; in a world where CoD’s competitors are pushing their stunning engines to the limit and making stunningly vibrant maps and landscapes, Modern Warfare 2 is brown. It’s muddy, misty, and tiresome to the eye. It’s a battlefield held in the modern era, so where is the colour? The most exciting of the maps visually is Crown Raceway, which is bizarrely played out at nighttime and suffers from a dull mask over what could be an all-time great map. Museum would have been a close second but has since been axed. 

I do have to admit that, if you’ve never played Call of Duty and decided to pick up a shooter for the first time, aside from the colour palette and dark overskin, Modern Warfare 2 is pretty. The detail in the maps is of the highest standard and even the surrounding areas of the maps that act as your playground are well executed. Graphically, MW2 is brilliant, but I was just yearning for someone to take off my sunglasses and inject some life and colour into the game.

Smooth But Broken

This is why we’re here, the gameplay. I’ll take my rose-tinted glasses off for two seconds and confess that Modern Warfare 2 is very smooth to play, and it does exactly what Infinity Ward intends it to do. There’s no bloom, so your guns do exactly what your thumbs are telling them, and the basic movement is great. The running, jumping, diving, crouching, your operator is fluid and it should be exactly what an arcade shooter should be. However, the entire abolishment of the advanced movement is counter-intuitive to how Call of Duty has evolved in the past ten years. Ever since 360s became a thing, going above and beyond in the movement department has been critical to how players have grown and learned their play style, to remove it was a complete step backwards.

And, it’s worth noting that the gameplay is only good if you can actually physically find a match without your game bugging out. The wealth of bugs and glitches in Modern Warfare 2’s launch have made it physically unbearable at times, especially if you like playing with friends. To launch a game that kicks you off when in a party is unacceptable and can only be put down to a lack of testing. 

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The map designs, bar their gloomy appearances, offer a nice mix of gameplay options. This does make it quite hard to find favourites and without a map voting system it can be difficult to enjoy them all, but there are definitely a few selections that different styles of Call of Duty players enjoy. Even Santa Sena works, weirdly, as it really shouldn’t. Personally, Al Bagra, El Asilo, and Crown Raceway are a cut from my cloth, but I can understand why Farm 18 is proving popular and that does lean into the beauty of CoD; there’s more than one way to play. 

The most head-scratching element of Modern Warfare 2 is the aforementioned gunsmith options, and alongside its abhorrent UI design, the new weapon system is abysmal. The game forces players to use a range of non-meta guns to unlock attachments for their favourite weapons, which might have been clever if it was catered to a fan base who had patience, but we don’t, and never have done. Knowing that your target audience has shifted to casual get-on-and-go players, a gunsmith option that drives players away from what they want to use seems backwards.

The Omissions

Reviewing Modern Warfare 2 feels somewhat unfair in its current state, but you can only take into account what is in front of you and there’s not much of it at all. Modern Warfare 2 is missing a lot and feels like a beta test.

There’s no ranked mode, no Hardcore (Tier 1), no raids, no DMZ, missing maps, and a removed weapon tuning system. It would be better serving to review Modern Warfare 2 at Christmas, but if we didn’t give Cyberpunk 2077, Halo Infinite, or Battlefield 2042 that luxury, the MW2 doesn’t get it either. 

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Warranted, the Call of Duty developers enjoy holding back some content for its post-launch updates, which is fair, but core game modes like Ranked and Hardcore cannot be passed up on if you want to make MW2 a hit at launch. They’re staples of the game and should be complemented by new things, not served up as glorified updates when in reality they’re just late.

Unfortunately, Modern Warfare 2 is nothing that we’ve not seen before and even cuts away from what a usual CoD entails. It has all the promise to be a great game, maybe even one of the best ever, but its launch was not complete, like a spaceship lifting off with no wings.

A Missed Opportunity

It is a shame that Modern Warfare 2 isn’t finished, as it is the same problem that Vanguard suffered from and ultimately died from. Even though the gameplay is solid enough, there are very few flashes of brilliance from MW2, and it leaves you yearning for completion. 

With remastered maps from 2009 promised, the road forward for Modern Warfare 2 remains promising - even the potholes should be filled in within a month - but Infinity Ward took a huge swing to focus on new UIs and weapon systems rather than fundamentals, and it missed. By quite a margin. 

5/10

Reviewed on Xbox.