It’s now the day after the latest Call of Duty game was released. The game is called Modern Warfare 2 and I have a few thoughts I’d like to share.

First of all I should probably start with the good points. The game looks excellent and obviously has very high production values. The voice acting is excellent and the music, main theme by movie score giant Hans Zimmer, is perfect. Unfortunately it pretty much stops there.

The game is split in to three types of game play. Special Ops, Campaign and Multiplayer. Being that I play games along I played through the campaign mode. Sadly that took around five hours. Remember that Activision are charging £54.99 for this game. You can pay far less than that if you shop around with Sainsbury’s having the lowest price I could find at £26. Let me assure you if you pay full price you’re going to be far more disappointed than I was.

The campaign mode follows a very confusing story. Something about a Russian guy causing a war. This is bad point number one. I have played the game through, watched every cut scene and I’ve got absolutely no idea what the story is about. That doesn’t happen with better games like Fallout 3, GTA 4 or any of the Halo series.

Gameplay is very poor, so poor in fact that it might as well be an “on rails” kind of game. The emphasis is very much on run to one point, shoot a few guys, run to another point and shoot some more guys. There are no puzzles to solve, very little though required and if you get killed you simply pick up at the last check point and carry on. No matter what difficulty level you play at you can pretty much blast your way through to the end. Something that makes the annoying “test your skills” section at the beginning of the game quite pointless and ever so slightly more annoying.

The game’s graphic designers have clearly put a lot of work into this creating good looking lush environments that you’ll have absolutely no time to look around or explore. You’ll spend most of your time following computer controlled characters. At some point in the game you’ll bump into a laptop computer and be presented with the option to collect enemy intelligence. Then you’ll realise that you’ve missed a part of the gameplay. Then you’ll realise that you can’t actually do that point of the game even now you know it’s there because you’ve got to follow the computer controlled characters. Even when you try to wonder off course to have a look around you’re constantly bombarded with the character shouting at you for not following him. Very annoying.

MW2 has got one level in particular that has caused a bit of controversy, so much that Activision have given you the opportunity to miss the level out if you think you’ll be offended. In this level you play a terrorist walking through an airport shooting people as you go. It’s very slow, feels like it’s on rails, presents absolutely no challenge and so feels like it’s there just for the sake of it. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t really care what you have to do in the missions. After all it’s just a computer game and it’s not about to make me actually go on a killing spree at Leeds Bradford Airport. Once again we have un-needed attention on violent games for absolutely no reason. Levels like this should be banned, not for being violent, but for being really boring.

There is a vast array of weaponry that all does pretty much the same thing. There’s machine guns, sniper rifles, hand guns and one or two rocket launchers. That’s it. It doesn’t matter which machine gun you use, they all do the same thing. Eventually you’ll run out of ammo and while there is extra ammo spotted around there’s very little to identify it or even tell you that you’ve picked it up. Not a sound is made when you replenish your supply. Guns just keep reloading.

The Special Ops mode is even worse. It’s simply made up of sections from the campaign mode only you have to do them even quicker. You’re awarded gold stars by doing missions as quick as you can. Being that my main problem with the game is that levels are too fast and frantic, Special Ops isn’t exactly something I feel like wasting my time on.

I’m told that the main attraction of the Call of Duty games are the multiplayer mode, and it’s something that they’ve always done well. Unfortunately there’s no real difference between the multiplayer in this game and the multiplayer in Call of Duty 3. Just better graphics and different maps. You can even choose to give Activision even more of your money for more maps to run around being shot by 11 year old kids.

All in all I really feel like I pissed away £26. If you want a good FPS there are far better ones than this available.

There I was, in the middle of a dead city, crouched behind a rotting wooden door, with a few hundred wandering corpses in shouting distance. I was fresh out of ammo, just the handle of a frying pan clutched in my palm.

But the guy next to me was still packing his shotgun, and that skinny girl we picked up was hefting a pipe bomb while running her thumb down the edge of a machete. A little ways away, creeping along the shadow of a rusting car toward a pile of loose bullets near the riot barricade was the shifty-looking fella in the wrinkled suit.

He didn’t make it to the shells before ten sets of eyes were on him. The horde picked up his scent, started baying to alert their lifeless brothers: It was feeding time. Continue Reading…