A videogame has been released. Also, the Beatles have split up and Kennedy’s been shot. Hadn’t you heard?
I haven’t hurried, as such, to get my thoughts on this omnipresent game up on RPS, as it’s not like it’s going to affect anyone’s buying decision after all that hype and backlash, is it? But here they are now, after having had some time to digest and absorb now the shouting’s died down – for the singleplayer campaign, at least. Thoughts on the multiplayer will be along next week. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, then. Probably one or two things to say about it, I’d have thought…
Modern Warfare 2 is a first-person shooter. I know! It’s a game about shooting people! Sounds pretty fun, right? It shouldn’t be so hard to write about something so simple. It’s a game about shooting people – that dance we’ve all been happily doing for 20-odd years. Why should I sit here, stuck for an intro that’s both insightful and entertaining, because the weight of controversy and expectancy around this latest step in that eternal dance is so stifling? Between mercenary publishers, arrogant developers and outraged consumers, so many pounds of flesh have been brutally torn out of what was only supposed to be a fun time. ‘Modern Warfare’. Yeah, it really is. There’s no war more modern than the one that’s raged across the web over the last few weeks.
Modern Warfare 2 is a first-person shooter. It is a game in which you play a soldier, killing other soldiers. It has rather pretty graphics, and it has a frightening amount of money very obviously poured into it – the animations, the incidental details, the acting… These things are only surface, of course, but they make a very real difference. They make the game lavish – at times, excessively so. It very clearly wants to be a blockbuster experience, and it very clearly is.
It is not a game of corridors – it is a game of big crazy action. It pings between war movie and James Bond, as Call of Duty has always done, but bigger, bigger, always bigger. Now unbound by even a pretence of contemporary comment, it’s way off into Tom Clancy territory. EMP bombs, military coups, exploding space stations, rogue agents… events that are theoretically plausible, but so over-the-top that they are, essentially, science-fiction. There’s a reason you can’t find a review that doesn’t mention 24.
It’s hard not to be impressed by its sheer ballsiness and opulence – even during the sick feeling raised by That Level, the amount of detail, the sheer bombast and perfectionism of the presentation, is nothing short of incredible. The highlight, for me, of the entire game is the opening segment – the bloody tutorial. As you wander from basic weapons training to an obstacle course, you get a few seconds to gaze around a busy US military base in Afghanistan. Soldiers you’ll never see again are playing basketball, doing press-ups, fixing jeeps, smoking, talking, loafing, staring, mingling with native friendly soldiers.
It coolly conveys both the hyper-macho atmosphere and the sense of hostility and discomfort we suspect is present in its real-world equivlents. There’s just so much there, so much incidental visual detail packed in, and with clear pride. It’s not the only time the game goes to such visual lengths, but it is the best of them.It’s an amazing sight. And you’ll probably only run straight through it without taking any of it in, because you want to get to the next bit with shooting in as soon as possible. That’s Modern Warfare 2 all over, really. It knows why you’re really there, how much of it you’ll probably just ignore – but it does it anyway, because it can. I’m really glad of that, of this solid statement of look what games can do now.
Modern Warfare 2 is a first-person-shooter. You shoot other persons from a first-person perspective. So very many persons. So, so many persons. It’s not as though it creeps close to a Serious Sam-level bodycount, but somehow it seems even more unrelenting. Often, the killing comes so quickly and so clustered that no individual kill means anything. I don’t mean morally, or in terms of mourning for lives lost, but in terms of self-celebration and of acknowledging what you’ve just done. This is a game that entirely relies on your skill with a mouse (or gamepad, if you must), but it doesn’t give you the space to feel proud about that skill.
There are some quieter, stealthier levels, where whichever returning MW1 character you’re following around offers brief, stoic platitudes for a neatly-executed kill, for your quick, quiet pffft-ack-dead amidst the affectingly eerie silence of a Russian wood or a Siberian snowstorm, and you feel pretty proud of yourself then. Again, MW2 knows how to look and sound great, how to create a sense of world that’s much bigger than the linear spaces you play in, and it’s in these quieter moments that you can really appreciate this. These levels are also the highlights of its action, tense and strange, deftly making the first-person shooting feel robust and heroic.
But its other levels, those that are closest to classic Call of Duty, threaten to become gruelling in their intensity. They just don’t stop, don’t let you breathe, don’t let you admire yourself or the crazy detail of the game. There are always more guys to kill, and more guys killing you. That’s war, sure. But it’s not always as fun as it seems to think it is. It’s a short game, but at times it can feel endless. It’s whack-a-mole, as Call of Duty’s always been, but its pacing is a little off this time. The number and accuracy of your foes feels like something from a tactical shooter, one in which you’d use cover and creeping to win the day. But those tools aren’t in here – no leaning, no clinging to cover. Just doing the Doom thing. It’s the inevitable clarion call of many of a dyed-in-the-wool PC gamer in response to a multi-platform or ultra-glossy shooter – why can’t I leeeeeeean? – but the difference here is that the game really feels built as though those abilities are in there. It’s genuinely irritating that they’re not.
It’s hard to pin down why it feels lesser than, specifically, its predecessor, most especially because most of it the time it’s so much more. It’s Hollywood in a way that very little else has managed, without a doubt. This is not a series that has ever been interested in taking first-person shooters away from the first-person shooting, and hence it would be a lapse in judgement to criticise if for not doing so – but MW1 managed to feel novel and forward-thinking nevertheless. It moved confidently and naturally away from trenches and corridors, and it turned you into an active participant in its cutscenes. MW2 does that too, but it doesn’t take it any further. It feels much, much more familiar, despite its ice-climbing and snow-speeding and motorboating sequences.
It doesn’t need to, of course – it only need be judged within the context of linear action games, and it’s a perfectly good one of those. It is a reliably fun first person shooter with an unprecedented level of visual polish heaped on top it, so it’s entirely understandable that people have been looking forward to playing it. The only criticism of it sticking to such aggressively traditional mechanics is that there isn’t anything in here to really justify the Most Anticipated Game Of The Decade status it’s been accorded. Modern Warfare 2 is a first-person shooter. It shouldn’t have been treated as something somehow more than that.
But it has, and I fear that thinking, that lionising may have overcome its creators somewhat. Its plot very quickly abandons grit and military cool in favour of going way over the top while still taking itself seriously, and its lead characters – especially those returning from MW1, who it is horribly guilty of auto-mythologising – become cod-philosophers as well as soldiers, smearing awkwardly purple prose all over the place. It seems to think it’s more important and more grown-up than it is, becoming far too invested in characters who don’t naturally have depth, who were only supposed to be there to guide us to the next ten minutes of fun. It’s the Pirates of the Caribbean sequels, it’s the last few seasons of Heroes, it’s the end of Superman Returns…
No. That’s not why we’re here. We’re here for a first-person shooter. The next ten minutes of fun does always come, and it is usually fun – but sometimes the journey to it is irritating and overcooked. Halo 2 is an easy but logical comparison to make – another FPS that forgot what it was, and got lost to self-obsession. MW2’s campaign is massively more entertaining than Halo 2’s – it’s a masterful at keeping things varied, most especially in terms of environment – but the mistakes are the same. People aren’t paying £50 for a story that doesn’t end (and there are far smarter ways to make them buy the sequel). They’re paying for a first-person shooter.
That Level, ‘No Russian’, is guilty of the same thing – misplaced gravitas, forcibly inserting something that doesn’t belong in such an otherwise silly, implausible tale. It’s another instance of the game trying to find more ways to create sound and fury, but really messing up pace and context. No Russian doesn’t achieve anything, doesn’t add anything. It’s just an uncomfortable, gratuitous scene inserted at the wrong point – it’s crazy to place that kind of downer immediately after a thrilling snowspeeder escape – to achieve a key plot beat. The moral dilemma of being a US agent killing innocents in order to convince Russian terrorists he’s part of their team doesn’t exist. Shoot or don’t shoot any civilians, and the outcome is the same: you get killed, the US is accused of killing Russian civilians, and the world goes to war. It’s only there to be a plot twist, to lead to the increasingly absurd events of the rest of the game.
The case for its defence doesn’t exist, just as the case for its banning doesn’t. The game has nothing to say about it or its moral repercussions. It just picks an unpleasantly gratuitous excuse to depict the US and Russia going to war. It didn’t need to get anyone’s knickers in a twist to achieve that. It does so because it’s arrogant, because it knows it can get away with it. There’s no need to be as outraged as many have (the price-gouging, on the other hand, deserved far more of a protest than it got), but anyone claiming it’s meaningful and thoughtful, that it raises important questions about gaming and war, is talking about a game that doesn’t actually exist.
Which is, of course, Modern Warfare 2 all over. The incredible/outrageous/horrible game we’ve been talking about and worrying about and shouting about these last few months doesn’t, in fact, exist.
Modern Warfare 2 is a first-person shooter. Makes a fair few pacing mistakes, but it’s not a bad one, as they go. At the heart of it, underneath the razzle-dazzle and the argy-bargy, it just about retains an understanding of why Call of Duty was such a breath of fresh air half a decade ago – making you a willing soldier in a noisy, excited war movie, not a meathead plodding slowly through monster-filled corridors. I’m glad Infinity Ward haven’t entirely lost sight of that, because I miss the developer they were then.
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I borrowed the 360 version from a co-worker over the weekend and played through it in one sitting. It’s quite the achievement, I have to say. The developers manage to blind and dazzle you with so much visual opulence and so many over the top moments and the game is so short that you don’t even notice that it’s not particularly good.
There are many levels that are confusing, with enemies turning up in your back without warning, enemies that can see you through walls (a problem in a game where many walls can be shot through), not readily apparent mission goals and quite a few other entries from the How To Not Design Your Missions handbook. I appreciate the designers trying to recreate the horror and confusion of war, where people die without knowing what hit them. But if I have to restart a part of a level a dozen times, because I have no idea what I’m supposed to do and allways get killed by some enemy I had no chance of seeing I start to get just slightly frustrated.
Since Alec made the comparison to Halo 2 in his article: I played ODST last week and it’s a much better game than MW2. The level design, pacing and balancing are all way better and a lot more imaginative. And ODST is by no means an innovative title, but just an iteration on the classic Halo formula.
Mate, I may be a dirty console player who bought this cheaply for his 360, but I can still muscle up the brain cells to tell you that the idea that something is (I paraphrase) “tricking you into enjoying it” is horse kidneys. You either enjoyed it minute to minute or didn’t. If you’re left cold by the ending or a particular level, that’s worth mentioning, but if you’ve trundled through it never thinking “this isn’t very good” then you either lack critical faculties or were at least ’sorta’ entertained at the time.
Sorry for picking out what seems like a trival point, but you seem too intelligent to be so easily ‘tricked’ into liking something you now don’t.
Delete-o-tron is rapid and thorough.
lol the delete was deserved but the point was valid :D
odst is abysmal.
Slower paced yes but good god there’s only so many times you can headshot a baddie with your pistol.
@Metalfish: I guess I need to clarify this a bit. The single player mode was entertaining. There’s more to a game than just good design, the presentation is just as important and MW2 really hast it’s glorious moments in this regard – storming the White House for example (at least the first two tries – the other five tries it took me to find out what exactly the game wanted me to do were a chore).
But there’s no denying that the game’s level design is average at best. And frustrating at it’s worst. It is short though and the levels are short and the frustrating parts are thankfully short as well, and there’s always something new to do – even if this often just results in more frustration. So it still managed to suck me in for quite some time and over all I was entertained by it for the short while it lasted.
And if I was only a consumer, I’d leave it at that and would move on to other things. But I’m a developer and so I have the need to analyze what it was that I enjoyed and what I didn’t enjoy. And after replaying parts of the game and then thinking about it and talking to my coworkers and thinking about it some more I arrived at the conclusion, that it’s not a very good game from a designer’s point of view. It entertained me for a few hours, but not because it featured good level design or good game design or anything like that.
I hope this clarifies things a bit.
Still not finished with the campaign (defending Malakov’s mansion right now to get the Intel).
I haven’t played CoD 4 / CoD 5 yet so this might be old news to those that did but the most impressive thing I encountered in MW2 so far were the scenes where you “lost” control in situations.
Namely the massacre (you can’t shoot the bad guys from behind stopping their acts) + you can’t dodge / shoot back at the end, the entrapment under the rubble when you try to escape the prison while it’s bombed to pieces (you need someone unburry you) and finally the crash of the helicopter when you can’t move and run out of ammo (some soldier is freeing you after the EMP attack). Finally the blowing up of the ISS while you are an astronaut in it that get sucked into space helplessly.
Never had this kind of experience in any shooter before. Usually you grab a gun and be in control 99% of the time.
I hate that you can’t play tactical much. Usually you have to storm forward until you are close to death, hide to regen health and storm again.
This, and it feels like Wario Ware or something. An endless concatenation of minigames.
A shame, ‘cos if you play COD4 first, you would find its not-in-control situation more powerful and brilliant, but now it’s spoiled for you.
i stopped reading when mentioning 24 as sci-fi. and now i’m closing down the tab.
You’re missing out. He makes good points.
Don’t let the door smack you on the arse on the way out.
What the heck? 24 is an SF show. To start with it takes place in an alterante history where George W. Bush never become President of the United States and presidential elections are all two years off from the real ones, and by Season 6 the show had moved into the future and that season was set in 2012.
Hooah, I’m Oscar-Mike.
Best review so far of MW2, captures my sentiments precisely.
Besides the ridiculous plot and the jerky pacing, I’ve lost count of the time I got massacred by getting stuck on terrain details. That really shouldn’t happen in a game of this apparent quality.
Modern Warfare is the 2009 version of “Operation Wolf”.
Its somewhat visually like a FPS, but this is fact-hidding. The lack of a automatic horizontal scrolling is another fact-hidding.
Much like Operation Wolf, you don’t really have a health bar. And you don’t really have control over the experience, It just scroll forward. The cool things you don in game are all events you watch, not events you do.
If you think about it, is soo antique, … 1984 gameplay with 2009 graphics. Is this a bad thing? I don’t think soo. People could still play Tetris and have fun. The old Operation Wolf formula is not bad at all. Is probably the perfect formula for these people that don’t want /can’t think where to go, and what to do, so the game decide for him. And I can’t blame then. I could often get lost in a game withouth hand-holding. But It don’t kill the game, It kill the pace, but It make for a overall better experience. Also, watching TV is not what I want to do in a videogame.
“you don’t really have a health bar. ”
reads: have a heath bar, but lets say is not the point of the game.
I said I wasn’t going to buy it but I caved in.
The singleplayer is the much the same as previous call of duty’s and wont be revisited once completed.
The multiplayer is a pain in the ass, not as good as COD 4 or CODWAW. The matchmaking stinks and it’s completely baffleing why IW didn’t go out of their way to make the PC multiplayer capable of what the PC platform can do rather than just emulate the crappy console version with miniaml players.
Where it shines for me is the Co-Op. Was playing it the other night with a mate in Ventrilo and was really enjoying it.
If there are no dedicated servers for the next version I will abandon the COD series for pastures greener, ie BFBC2.
I didn’t like MW2 at all.
The game felt like an over-the-top arcade railshooter and not like a proper FPS game.
You could actually just sit there forever and shoot neverending waves of enemies which game was spawning all over the place if you didn’t advance forward. Or on the contrary, you could simply dash to the next map checkpoint and all the pursuit behind you would stop. :/
The only bits of the game that i’ve enjoyed were the tactical parts of the sniper missions, but unfortunately those didn’t last long…
The endlessly respawning baddies were a pain in COD4, but i heard that there were only limited numbers in MW2. On playing though, not once did i notice any ‘endlessly spawning’ bits, and any places where i was overwhelmed and forced to run it was for the story.
Good, thoughtful review. It certainly made me think more about the game than I have so far.
I started playing it at about 6pm on Sunday on Veteran level and finished it 8 hours later with only a few breaks for dinner etc. I really enjoyed it, with one or two very frustrating bits that I had to redo a few times until I figured out the patterns.
All of Alec’s criticisms apply, no question. The plot was absolutely ridiculous and it did, indeed, feel like it was a series of great ideas for stuff to put in a video game with a plot woven around them. I also got a bit fed up of the cod philosophy and constant, unsubtle flogging of the idea that revenge=bad and all that.
That all told, several bits of the game really awed me (I’ve always wanted to pull a knife from my own chest and throw it into the eye of a US general), and I’ve been playing FPS since they were invented. It’s certainly not the best shooter ever made, and it probably helps that I got given it as a birthday present rather than having to cough up a large pile of cash for it, but it was fun in the way that 300, Independence Day, and Star Trek were all fun: spectacular and enjoyable as long as you don’t expect too much depth, true-life fidelity or thoughtful story-telling.
If that’s what Infinity Ward were going for (not counting the massive piles of profit), they succeeded. If they were trying to create a commentary on the futility of modern warfare too (hahaha!) they only got about 40% of the way there.
Nice to see someone else beside me who also really miss the lean-feature.
I also had a bad experience with the friendly AI, i couldnt even trust 4 of them to keep one charging enemy from knifing me in the back. Almost as if they missed every shot on purpose.
My main question would be: is it worth €60?
I feel through the floor on one of the later snow missions, was running up a slope (not one out of the way, it was a way you were meant to go) and I fell beneath the level and died. I mean it was hilarious at the time, but as you say for a game with this level of polish thrown at it that sort of thing shouldn’t happen ,
I’m highly unlikely to ever play this game (never played COD4, have no intention of) but I’m glad it exists. It’s good to have games like this around as they’re the gaming equivalent of a bouncy ball or shiny keys. They provide a nice way of keeping all those who are “less cerebrally equipped” in a conveniently ignorable place rather than having them randomly infesting our TF2, L4D2 etc servers.
Lets be brutally honest, this game is Counter-Strike 2009 with a genuflection in the direction of single-player content to help justify the hype and/or price tag. Everyone calling it the gaming equivalent of a Michael Bay film in these comments is probably correct. However movie publishers make those type of movies so they can then afford to make the more interesting & thought provoking movies that win awards & critical acclaim but generally don’t make a load of money. This doesn’t happen in the gaming industry where publishers like Activision are only interested in making more money rather than releasing good games as every indie dev studio (and most non-indies) can attest.
Careful, I think you might drown in your own superiority complex. Many of us who are busily plugging hours and hours into multiplayer MW2 on our 360s (and have hugely enjoyed the Halos and Gears Of War games) are the same people also heading towards 100 hours of Dragon Age (on Normal) on the PC. The sub-humans here are people such as yourself, who think one game is played by the intellectual elite and one game is played by people who can barely speak.
Well summarised. Although I believe the game might even fall into the realms of ‘bumbling mess’, at least with regards to my own experiences with it. For my sins, I took the afternoon off work to bang through the SP campaign so I could dedicate the evening to the multiplayer side of things. I’m still not quite sure which, out of the game or my job, is the biggest grind. One thing is for sure though, I rarely slam my head against the keyboard in frustration at the office, and not only because of the looks it would get me.
The campaign is bloated, over-egged, fantastical, self-referencing nonsense. If I were American or from ‘the street’ I would say that it ‘blows’ or that it is ‘whack’. It is ‘whack’, a whack in the nuts, a whack in the head. I think what really got under my skin was how far removed it is from the remarkable evolution that first-person shooting has enjoyed over the years. For such an over-emotional, over-ambitious, melodramatic mess, does it carry an inch of the weight of the Half-Life series? The hell it does. It’s the equivalent of a sugar-coated turd, it might look delicious (I said it might), but beneath the gloss of thousands of dollars and man hours is a big, steaming shit.
On the flipside, I love the multiplayer side of things, so I’ll look forward to the next critique.
It’s amazing how many comments anything about MW2 generates.
Enjoyed the WiT, pretty much perfect, especially this:
“That Level, ‘No Russian’, is guilty of the same thing – misplaced gravitas, forcibly inserting something that doesn’t belong in such an otherwise silly, implausible tale.”
It’s just inconsistent. An awful lot of the game is. The general tone lunges wildly before finally grabbing hold of Jack Bauerland and not letting go.
I don’t resent that, though. It’s the CoD style, and it’s what enables the CoD games to follow grand set-piece with grander set-piece. That’s all it’s about, really – a succession of new experiences, then an ending.
Everyone who knew the first thing about the CoD series and top tier shooters in general knew what to expect: A game where the single player is a gripping, well executed experience, you’d play through that once, maybe twice (taking the spare time of 3-4 days for that). Then you play a bit of the multiplayer. How much of the multiplayer you would play is generally dependent on the question when the next top tier shooter with a gripping single player experience is released or rather when you buy the next one.
Straight shooters have always been the game equivalent to blockbuster cinema or fast food. The underlieing mechanics are just too simple for anything else. The few exceptions just underline that rule.
Oh my, that is a fantastic review, absolutely nailed it. Very nicely separated out how making the game more intense and Hollywood didn’t make it any more fun and sometimes actually less so. For all the game does MORE and BIGGER, it still has those bloody psychic, hyper accurate, infinitely respawning enemies that have plagued the series from the very first game on.
increasingly i’d been feeling like i was the only one who felt the way i did about MW2, this review and the subsequent comments changed that, thanks :D
I can’t agree, as people who play TF2 and L4D seem to be on the same intelligence level of most random MW fans. I have since quit playing both games and moved on to rpg’s and other action games, like Dragon Age and Assassins Creed II.
If you have any of the female characters in your party (sans Shale, but Shale strikes me as more gender-confused), or if you aren’t running the no-blood mod, then I find it very hard to take you seriously. Dragon Age has many elements which are directly targeted at the mainstream durrrhmographic and I couldn’t even play the game until I’d done some modding, one of those mods I even created myself.
About the only party I find tolerable in Dragon Age is Alistair, Shale, and the Mabari Hound, the rest make me cringe, shudder, and sometimes even wretch with how pathetic they are. I’m kind of looking forward to one of the Morrigan mods being worked on (to restore her to how she looked in some of the concept art), because right now she looks like she’s straight out of a brothel. And talking to her in the camp, her character doesn’t seem to fit that appearance at all.
So yeah, if you’re just playing the Hurr Hurr version of Dragon Age, you’re not exactly better than those would seek to condemn.
I wrote this over on another forum, but just thought I’d add my two cents about the Airport scene:
Having now played it myself, the concept of the level is, I think, a very good one. However, in execution it’s a failutre. it isn’t very dynamic. It’s shoot civilians or don’t shoot civilians – the result is the same.
But imagine a game where you blow your cover and turn on the terrorists or are forced to shoot a civilian in front of the other men to prove you support their cause. Perhaps you could go for an incapacitating shot, downing, but unbeknownst to the other terrorists, not killing the civilian. Or perhaps as you walk through the crowds, you’re forced to shoot just over or at the feet of the civilians – doing everything you can to keep up the charade but in no way harming the innocents. Or perhaps you just go along with it, your overarching goal to stay in favour and save millions through the sacrifice of a few. There’s interesting things that could be done with this scenario. It doesn’t even matter if the end result is always be the same – and people who have played it will know what I mean – but at least make it dynamic, give the player choices – choices that they make on the fly, weighing their morals with the greater good, etc. That’s good design.
I think what people are objecting to is that is context and the lack of it. The narrative appears to be very poor, there’s little to draw you into the scene, make you play as the character you embody, mainly because the protagonist isn’t given a role. You have nothing to empathise to.
People who say they can just breeze through the level, gunning down civilians, with absolutely no qualms about doing so are not necessarily opposed to the people saying that the scene is wholly unnecessary and adds nothing to the game. Because there is no strong context, nothing to make you really feel for the truly dreadful situation the protagonist is in – to take part in a massacre when every fibre in your being is opposed to it – both views are completely valid. It’s all about context, about narrative, and this is why the scene doesn’t work.
“the outcome is the same: you get killed” SPOILAHHHHHH!!!
Actually, that point is slightly interesting in that I didn’t expect that my Player Character would get killed “for sure” in the campaign at any point. I guess it’s a “multi-POV campaign”…?
Did you play modern warfare 1? Because the one of two parts that were actually interesting in that game and retread it pretty blatantly.
This is honestly one of the best video game reviews I have ever read. And, it also happens to be right.
I really wish there had been more fuss about the price.
Is everyone who plays games rich or what? Am I the only person out there who regularly waits a few months for special deals before buying a game.
The beer! Think of the beer! All that beer YOU COULD HAVE BEEN DRINKING FOR THOSE FIFTY BRITISH PESOS
Nobody actually had to pay £50 though. The supermarkets were selling the console version for peanuts and no decent retailer (online or brick & mortar) had the PC version above £35 wherever I looked.
I have to vouch for TeeJay I am older and fatter and my voice is actually louder ;)
This game keeps on giving!
Now is known that the game has already the supposed “downloaded content” already on its files, will it be now the called the “locked content” from now on? Or they will keep the farce of calling it DLC.
Amazing all the things they did wrong on this game.
Sick feeling raised by that lvl rly? I found that lvl highly enjoyable when else bar postal have you got to shoot in to a tightly packed crowd of civs?
Sick feeling raised by that lvl rly? I found that lvl highly enjoyable when else bar postal have you got to shoot in to a tightly packed crowd of civs?
Syndicate.
X-Com.
Oh, sure. Technically you weren’t supposed to…
Hitman: Blood Money.
I think the complaint about the craziness of certain segments (enemy accuracy, number, etc.) are misplaced. I certainly found this true of the initial portions of the favela, and and inital push into the Afghani city, and while it was dual parts frustrating and almost outright unfair, it was also (I think) an authentic experience of the tension, its subsequent release, and how that release is in no way satisfying and just more panic inducing. I should have had a heart attack during the humvee drive in the Afghan city, its all dusty and you can’t see shit, and then bullets are flying, you don’t know where they’re coming from, hell you don’t even know where you’re going, your RoE of ‘don’t shoot the civvies’ goes out the fucking window because you’re going to spin up your minigun and shoot everything around you. I don’t care if it doesn’t move, it might be pretending to be a vase. Shoot it just to be safe.
In many ways kills then are unsatisfying, but touching that experience of panic was one of many highlights in the game that I think are being glossed over in the review.
It’s the Rumsfeld quotes that really annoy me. In so many ways. I guess it’s just Infinity Ward being sardonic.
I believe the PC Gamer UK review of CoD2 had a rather apt way of describing it: “I bet the source code to this game is all in CAPITAL LETTERS!!!!”.
I don’t really have any interest towards this game, but I’m just dropping by to say that whenever I see that wintery screenshot in the middle of this review, I get a weird prod inside me that laments the lack of beautiful winter settings in games.
That’s cause snow is really freaking hard to do well. In 20 years the best we’ve been able to do is paint textures white and add dots to the wind.
I live in Canada. I know what snow looks like. And no video game has ever done it well. You know how for a long time people complained about water and water effects? These days we’ve got decent looking static water, but add some waves, or objects entering/exiting, or, god forbid, make it flow – it looks so unnatural. And snow? Snow is a thousand times harder.
I expect that whenever I’m allowed a crack at it I will thoroughly enjoy the singleplayer campaign of Modern Warfare 2. I did the singleplayer of the last one, and World at War, for that matter, though to a lesser extent. But they are essentially forcibly bundling two entirely separate games (the singleplayer game, and the multiplayer game) and then charging an extortionate rate based largely on the success and acclaim of the multiplayer end. And I can’t go along with that. I am simply not going to spend $60 (or even $50), on a brief though excellent thrill ride with basically zero replay value. And I have no intention of ever playing the multiplayer. So I wish they would figure out that these are not the same game and do separate releases. Charge whatever they feel like for the multi, and let me buy my singleplayer experience for, oh, $20 or so.
I mean, yeah, this has been true of a lot of other shooters as well, lately (singleplayer and multiplayer unrelated, short singleplayer, high price), but most games drop into the $20-30 range naturally (or have sales putting them there) within a year or so. Modern Warfare? Hah. Modern Warfare 2? No, I very much doubt that. So the problem is severely aggravated in their case.
And yes, I could rent it for my 360. Yay. But I don’t enjoy playing shooters on consoles, so that’s not a particularly helpful solution.
Fantastic review: you put into words some things I couldn’t. Beyond that, I’ve lost count of the times I’ve said “incoherent nonsense” when referring to the single-player campaign….
Now I don’t have to explain my opinions on the campaign, I can just link here.
Thank you, here.
I also am in agreement with the review more or less and it’s well-written. Shame this is the most hyped game of the last whatever years, not because it’s a fantasy-gratification product (I have no illusions about which aspects of the videogame experience will always capture the widest audience), but just because it’s not as good as it should have been. And this will lead to many designers and publishers to follow through with eye-candy and confused Bauerisms.
Wisq are you saying that real soliders don’t lean out of cover to fire, then jump out their entire body to be shot at instead? Modern weapon aren’t nearly as ultra-accurate as people in movies ect seem to think they are to the point where it makes no difference if you expose your entire body or just your head : P
We often hear the argument “Why didn’t you just shoot the gun out of his hand or just shoot him in the leg” when a cop kills someone in the line of duty. Most agree they aren’t in a movie and can’t shoot a gun out of someones hands on command so instead shoot for the largest body of the body the torso in hopes of getting a hit and yes, sadly that can often lead to death (not to mention cops seem to shoot a whole lot too just to make sure :P I don’t blame them mind they are just human and they don’t want to die because some criminal doesn’t have the common sense not to attack a police officer)
Shadowcat “It hammers at my retinas like an evil woodpecker of pure energy”
It’s not that they jump out to get shot. It’s that they move as a team and cover each other as they move. If a threat appears and you’re alert like you should be, then at least someone is going to have their gun raised and ready to fire, and you shouldn’t get pinned down in the first place.
If you do, then you need to work as a team to get un-pinned, such as suppression and movement, popping a smoke, pulling out, calling for backup, etc. What you don’t do is just pop your head around a corner and start shooting, because that’s exactly where they expect you to be, and you’ll get yourself shot.
You complain that Hollywood thinks guns are “ultra-accurate”. I’d argue the exact opposite. Yes, they do have those unbelievable (in the literal sense) scenes where someone shoots a gun out of someone else’s hand. But for every one of those, there’s a hundred scenes where people run around with minimal cover while under fire and never take a single bullet — or they spend hours hiding behind cover and popping up to shoot now and then.
Think about it: If you’ve got a half-dozen people aiming at you and you pop yourself out, you’re going to get over a dozen bullets coming at whatever part of you that you decide to expose. Leaning around a corner means exposing your head and upper torso, which is exactly what they want to hit anyway. It doesn’t take “ultra accuracy” for one of a dozen bullets from modern, fairly accurate weapons to find and kill you. This is why suppression fire works in the first place.
And yes, shooting guns out of people’s heads is insanely stupid. I’ve seen all the arguments and evidence, and agree 100%.
You know, the airport scene probably would’ve been way more interesting if you played as an unarmed civilian. You could be one of the beloved characters from MW1 caught with his pants down in a russian airport, but instead of going all John McClaine, you just try to survive and not trip over the other victims.
You could confront the CIA mole later in the mission to ask what the hell was going on, only to be executed w/ him later.