Modern Warfare 2 (Xbox 360)
Modern Warfare 2
11/13/2009 12:39 PM | 25 Comments | Page 1 of 2
User Ratings (5 total)
20% Buy | 40% Try | 40% Fry
My Rating
What's Hot: Superlative multiplayer and standalone co-operative challenges
What's Not: Disappointing single-player storyline
OK, let's get this out of the way. In one of the early missions in
Modern Warfare 2, you play an undercover soldier who has infiltrated a Russian terrorist group. You participate in an attack on an airport. You play through the mission, moving slowly through carefully scripted and graphically presented carnage. You're invited to participate in the massacre. You don't have to actively shoot any unarmed victims, but you do have to watch. And you do have to participate in the ensuing shootout with police. There's some guff in the exposition about why you don't stop it. But the real reason you don't stop it is because the developers at Infinity Ward want the publicity.
The mission is an unmitigated success!
Modern Warfare 2 is probably going to be the biggest game of 2009.
The mission is also reprehensible trash, all the more reprehensible for how poorly it serves the narrative, not to mention how implausible it is. Anyone who claims this interactive airport massacre somehow has value for the way it "raises important issues" or "elicits strong emotions" or "makes you think" is as tone-deaf as Infinity Ward and Activision. As the companies demonstrated in their last collaboration, there are ways to do these things without resorting to this sort of cheap shock and "uhh..."
For the purposes of this review, we'll pretend this scene didn't happen.
In response to pre-release reactions to this scene, Infinity Ward patched into the game a disclaimer that pops up as soon you start
Modern Warfare 2. It asks if you'd like to skip a potentially disturbing level. I sincerely hope you won't skip it, because I want you to know what you're supporting when you buy this game.
However, in the interest of fairness, I'm going to review this game as if I'd elected to skip the scene. I'm going to pretend this is a better world in which a wildly successful videogame company doesn't feel the need to compromise its integrity by shoving my nose in the lurid sensationalism of civilian massacre porn that doesn't advance their game one whit.
WWPSD: What would Patrick Swayze do?
The most disappointing thing about
Modern Warfare 2 is how poorly the single-player campaign lives up to the previous game.
Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare was a trenchant, canny, shrewdly told story about the nature of warfare in the modern world. Now
Modern Warfare 2 is a confused mishmash of levels minus any real connective tissue, much less any sort of overarching narrative. It's a desultory trip through several locations where you do the usual shooter things like taking out SAM sites, sniping guards, riding vehicles, manning turrets, and getting to the chopper.
Windshield wipers not included.
The twist is supposedly that you're fighting them over here even though you also fought them over there. Unless you count the awful snowmobile chase and the absurd bullet-time door breaches, the suburban USA settings are about the only new things you get in
Modern Warfare 2. But I'm not sure you can say they're new when games like
Blacksite: Area 51 and
Battlefield 2: Modern Combat have already done the same thing, on the same stage, with pretty much the same players. And it seems like every third real-time strategy game has me defending Washington D.C. Been there, done that, got the T-shirt, wore it out, and I've long since used it as a rag when I clean out the garage. All this "Red Dawn" hooey is fine for silly fantasy fare, but in a supposedly relevant and ever-so-slightly realistic series like Call of Duty, it's laughably out of place. At this rate,
Modern Warfare 3 will take place on the moon. And given one of
Modern Warfare 2's most ridiculous scenes, they already have some of the assets ready to go!
When it's all over, it makes no sense. This thing is about as comprehensible as a Metal Gear Solid game, but without the benefit of being Japanese, meta, or slow. It's not clear who's doing what to whom, why you're going anywhere, what you're doing there, how this mission relates to that mission, who that guy is, or why Price is reciting some sort of bad LiveJournal poetry during the last few missions. At least I think it was Price. Wait, isn't he the bad guy? Or did someone else launch the nuke? It's a pretty poorly told story that can't distinguish characters named Price, Soap, Roach, Ramirez, MacTavish and Allen. In fact, I think some of those names might be the same guy. It's telling that
Modern Warfare 2 dispenses with the waypoint marker that always told you where to go. In many of the levels, you're left to sort of wander until you find the exit. This accurately captures the experience of trying to follow the story.
