cod: mw 2

So last week I started playing Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2.

And last week I finished playing Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2.

It's not the longest of games.

It is one of the best looking FPSs I've ever played. It's also got one of the best soundtracks. And it's really fun when you're actually in there playing the missions. Plus it's got the usual brilliant pre-scripted moments that always made CoD something a bit special.

That's all good stuff. But there are a few bad bits too.

There's the length, as I mentioned - you'll be lucky to get 6 hours game play out of the single-player campaign. That's what I got and I'm rubbish.

Then there' the plot.

I remember when the first Modern Warfare came out I was somewhat sceptical. Part of my reservations were that the CoD franchise had always relied on depicting real-world events during World War 2. I mean, they were semi-fictionalised, but you could go and look up the campaigns and stuff on Wikipedia.

So when the first MW came along I was therefore really surprised that it had a decent plot. Now to be fair it wasn't the most original plot. There was lots of stuff you'd seen before, but what helped it through was the quality of the writing and the non-player characters.

It's less good in MW2. The plot is again very familiar, but it's also now got the problem that it feels like it's retreading what Modern Warfare did. Also, the characters are a little lacking.

Well, I say that - it's more like the game is so short we don't really get a chance to experience the characters as much. I didn't really feel anything towards them like I did before.

Another problem is that we seem to switch all over the place too much. I kept feeling throughout MW2 like I was playing a Bond film. You jet off to all sorts of exotic locations (given the timelines I don't quite know how you get to some of the places you do, but there you go), shoot the natives for a bit and then off you go again.

It's too choppy, too quick. Every level feels like a taster, not the full thing.

It also doesn't help that this time out the plot doesn't quite make sense. I'm going to give a good spoilery now that's also therefore a giant spoiler, so you may want to skip ahead.

Basically, there's a bit where one of the good characters fires off a nuclear missile.

His plan, it seems, is to detonate it in the upper atmosphere, causing an EMP that will knock out all electronic equipment.

Well, I think that's his plan. It's not entirely clear if he's not actually doing it to make it seem like the Russians attacked America, because it's a Russian nuke he fires.

But setting that aside, the whole thing is full of holes, the biggest of which is when the actual nuke detonates. You get this cool bit where you're an astronaut floating in space and you see the nuke fly up and detonate. Fair enough, but for some reason they had the ISS and you being blown away by the force of the blast.

The ISS is high enough up that there's no air - so how is a blast wave hitting the ISS? I mean, it's not like it's next to it - it's way off in the distance.

Plus that brings to mind the other big problem - the hero just set off a nuke over continental USA. He kills everyone in the ISS and how many other civilians, who would presumably be hit by loads of radiation and fallout.

Not to mention the idea is the EMP knocks out all electronics, so what everyone in planes drops out of the car, instantly getting killed?

Some hero.

But what makes that worse is after that no-one goes "he's a bad guy" or "that wasn't cool". They're all perfectly fine with it :/.

There are some other problems too.

One is with the mechanics. CoD has always relied on infinitely spawning enemies. You can literally stand in the same place and kill thousands of enemies as waves of them spawn.

This is okay in some scenarios like where you have a large army coming at you like you used to in the old CoDs, but here you are in several situations where it makes no sense. I mean, just how many bad guys can you fit on an oil rig? Well, millions, apparently, until you walk past the trigger point and they stop spawning.

I mean, really this is an old-hat way of doing things that they should really think about redoing. How about instead properly placed enemies that are tougher to kill with really good AI?

Compounding that problem, there's a problem in the levels set in Brazil that there's only about half a dozen character models. That works when you're being attacked by an effectively faceless regular army - the whole point is that Russian soldiers basically all look the same right?

But when you're in Brazil it's an irregular militia - so civvies with guns. And that means you end up killing the exact same guys over and over and it just ends up looking stupid.

I mean how many moustachioed Freddy Mercury lookalikes are there in Brazil? Hundreds, apparently.