Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 is essentially a technological masterpiece; and by 'masterpiece' I mean 'thundering shitstorm'. In the same way a train-wreck or 'Transformers 2' is disgustingly compelling, but extraordinarily bad for you, so too is MW2. It's impossible not to be so hard on such a popular game. There is so much responsibility in developing a title that so many people will be consuming, and sadly Infinity Ward has entirely dropped the ball in that regard. I hope that this review can show how they've let a very important series fall from a credible standpoint while IW dabs its tears away with dollar bills.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 Review : from a famousblueraincoat
Played 15+ hours on PC
"My Interest is Oscar Mike"

In other titles in the Call of Duty line, there was much more of a focus on themes of honour and brotherhood. The early games taking place in the Second World War touched on individual heroism, but always maintained that the individual battles you were taking part in were part of a war much bigger in physical and moral scale. The modern series seems to focus on a general kind of 'Rambo-ism', which is fine, but overall lacks a kind of tasteful and intellectually-based approach which undercuts entirely my areas of interest in this series.

Against the overarching narrative of the World War Two, the storyline would literally write itself. The narrative in those games only had to be supported by context-based banter between your squad and the interesting individual characters. Without that historical backdrop, the "narrative" can only be described as if Tom Clancy made a snuff film.

My own moral qualms about violence aside, there is an inconsistency that must be held to account. On the one hand you feel as though you are an unstoppable one-man military force, and on the other we're presented with a plot-twist that is only supposed to make you 'feel' horrified and appalled. In the airport sequence where you play as an undercover agent taking part in a terrorist massacre, the intent was to draw parallels between the Mumbai massacre, or Columbine. This hit a seriously compelling point, but what I found most interesting was that there was very little difference, in terms of interaction, between that sequence and the entirety of the game; only press the shoot button.

This only leads me to believe this game doesn't know what it's doing. To develop a game so morally ambiguous as to mix quotes from both Gandhi and Dick Cheney in the same context is not only ridiculous, it's irresponsible. Regardless of your politics, or what you think of whom, there is no question that these values conflict.

Perhaps the most serious way this moral ambiguity affects the consumers of this game is with the decision by Infinity Ward to replace the system of dedicated servers (community-run server space for the public to play on) with a matchmaking system in which individuals will be partnered up and allocated to corporate-owned server space. This, they would argue, is a way to have a gaming experience controlled consistently. Granted, the infrastructure is there to have an entire party over friends join a particular game, but the loss of community-controlled content will obviously be lacking. I would argue the loss of dedicated servers doesn't make my experience consistent, it just makes it anti-social and homogeneous.

Community servers are institutions to PC Gamers. They are common grounds and that bottleneck traffic. Like a pub, or local market they are legitimate infrastructure that have allowed people to simply get together for a common purpose of spending time doing things that they're interested in doing. Of course, I'm showing my bias, but how can one argue that a community-based experience would be worse than an individual one? Bottom-line is that it's more fun to know the people you're playing with.

My actual experience with the game was admittedly a lot of fun. It was intense the entire way through, and for the most part I had been impressed with the level-design and interesting way of incorporating characters from the title previous. In the end however, I just felt embarrassed and guilty for having such a strong reaction to the legitimately intense and thrilling portions of this game given the lack of insight in to a particular point that it was trying to make. It's obvious that in more than a few ways Infinity Ward has sold itself shot to be more accessible to people that would have otherwise not purchased this newest addition to the franchise. Much like every martyred hero it has in its storyline, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 is squeezing every penny from us while it can.