Wetwork, which has you lobbing knives at guards from beneath the water of Amsterdam's docks, is brief but brilliant, built on the darkly therapeutic thrills of dressing up all in black and slowly screwing silencers onto guns. Delivery is surprisingly good and dare I say it, there are a couple of genuinely funny lines ("Get us a tea" is inspired - shame it was followed up by "Fuckin' Brits" from a character who is… Scottish.)Īmongst the chatter there are some genuinely brilliant missions. Radio banter between old favs Soap, Price, and Ghost borders on the flirtatious. The wicked Valeria Garza (Maria Elisa Camargo) has some nice chemistry with fellow newcomer and world's gravellyist voice-owner Alejandro Vargas (Alain Mesa). Disparate protagonists from different Call of Dutys are brought together here, along with a couple of fun newcomers, into a kind of mercenary Avengers, and there's been some attempt to distinguish one Gruff Tactical Man from another.
#CALL OF DUTY MODERN WARFARE 2 REVIEWS FULL#
Still, the good stuff - and there is good stuff! Modern Warfare 2's cutscenes are extraordinarily good-looking - arguably the most technically impressive of any game I've played, and full of some genuine moments of character. But the narrative is gibberish, the tone's gone haywire, back to this series' cynical worst, and the failsafe bombast isn't there to rescue it.Ĭall of Duty wants to marry Sicario (I'm not sure it gets what Sicario is about) There are some very good individual missions, and the multiplayer, always a game in its own right, is having a good year - still very much a 'brain off' shooter but a compelling one all the same.
In 2022's Modern Warfare 2, though, things are neither abstracted far enough from their real world context, nor entertaining enough to help you forget it. Keep them abstract, and keep them relentlessly entertaining, and their breed of empty escapism is more than welcome. Above all, both had undeniable spectacle, which has always been this series' safety net to fall back on when its often haphazard storytelling has failed - there are plenty of stories, across more mediums than games, about nothing more than big explosions, cool guns, and good guys getting it done. There were glimpses of this in the first of these new Modern Warfare retcons in 2019, which seemed to be grasping for something adjacent to "war is bad", if not always reaching it successfully. Even if they led to an impossible tension with a game that still used contemporary wars as a playground, at least there was a tension to wrestle with, a bit of substance to bite into. That might be a little generous, but at least there was something there, some scraps of direction, theme or tone to cling to. Watch on YouTube Here's Digital Foundry's take on the Modern Warfare 2 beta, for a closer look at the game's tech. There was an argument, too - not that many tend to agree with it - that a close reading might find something almost, nearly, verging on an anti-imperialist message, what with its tale of ultra-nationalists inciting invasions and warmongering commanders-in-chief using their window to take the world for a ride. It was a bleak reflection of the west's shared headspace in the late noughties, playing up on jingoism and melodrama and a general post-9/11, mid-forever war, Pearl Harbour-esque fear of American vulnerability to surprise attack. The original Modern Warfare 2 was huge, a cultural event after the breakout debut of the first Modern Warfare subtitle but also a remarkable reflection of that culture itself at the time.
#CALL OF DUTY MODERN WARFARE 2 REVIEWS SERIES#
If you like brash, explosive, Brosnan-era Bond action with outrageous, blockbuster set-pieces and peak Michael Bay spectacle, then boy do I have the game for you: it's available now on next-generation hardware, it's called Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, and it came out in 2009.Ĭall of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (2022) review This year's Modern Warfare 2 has some good moments, some beautiful cinematics and some typically moreish multiplayer - but it's a cowardly retconning of the original's story.
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