The first Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare was a huge blockbuster hit with a ton of sales and wide positive critic approval. The game packaged a great single player experience with awesome multiplayer gameplay. Modern Warfare 2 sets out to not only do that but top it off with a co-op mode, great visuals and music, high quality multiplayer and a diamond-crafter level of polish. Did it succeed? Read on.

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Let’s take a trip down memory lane for starters. The Call of Duty series started up in 2003 developed by Infinity Ward, followed by Call of Duty 2 in 2005, again by IW, and they both followed World-War 2 pitting you on different campaigns around Europe. Call of Duty 3 was the first incursion of Treyarch into the franchise and was the only one so far that was not brought on PC’s. The first Modern Warfare came out november 2007 and contrary to Activision’s wants, thinking it would fail and seeing the series at an endpoint, they decided to let Infinity Ward make the sequel anyway. As seen, it was hugely successful and Activision hurried to get them to work on Modern Warfare 2. In the meantime, Treyarch was already working on Call of Duty 5, set back in World War 2 again but on another battlefield. It was met with mixed reviews, mostly seen for leeching of the, then invigorated, Call of Duty franchise.

Coming down to earth in the current timeline, we have Call of Duty (6): Modern Warfare 2 which as said, antes up and strives to deliver more and better then its predecessors. Besides the usual struggles of development, the game received and continues to receive highly negative feedback on both the content and functionality of the game, from both a moral and a gameplay-related perspective. One of the main sticking points was the single-player. For reference, in this review i will use “Call of Duty 4″/”CoD4″ when i want to mention Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, and “Modern Warfare 2″/”MW2″ when i want to mention Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare 2.

I got a F.E.A.R. vibe just now.

The single player campaign follows the same structure as the rest of the series, and puts the player in control of multiple characters showing a different side of the conflict. You get to play as a private that got pulled out of service and into a secret military force called Task Force 141 only to be killed 15 minutes in the game, as another private in the Rangers that will eventually be charged with saving DC and as different members in Task Force 141 itself  that work in the shadows saving the day. I won’t divulge much of the conglomerated, mixed and short story of the game, but i’ll stop on some issues.

The core of them is that the story is a lot grander and more specific then the one in CoD4, you are no longer fighting in a random unnamed arabian country. You’re fighting in real Afghanistan and the fighting eventually will get back to US soil in real Washington DC following a  russian invasion. These points alone make it so the game hits close to home for some people. I understand the fact of making a game focused on current real events and i don’t have a problem with the approach or the subjects, what i do have a problem with is the way the story is told and some ridiculous claims that it makes. I won’t delve much into them, but they were persistent enough to make the single-player experience incredibly confusing and a bit too ‘out there’.

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