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Modern Warfare 2 was kind of a disappointment.

Well, let me be more specific. The single player in Modern Warfare 2 was kind of a disappointment.

As an overall package, MW2 is completely worth it. If you’re going to put any time into multiplayer, go buy it now. It’s so much more chaotic, and you have so many more options, plus new cool things you can use like the Riot Shield. It’s great.

But the single player…? I dunno.

The first Modern Warfare has pretty amazing. Not only did the game feature some of the best shooting mechanics ever, as well as that excellent quasi-RPG multiplayer, but the single player game was fantastic. Here was a game, that from the surface seemed like it would just be a kind of “fuck yeah” shooter, but did genius things with perspective during the plot to tell a fun story in a way that really made you think about things. The points most people would refer to is the sequence in the AC-10 gunship, and the HUGE PLOT TWIST when the bomb goes off. These sequences really do affect you. They were novel, new, and made a strong point to them. They were, dare I say it, innovative in some ways.

So I was expecting the same level of innovation from the Modern Warfare 2 single player. But they took the general “bigger, more badass” approach to the game. They looked at what was effective in the first one, and just did that like… every 2 levels. Which makes it devoid of almost any point, when it’s brought up again and again. Not to mention that it was no longer novel, since the first game did it. There wasn’t really any innovation there at all.
Still, I could have forgiven it had the plot not been extremely nonsensical. You feel like you know what you’re doing and why you’re doing it in the first game, and you feel like what’s going on is not completely outside of the realm of possibility. MW2 is a game of supervillians, huge conspiracies, and so many things that they require you to buy as conceits that it just makes absolutely no sense. What’s worse, characters that died in the first game come back for no real reason, and it sets this precedent that none of the characters are actually vunerable, which removes all of the potential drama when you see one of them go down. You know, now, that Infinity Ward will have no problem with bringing them back in the next game anyway, so what’s the point?

I realize I haven’t mentioned “No Russian,” which was their “controversy” level. It hasn’t stuck with me at all. Maybe it’s because I’ve heard it analyzed to death on podcasts. Maybe it’s because, once I thought about the plot, your particular character being there and acting that way makes very little sense. Maybe it’s because there’s no repercussions for NOT being involved in it, so you can just follow along and keep your hands clean, making it devoid of the point they were trying to make. In any case, I really don’t think that level is effective in the way they wanted it to be.

That said, there are some really cool sequences in the single player. The level where you’re having to bunker down and defend a TGI Friday’s and a Burger King is almost surreal in its location, and pulls off that sort of “thinking about things” more that anything that was probably supposed to, for example. There are also some fucking awful sequences, like a point where you have to advance on the Whiskey Hotel, and there are so many people firing at you that it almost seemed like stupid luck that I made it through on the 40th try, since there was very little I could do to cut down on how much I was being shot.

As an overall package, the game is still amazing and a great value. I guess I’m just a bit let down by the single player. I had such high hopes. This was the first sort of “standard” shooter series that really, really got me involved, and it was because of that single player. After the passable but lackluster effort of Treyarch in World at War, I was ready for something amazing. I got that in the multiplayer and Spec Ops, but not so much in the single player, and that’s sad.