Modern Warfare... Again... for the second time!
The Good:
The campaign for this game, as Jeff Gerstmann put it feels like an action movie where they jump from location to location just for the hell of moving the plot forward, wasting no time jumping into the exposition of getting from point A to B or the logistics of jumping from the Middle East in one mission to Mexico in the next, they just did it. Honestly I didn't care too much for the plot, it's just kinda there, but it's not actively bad, which matters a lot! The levels were fun for the most part, though there is quite a lot of "It's a Sneaking Mission" type beat to go around. Infinity Ward made it a point to make the missions feel varied, as you're jumping through all sorts of different biomes and locales with varying objectives and methods of completing them. If you view this more as a blockbuster Hollywood film story, it becomes a lot easier to take in. The AC130 mission runs a bit long, but it was cool!The first mission was really cool! The final mission was cool! Maybe that says a lot about me but I was looking for a whelming + experience, and I liked what I got.
More of the good is the mutiplayer loop, it's more of the same that 2019 brought to the table but with enough positive changes that I'm satiated and not upset like I am with an Overwatch 2. They went all out in creating new maps, new modes, and new guns that don't repeat from the last title. Easy to learn/master maps are a dime a dozen in gaming nowadays but MWII seems to have got it down, with a few runs through each level (and maybe even just one in the ground war levels,) and you'll grow accustomed to the corners, peak spots, and optimal places to engage in combat. The gun play, while the classic CoD arcadey "what is a recoil" mantra, is again fun and a nice break from the realism-heavy recoil games that I play otherwise (like PUBG.)
The Bad:
It sometimes... works? I can't knock the game for the recent Nvidia flickering/stuttering on the newest drivers, but I can blame the game for the crashing in the campaign and assets sometimes not loading in multiplayer. Smoke and dust seems to be on the player side and not on the server, which means if you think you're under the cover of an explosion... often times that is only the case for you. Another item I have to dock from the game is the unlocks feel like they take a REALLY long time. You can unlock some weapons (and all perks/killstreaks/throwables) by levelling up but unlocking certain guns means levelling up with their "base" versions, which seems to take an unreasonable amount of time. I am not putting a ton of hours into the game thus far, with my Steam playtime reading over twenty-one hours, but I feel like I'm not getting enough "new" for how much exp/levels I'm getting.
When it comes to recommending MWII, I'm very much in the "you should play it!" camp because I'm having a really good time logging on after a long day, doing my basic "haha shoot and kills go up," logging off and going to bed. That's really all I want from CoD, what I got from it in 2019, and what I'm getting in MWII's 2022 release. I've had a good time playing ground war with my buds, laughing as we try to hold buildings down, and comparing our KD ratios like in the old days. Over all, it's not perfect, nor is it as good YET as MW 2019 is, but I'm going to continue to play it because it's just what I wanted.
The Good:
The campaign for this game, as Jeff Gerstmann put it feels like an action movie where they jump from location to location just for the hell of moving the plot forward, wasting no time jumping into the exposition of getting from point A to B or the logistics of jumping from the Middle East in one mission to Mexico in the next, they just did it. Honestly I didn't care too much for the plot, it's just kinda there, but it's not actively bad, which matters a lot! The levels were fun for the most part, though there is quite a lot of "It's a Sneaking Mission" type beat to go around. Infinity Ward made it a point to make the missions feel varied, as you're jumping through all sorts of different biomes and locales with varying objectives and methods of completing them. If you view this more as a blockbuster Hollywood film story, it becomes a lot easier to take in. The AC130 mission runs a bit long, but it was cool!The first mission was really cool! The final mission was cool! Maybe that says a lot about me but I was looking for a whelming + experience, and I liked what I got.
More of the good is the mutiplayer loop, it's more of the same that 2019 brought to the table but with enough positive changes that I'm satiated and not upset like I am with an Overwatch 2. They went all out in creating new maps, new modes, and new guns that don't repeat from the last title. Easy to learn/master maps are a dime a dozen in gaming nowadays but MWII seems to have got it down, with a few runs through each level (and maybe even just one in the ground war levels,) and you'll grow accustomed to the corners, peak spots, and optimal places to engage in combat. The gun play, while the classic CoD arcadey "what is a recoil" mantra, is again fun and a nice break from the realism-heavy recoil games that I play otherwise (like PUBG.)
The Bad:
It sometimes... works? I can't knock the game for the recent Nvidia flickering/stuttering on the newest drivers, but I can blame the game for the crashing in the campaign and assets sometimes not loading in multiplayer. Smoke and dust seems to be on the player side and not on the server, which means if you think you're under the cover of an explosion... often times that is only the case for you. Another item I have to dock from the game is the unlocks feel like they take a REALLY long time. You can unlock some weapons (and all perks/killstreaks/throwables) by levelling up but unlocking certain guns means levelling up with their "base" versions, which seems to take an unreasonable amount of time. I am not putting a ton of hours into the game thus far, with my Steam playtime reading over twenty-one hours, but I feel like I'm not getting enough "new" for how much exp/levels I'm getting.
When it comes to recommending MWII, I'm very much in the "you should play it!" camp because I'm having a really good time logging on after a long day, doing my basic "haha shoot and kills go up," logging off and going to bed. That's really all I want from CoD, what I got from it in 2019, and what I'm getting in MWII's 2022 release. I've had a good time playing ground war with my buds, laughing as we try to hold buildings down, and comparing our KD ratios like in the old days. Over all, it's not perfect, nor is it as good YET as MW 2019 is, but I'm going to continue to play it because it's just what I wanted.