4 player co-op game coming "this spring" to Xbox Live, PSN & PC.

Below is a review of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 written by a friend.

The Good:

The single player is awesome but short.  It got rid of my biggest concern with CoD: WaW, that there were endless enemies waiting on the player alone to progress while the hundreds of support NPC’s were incapable of killing any enemies.

Although the computer teammates are not as prolific as the player, they have more than once taken out a guy who was juggling me with constant fire before I died.  There are also stages where those who come with you are not immortal or automatically replaced and you will miss them when they are hit and no longer with you.

There is a finite number of enemies on each stage, so it is entirely possible to sit and kill everyone before moving on, but the enemies use group tactics and will attempt to flank you as you do so.  In many cases the old strategy of wait until he pops his head back up in that same spot is as flawed as it is in real life as the enemy will in fact move before firing again.  Knocking an enemy down doesn’t necessarily put them out of the fight, they will crawl to cover, shoot with pistols, and in one case a guy lay bleeding out behind a vehicle and let a grenade roll when I rounded as he died.  That was an awesome bit of AI work.  I actually had to go back to a checkpoint more than once because a guy I thought I had taken out shot me in the back with a pistol while he lay dying.

The co-op mode is called Special Ops and is a series of short missions with a timer that rewards you with stars as you progress through them.  As so many stars are earned additional missions become available five or so at a time.  These missions are fun little snapshots of the game and really designed around the idea of a second player.  Two of them are only available with a second player and involve one player on the ground while the other is in an aircraft assisting, these are in fact a blast.

The thermal sight is kick ass, it’s a niche item and has times when it is much more useful than others, but I would choose to have it every time I could.  The heartbeat sensor is as useful as you would expect.  Teaming both of these up on the same weapon would be phenomenal.  The single player gives you a good mix of weapons and tech to try out and even gives the you opportunity to appreciate the old iron sights at one point.  Having a heart beat sensor on a light machine gun was a great time even as the mission gave some difficulty at first.

The Bad:

No co-op in campaign.  For a game that is banking on its multiplayer ability I found this disappointing to the extreme.  The only co-op is the spec ops missions which in addition to being snippets rather than story only supports two players.  My favorite part of CoD:WaW was playing with two or three friends and really getting into the thick of it.  The lack of that capability at all is a big down side.

The weapons are a bit erratic, there is definite lean to larger caliber and a very heavy penalty to effectiveness when a weapon is silenced.  Obviously the idea here is based on reality, but I feel they overdid it.  Carrying around a saw, and having to hit people with two burst before they go down even at fairly close range seemed a bit skewed to me.    The game starts you in many cases with a weapon that really doesn’t come across as that effective.  Get that FAL every chance you get, one shot kills were my expected norm with that rifle.

In addition if there is a mechanism for adjusting rate of fire, I couldn’t find it.  Leaving the weapon on full automatic left me changing magazines at many inopportune times.  I’m not a huge fan of the fact that partial magazines magically recombine in these games to begin with and forcing me to change mags after every “shot” added to the effect that little quirk plays.  The character carries an astounding amount of ammo, so the magazine changes were the only real effect that it has on gameplay.  (The average infantryman carries 210 rounds of m-16 ammunition into combat, these guys aren’t average, but 700 rounds of .308, really?)  When you pick up a downed enemies weapon the ammunition is much more limited, I liked this feature as it forced me to expose myself once in a while to stay combat effective.

The level design is definitely linear and event triggered.  The game does a good job of telling you that you have limited time, but except for a few cases that’s not true.  You can only go one or two directions to get anywhere no matter where you are (make sure to look at the map once in a while when that second <short> route exists it will result in a flank and an entirely different set of combat challenges), this is to be expected but definitely limits the available options.  The game does a decent job of disguising the limitation and many times even uses the third dimension of elevation very well to force you along the path.

What do you mean no zombie level.  I really think they missed the boat here.  We played CoD:WaW at parties just for the zombie levels.  They really should have done something to capitalize on that wonder idea they had.  Even if this was created by an entirely different group, the massive popularity of that bonus feature should have been harnessed with the addition of some other four player co-op experience.

Overall:

My honest recommendation is to wait on this one till it comes down or even just rent/borrow it unless you want a “twitch” game.  It seems as if the whole design of this game is around the multiplayer battles and the rest is thrown in as an afterthought (an awesome ride of an afterthought, but an afterthought none the less).

This game is awesome, and just misses the gotta have it stage, but it misses it several times and that doesn’t add up well for my “the wife said I could” dollars.