Call of duty: Modern Warfare 2
So I finally finished COD MW2 and finally put together an opinion of it. The gameplay is pretty much what you'd expect if you played the first MW--you shoot things, they die, sometimes you throw/launch grenades, sometimes you man turrets. New to MW2 is the whole snowmobile/motorized raft mechanic where you drive said vehicles at irresponsible speeds making daredevil jumps. Fortuntely these don't break up the game flow too much which saves me an eyeroll. I dunno why it is but there is an unwritten rule ever since the first vehicle section in a first person shooter that every shooter henceforth must contain one vehicle section. It's fine when it's vital to the story (like chasing down an escaping villain) and goes by quickly but usually a vehicle section amounts to breaking up your run of kicking ass and taking by making your movement controls awkward and replacing all your colorful weapons with a generic machine gun and slow-to-reload rocket launcher. So MW2 gets points for managing to do this without making me grit my teeth while waiting for it to be over.
Also new to MW2 are placeable automated turrets and rocket drones, and I have to admit it's a lot of fun to sit behind cover on my laptop watching a fly-by-wire rocket from low orbit pummel my enemies to death. That's probably pretty close to what I'd do in an actual armed conflict and it tickles me to see how effective it is in MW2.
No MW2 review would be complete without touching upon the story so yay controversy! Basically as I'm sure some of you have heard MW2 contains a mission where you gun down a bunch of Russian civilians with belt-fed machine guns in an airport. Fortunately you don't have to play this mission and if you do you're not required to murder anyone. Personally I sat back and only fired to put poor sods suffering from stomach wounds out of their misery. All of this is in aid of starting a war between Russia and America since the American undercover agent(ie you) is the one left dead at the scene.
I sat on this for a while trying to get into the heads of infinity ward as to why they'd include something so horrifying into such a highly anticipated title, and I came up with this. In an effort to try and top the original MW, Infinity Ward saw it necessary to escalate the scale the conflict from a 3rd world country vs America to a global super power vs. America. I have a couple theories of why they chose to name the super power but choosing Russia was--I think--a lesser of two evils deal. Drama demands that the enemy be a plausible threat and America's plausible threats at the moment are China and North Korea--both of which are even more hot-button issues than Russia. North Korea-invades-America doesn't make for much of a game because it would just be a crazy guy nuking the entire continent, and at that point you might as well buy the Bond license and go the whole nine yards. China-invades-America...well there's a difference between the enemy having a reasonable shot of winning and the enemy cutting you down like wheat then wiping their ass with your blood soaked flags. SO with Russia, at least officially the conflict is in the past and unlikely to come back in the future. Not to trivialize how much this game must piss Russians off but I think given what they're trying to do they weren't completely unreasonable in choosing whose flag to put downrange. Besides I think there's a fair amount of effort put into making the Russians look like they're having a human reaction to a terrorist attack.
The other thing that kind of bugged me about MW2 is how many times your characters get killed. Like I never realized how much you start to care about the hyperactive mute you control until he started getting killed and replaced every other scene. It's an essential nuance of the FPS experience I've come to realize because after a few character deaths I started feeling unattached to the outcome of the battles I was fighting because I knew in the back of my head that I'm just going to die once I win. I mean not having persistent weapons/ammo is one thing but at least give me a guy to care about and feel some emotional investment in.
As a counterpoint, Price and Soap continue their trend of being more and more badass every time. I mean ripping a knife out of your own chest and throwing it through the enemy leader's eye? Goddamn.