FPS - Task Force 141, led by Captain Price, is deployed to stop a terrorist threat involving stolen American missiles.

PROS:

++ Solid campaign. Even though the story was lacking, I found that the overall campaign was still solid, although it is weaker compared to MW 2019's campaign. This entry brought back Soap and Ghost (two fan-favorite characters) to attract old fans and for the most part, I liked their inclusion. I felt that Ghost was more interesting in this iteration. And I really liked the new character named Alejandro and I liked it when the story focuses on the Mexican cartel and Special Forces. Alone, Prison Break, Violence And Timing, and Recon By Fire were solid missions. And although the campaign lacked memorable set-pieces, I did appreciate that the player had more freedom in missions.

++ Polished visuals. As per COD standards, the visuals looked great once again! Especially the pre-rendered cutscenes.

++ Strong gunplay. The gunplay is once again tight, quick, and somewhat tactical. Guns felt and sounded great to use. Movement was also brisk and felt fluid and I liked the ability to both dolphin dive or slide, depending on if you hold or tap the O button.

CONS:

-- Weak central story. The overall narrative was inferior to the original MW2 which had one of my favorite narratives in a COD campaign. The central villain (Hassan) was weak and forgettable, and so was the secondary antagonist (Graves). And the game ended quite abruptly with a very anticlimactic ending.

-- Forgettable music. Thinking back on my playthrough and I realized that none of the tracks were noticeable or memorable.

-- Familiarity. Although there were some new additions (new multiplayer modes like Invasion, and an even greater ability to customize and tweak weapons), the overall package just felt too familiar to MW 2019. Doesn't really do much to make itself stand out in the series. And the new co-operative modes aren't really my cup of tea either.

Pretty much everything I wrote in my initial impressions of this game back at release is still accurate to my experience. As generally a casual multiplayer-only player, I find it to be the most fun CoD in quite a few years.

Even some of the better recent ones had at least one significant problem or another, like a lack of technical polish, annoying maps and spawn issues, frustrating matchmaking, poor attempts at implementing character abilities, overemphasis on cosmetics, a bit too few maps... None of that has really been an issue for me at all in this one. It's just a very solid example of its series's formula.

The battle pass stuff, which wasn't added yet when I last posted about this game, is pushed somewhat annoyingly after each match, and like other parts of the UI is a bit overly complicated. Ultimately though it's just a B-button press to dismiss it, so not really a big deal, particularly compared to a couple other recent CoDs. Still, I'd just rather see match stats prioritized right away after a match instead if I've already said I don't care about the battle pass. In general they are fine about letting you get into a match with the playlists you want very quickly, at least, so props for that.

Otherwise, I enjoy what they've added post-release, and the gameplay has still felt pretty polished and fun on Xbox. I enjoy almost every map quite a bit—even my least favorite, a dark map added recently with Season 3 that requires night vision as a gimmick, has its place in the rotation and is not something I actively dislike at all. Splitscreen works great aside from extremely minor visual bugs in menus and an inability to change classes mid-match. Perk and killstreak/scorestreak systems are nice IMO and the weapons and killstreaks feel good with nothing seeming too frustrating to play against right now.

I hope personally that this is a sign that future CoD multiplayer experiences will be this fun with as few caveats.

Spoilers ahead, you've been warned.

I completed the game in 11 hours (with breaks) on Veteran difficulty, and I would give it a solid 8.5. Here are my detailed impressions:

Let me start with the fact, that I completed the game on Veteran, and it was the worst decision of my life. I completed almost every CoD game on Veteran, and I love the challenge, but this game was just unfair. Every second enemy had this awful armor, grenades flew all over the place, your team's AI is nonexistent, like literally. I've seen Ghost fighting one normal enemy for two minutes, Rodolfo running in circles between enemies, doing nothing, Alejandro missing the shot during "you kill the left guy, right one is mine" section, and more. Enemies lasered me with shotguns, from miles away, like rooftops away, through multiple walls. They always knew my position, and they often one shotted me, before I could see them. Let's say I'm a Veteran of Veteran (heh), but this was disgusting.

Moving forward, the visuals in this game are beyond me. This is literally the best looking game I've ever seen, it looks photorealistic, Amsterdam section looks like real life.

I adore our soldiers, they are really well written, Alejandro might be my new favorite character. I was skeptical with Ghost at first, as for me, he was never really too special. In OG MW2 he was the guy with a cool mask, that's it. In this iteration, he started like this really edgy guy with a secret identity and probably some really dark past, and I didn't like it, at all, but later in the game, they showcased his character more, and he started to grow on me. I totally expected them to show us his face, but I'm glad they didn't, we've got teased badly, tho. I really liked the "side" characters, like Diego and Valeria, too. Also, I totally expected Rodolfo to reveal as Roach later in the game, but it didn't happen. I was also really glad to see Farah, as I enjoyed her character very much.

Now that I talked about the cool characters, I absolutely hate the villains in this game. Shepherd's motive doesn't buy me, at all, I preferred him being a straight-up traitor in the OG game, and the fact that he fled is funny to me. Hassan almost made me fall asleep, and even though we chased him for the most of the game, I feel like he was barely in it. Graves was the best of the three, but nowhere close to being good. That said, CoD had really legendary villains over the years, so I kinda accept, that it's hard to beat them, but I feel like they haven't even tried. Their deaths, tho, oh boy were they awful. After the worst fight, maybe ever (at least on Veteran), we don't even see the body of Graves. I laughed out loud at this, but at least we had awesome dialogues between him and Soap during the fight. Hassan's death was even worse in my eyes. CoD always had these memorable endings with totally batshit crazy stuff going on near the end. This time, he captures injured Soap after this awful stealth crafting section, and you just put a bullet in his head with a sniper, the end, lol.

I appreciate the gameplay of the missions, a lot of them felt like real military operations/special ops (I mean, I felt like they could really happen irl, while nothing in the OG trilogy seemed like that). I actually liked all the gimmick missions. The convoy was insanely good, cameras mini-game was super fun, "All ghillied up" style mission was awesome, with a lot of options to choose, the callback to ghosts from the last mission was also really well executed, "Alone" mission was great, I really liked the crafting gimmick, too bad it didn't work in the last mission, at all. They were all really nice, and I loved the diversity in gameplay they offered.

I enjoyed all throwbacks to mw2, like Ghosts saying that Shepherd "burned them", reuniting with Price in prison, OG ghost masks and a lot more. I totally didn't expect them to make a "no russian" reference, and for sure I didn't expect a tease for it, but I'm all in for it, and when I think about it, it wasn't that unlikely to happen. Furthermore, I'm glad Makarov is coming back, at least one good villain is more than needed, I hope he turns out better than this Shepherd.

So yeah, excluding disappointing villains and awfully balanced Veteran difficulty, the game was pretty chad, and I had a blast with it. Below are my small thoughts on individual missions:

"Strike" - A cool intro, I guess. It shows how stunning the graphics are, the canyon looks photorealistic, with 4k and HDR it literally looks like real life.

"Kill or capture" - Another beautiful looking mission, really fun to play, seemed to me like an actual military operation, just a little over the top, a lot of "clean house" style, it was a really good start. Ghost introduction was a little too edgy, tho.

"Wetwork" - Fun, but short, nothing too special.

"Tradecraft" - Another "fun, but short" one, but with absolutely stunning visuals, it's actually insane how good they are.

"Borderline" - Awesome mission, I started to like Alejandro since the beginning, "clean house" style gameplay, again, felt like an actual operation, too. Really impressive stuff, especially towards the end of the mission.

"Cartel Protection" - Another great mission, a little more action this time, stunning visuals, the cliffs and river sections were something fresh, and it worked really well.

"Close Air" - I didn't expect AC-130 mission, but Oh Boy, I missed it. Really appreciated mission, was really fun, except the civilians part.

"Hardpoint" - More of AC-130, nothing wrong with it.

"Recon by Fire" - Awesome mission, all ghillied up style, great atmosphere, and fun gameplay, I loved the freedom and variety of options in this mission... If only it wasn't that hard on Veteran, I spent hours on this mission.

"Violence and Timing" - My favorite mission, I liked everything about it since the very beginning, a lot of crazy action, hijacking cars, dodging mines, shooting while driving, total mayhem. The realistic part pretty much died there, but it was fun as heck. Also, glad to see Farah, she was a great character.

"El Sin Nombre" - A stealth mission with its own gimmicks, I actually liked it a lot, Diego and Valeria were pretty impressive characters.

"Dark Water" - Awesome mission with a lot of action, the ship part was awesome in my opinion!

"Alone" - I actually loved this mission, which seems to be an unpopular opinion. It was brutal on veteran, I decided to do the achievement without firing a gun, so it was even harder, but I think it really added to the experience. I actually had to use all the stuff I've found, and think a lot about my actions. Dialogues between Soap and Ghost were gold, I actually didn't like this iteration of Ghost at all before that mission, he just seemed like an edgy soldier with sEcReT identity, but this mission really added to his character. I really appreciate the callbacks to the OG MW2, too. The only stupid part was the crafting animation repeating all the time, otherwise it was a really fun mechanic.

"Prison Break" - Nice mission, the cameras mini-game was fun as heck, a lot of good action happened, and I find it a nice callback to the OG MW2 mission, where you also reunite with Price in prison. Too bad, it was almost unbeatable on Veteran difficulty.

"Hindsight" - A flashback... Cool, I guess? To be honest, I didn't really like the motivations of this iteration of Shepherd, but it's just my opinion.

"Ghost team" - I find the whole ghost masks idea silly as heck, but at least we got the OG ghost for a while. Otherwise, it was a really good mission, a lot of action, awesome stuff with Price in helicopter, a lot of diversity, just that tank section was awful. Almost unbeatable on Veteran, friendly AI was nonexistent in it, too, and Graves' death was awful, not satisfying at all, but at least we had that fun dialogue between him and Soap.

"Countdown" - Nice mission, a good callback to Ghosts, really fun, except it was once again, hard as heck on Veteran, and the last segment with crafting was pretty weird. It worked in "alone", but it was pretty meh in this one. I find Hassan's death pathetic and not satisfying at all, but he was a boring villain, anyway.

Remember when Battletoads 2020 shifted between 6 genres instead of focusing on its core beat em up gameplay and the game was borderline unplayable because of it? It’s the exact same thing here.

Every time Modern Warfare II (2) (2022) The Second One does the standard COD shooting gallery, run n gun gameplay it’s a good time. The problem is that seemingly every mission just needs to shoehorn a godawful segment that doesn't use any of the skills you're supposed to be honing while playing the game.

Stealth missions with no stealth mechanics where you're spotted instantly if you do the slightest thing wrong? Check.

Hopping from vehicle to vehicle on a highway chase that goes on forever and the game has no real way to streamline the vehicle hopping so you die instantly if you miss? Check.

A mission with shifting cover that also kills you instantly if you're pushed into a corner, but yet they didn't adjust the collision to make sure you don't die in irl survivable spaces? Check.

A swimming section where the game has no real underwater mechanics and its unnecessarily difficult to get yourself back on the dock? Check.

A goddamn crafting segment in a stealth mission where you have to find supplies to keep yourself alive but somehow the enemies you kill don't drop the same weapons they're using to melt you? Check.

The return of said crafting mechanics for the very last fight in the game? Kill me now.

The first few missions were solid because they were standard COD fare, but as the game progressed, I started to count down the seconds until my agony was over and when I thought I finally got a break with the Prison Break to Ghosts missions, they throw in a boss fight against a tank. You'd think this would be par for the course for a COD game, but the game went to extreme lengths to make sure you had no explosives beforehand, so it stops being COD and briefly becomes OG Resident Evil.

The game itself seems to be vehemently against the concept of fun. There’s constant talk about watching for civilians and following the rules of engagement, which is what the entire story is about. But when has the US ever been known to follow the rules of engagement? The game has its head lodged so far up its ass with trying to keep your characters as the good guys that any form of collateral is an instant failure. You shot a civilian who was next to an enemy? Mission failed. You blew up the wrong building during the air support mission? Mission failed.

The air support mission is probably the worst example of this. Spec Ops the Line’s scathing critique of COD4’s AC-130 segment has scarred this series ever since and now you can’t use the big explosives because it may cause collateral, and you can’t destroy any buildings unless you have clearance, never mind that you’re already decimating a village in Mexico. Gotta make sure our characters can only be seen as the good guys. Someone died who wasn’t supposed to die? Well guess that’s the player’s fault; our characters are still perfect.

While the game’s score is also a joke about the awful naming, I have to at least give credit for the visuals and the sound design which remain impeccable from MW2019. Everything else? Shit.

I sure love when companies dig up the corpse of my beloved nostalgic games and parade them around with memberberries scattered throughout for me to point and clap like a monkey.

This review is an update to my original review of Modern Warfare II. This review was also originally posted on Steam on August 10, 2023 (with some edits as recently as October 16, 2023), although some additional rating adjustments have been made:

Campaign is pretty good. Not the best COD campaign & not all of it's changes to the COD formula work (looking at you armoured enemies & tank boss fight), but it's a good time and tells an engaging enough story.

Multiplayer can be fun if you jive with the faster time to kill, relatively more restrictive movement & more tactical feel, but if you prefer a faster-paced, more arcadey shooter you're out of luck and would be better off buying Modern Warfare III instead (which is a pretty overt course-correction in this direction and whose existence flys in the face of the 2 years of post-launch support that were promised for this game). Personally I fall into the latter camp so I HATE this multiplayer. Not to mention how Infinity Ward consistently fails to listen to community feedback.

Haven't played much of Spec Ops, but it's 100% much better than MW19 if you're into this sort of thing. Similar story with those Raids (although I haven't touched those at all).

The menu is also terrible BTW. Feels more like a streaming service than an actual game.

Overall, I recommend Modern Warfare II for the campaign, but not at $70 USD/$90 CAD. Wait for a sale. Multiplayer-wise, unless what I described interests you I'd just skip this game and get MWIII instead. I'm gonna be much more cautious about Infinity Ward's next COD than I was with MWII after how this game's post-launch life cycle went.

Ratings:

Creative score (story, gameplay, voice acting, art direction):

Campaign: 8/10

Multiplayer: 2/10

Spec Ops: 7/10

Whole Package: 5.5/10

Technical score (graphics, audio, optimization): 8/10

Business Practices score: 4/10 (exclusive content on PlayStation, microtransactions & a FOMO-inducing Battle Pass, not to mention the broken promises of 2 years of post-launch support)

Overall score (my thoughts on a game’s overall quality, doesn’t consider the business practices unless they are detrimental to the experience):

Campaign: 8/10

Multiplayer: 4/10

Spec Ops: 7/10

Whole Package: 6/10

General Thoughts:

DISCLAIMER: This review will not touch on Warzone 2.0 or its associated DMZ mode. That will get its own review.

First off, the visuals. The graphics are noticeably improved over Modern Warfare (2019) (often abbreviated to MW19). However, Ray Tracing is noticeably absent, with no indication of any RT features being added in a future patch (it’s worth noting that Vanguard, last year’s COD, didn’t have it either), even though Infinity Ward seemingly utilized in the Summer Game Fest demo). Although that hasn’t stopped the game from looking almost indistinguishable from the real world. The guns are more detailed than ever, the locations (regardless of what mode you are playing) look ripped straight from the real world & the representation of Night Vision looks more like what you see on YouTube. It is impressive what Infinity Ward can do while still targeting 60 or even 120 FPS on consoles (although it is worth noting that MWII is still very much a cross-generation game). There’s even an increased amount of destruction compared to Vanguard, although it doesn’t seem like this is being used in multiplayer.

I should mention that, at least in my experience, the PC version was pretty unstable at launch, with the game regularly crashing. This happened once during my campaign playthrough & multiple times in the hours I spent playing multiplayer before publishing this review. I also experienced some graphical errors in Spec Ops that led to some trouble with seeing anything. I did play this on an Nvidia RTX 2070 with the (at the time of launch) latest Game Ready drivers (526.47), which are reported to have stability issues in Modern Warfare II, so that may be the root cause of it (as, apparently, the problems aren’t as bad on AMD GPUs as they are on Nvidia). I will note that driver 526.86 seems to have fixed these issues & was explicitly released to address them. So there’s that.

Cross-play is also still here, meaning everyone playing MWII can play together regardless of where they are playing it. For whatever reason, though, the option to opt-out of cross-play is only visible on PlayStation consoles. Xbox players can opt-out via Xbox’s system settings, but reports indicate that it doesn’t always work and drastically increases queue times even when it does. PC players can’t opt out at all. This can be problematic as some console players will want to opt-out to avoid PC cheaters & mouse & keyboard players (although since keyboard & mouse can be used on console, this doesn’t entirely get rid of them, and PC players may want to opt-out of cross-play with consoles to avoid controller players & the strong aim-assist COD gives them (the PC version has controller support, so this doesn’t entirely get rid of them)…

The last thing I want to mention on the topic of general thoughts is the user interface. While when you’re playing the game (ie: in Multiplayer matches or playing the campaign) it’s pretty good, the main menu itself is pretty bad. It is in many ways a step backwards from MW19, feeling more like a menu for a streaming service than a video game.

Campaign:

I am of two minds regarding MWII’s campaign. On the one hand, the story elegantly balances new ideas with fanservice & classic COD tropes. But on the other, it has some design choices that threaten to derail the entire experience. The story is focused on the interplay between the War on Terror & the War on Drugs and how the former inhibits the latter in ways that benefit the cartels as well as the advantages & problems of American Interventionism, but it also makes plenty of time for references to other Infinity Ward COD games (especially the original Modern Warfare trilogy). The campaign is just as inspired by previous COD games as it is by the Sicario movies. It’s a well-told story that covers new ground for COD & is well-acted, but it can also feel very familiar sometimes.

From a gameplay standpoint, MWII doesn’t tread much new ground outside of a few missions. And while most of its new ideas are well-executed, a couple should have been cut. One such shake-up that did work for me was a mission where you have to sneak around behind enemy lines without any weapons or armour plates and scavenge whatever you can find to survive & reunite with one of your squadmates. What didn’t work for me were the myriad of bullet-sponge armoured enemies & the tank boss fight. The former, while likely an attempt to encourage players to use the equipment at their disposal besides guns, end up being tedious to deal with and can lead to downright frustrating deaths (not to mention that these enemies also appear during segments where you don’t have any extra equipment). The latter also leads to plenty of frustrating deaths & you can tell that COD isn’t designed for a boss fight like this.

So, in short, MWII’s campaign is a good one overall & I understand why many people love it, but it’s got some significant problems that hold it back, least for me.

Multiplayer:

If I had to describe Modern Warfare II’s multiplayer in one sentence, I’d say, “it’s Modern Warfare (2019), but on steroids”. Whereas MW19 was a more restrained experience that favoured more tactical play (but in so doing caused camping to be a highly powerful play style at launch), MWII is faster-paced and is trying to cater to as much of the COD community as possible. MWII’s Gunsmith is also revamped from the iteration seen in MW19, with guns now being grouped by platforms (essentially a shared lineage of sorts).

From the time I’ve put into the multiplayer so far, I’d say that MWII’s MP is pretty good, but it’s got problems.

The overall gunplay feels tight & responsive, the guns pack a serious punch (with some decent balance as far as I can tell) & there is a decent variety of maps (albeit the quantity does feel a little lacking after the sheer amount of maps Vanguard launched with).

But the matchmaking has almost all of the same problems as the last couple CODs. For more details on how this works & why calling it Skill-Based Matchmaking is misleading, see my Vanguard review & go straight to the multiplayer section. Infinity Ward claims they’ve increased the chances of a lobby being kept together, but I haven’t had this ever happen to me yet.

That’s not to say MWII doesn’t have problems of its own. While I’m hesitant to call this game “unfinished”, there’s a high enough number of core COD features that weren’t in the game at launch that I can understand why others would do so. Most notably, Ranked Mode (although Black Ops: Cold War (BOCW or simply Cold War from here on out) & Vanguard didn’t have it at launch either), Gunfight (a fan-favourite mode introduced in MW19 that was also added to Cold War post-launch) & Prestige Ranks (making MWII the first COD game to not have them at launch since their introduction in COD4). Prestige has at least been added alongside the launch of Warzone 2.0 though. The map design is also generally just fine. Not terrible, but not great either (although the Santa Sena Border Crossing map (a cut-down version of the Santa Sena Ground War map playable in 6v6 modes) is pretty bad in my opinion (although if you like maps such as Shipment, you’ll probably like this too).

Special Ops:

Special Ops (generally referred to as Spec Ops by the community) has undergone a drastic overhaul over Modern Warfare (2019). Instead of being a 4-player mode on a few maps that sees you doing the same few objectives over & over, it’s now a 2-player co-op mode with a wider variety of missions on an (as of launch) similar amount of maps. Variety has been drastically improved, with the 3 missions that were available at launch being pretty different from each other. And while the ping system (also carried over from MW19 & Warzone) is appreciated, you and your partner should ideally have microphones of some sort for voice chat.

Overall, definitely an improvement over Modern Warfare (2019) in terms of co-op that feels distinct from Treyarch’s ever-popular Zombies modes.

Conclusion:

Modern Warfare II, while not the revolution Activision’s marketing would indicate, is a sizable step forward for the franchise and a technological achievement for a game targeting high framerates on console & PC. It’s just a shame that Infinity Ward & co. are repeating old mistakes alongside sticking to what’s worked in the last couple of COD games.

Ratings:

Creative score (story, gameplay, voice acting, art direction): 8.5/10

Technical score (graphics, audio, optimization): 7.5/10 (While the graphics & audio in this game are phenomenal, I have to dock points for RBMM, the instability, glitches & crashing issues at launch (even if the most egregious visual bugs were caused by that Nvidia driver I mentioned earlier))

Business Practices score: 5/10 (Not terrible, but exclusive content on PlayStation, microtransactions & a FOMO-inducing Battle Pass do knock this game down a few notches (without even getting into the terrible practices of Activision as a company)

Overall score (my thoughts on a game’s overall quality, doesn’t consider the business practices unless they are detrimental to the experience): 8/10

Overall Rating: If just for the campaign then you might want to wait for patches / sale - with multiplayer it might be worth it, however as I did not played it post-release yet I can't comment on how good or bad it is so will update the review later to include multiplayer part.

Quick note that last CoD I played was Modern Warfare 3 and prior to that the original CoD series (WWII settings) so I’m not following the series as much as other people and this is just campaign as apart from beta tests, I didn’t play multiplayer after launch, so while I enjoyed it I don’t want to base it on a pre-release version.

Pros:

1. Enjoyable campaign – as much as there were some silly/wired moments I enjoyed it although wished it was a bit longer 2)Non-shooting missions were fun – some people might not like it but sniper mission and chasing one where you needed to be a MacGyver and make all your stuff was fun.
2. Enjoyed the characters – as I didn’t play the previous versions of the game, this version really made me want to learn a bit more about the characters

Cons:

1. Buggy – some could even make impossible to complete the missions – some triggered events never played or had infinite spawn of enemies, crashes, and graphical glitches as well.
2. Save system – there is no quick save/load and game using checkpoints, however they are sometimes trigger too often or too late so I either need to replay long section of the map again if I die or need to restart the mission entirely as it saved me 2s before I’m killed. Also, I had instance (Sniper mission) where I didn’t get any checkpoint triggered since the mission started and when I was killed just at the end of the mission, I needed to replay the entire map)
3. Difficulty level – I’m fine with the enemies being harder however on Veteran their aim is an aim bot on cheats as had instances where enemy headshot me over 500m distance with the pistol when I was crouching behind the cover… from what I saw on that difficulty when you are not behind the cover enemy will hit 100% shoots which feels bad as I would rather have enemies having more HP or better armour.