Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II (2022)

MWII(2)(2022) has serious PTSD from Spec Ops The Line's scathing criticism of COD4's AC-130 mission. In response this game decides to lace the entire air support mission with clearances and watching out for collateral that you're constantly failing if you kill any civilians or destroy a building you're not supposed to.

To some extent that is most of the first half of the game so far. Completely linear, and even when they give you freedom to tackle something your own way you're still hard punished for not doing it the ideal way.

First off, the names are confusing. I guess "Modern Warfare 2" is the original sequel to Modern Warfare and "Modern Warfare II" is the remake of that sequel. Not that it really matters, the storyline in these games aren't important.

I haven't played a Call of Duty in a while and the amount of killing is also a little jarring at first. This one has the option of skipping over the notorious airport slaughter level for "sensitive" gamers.

The graphics are great. I feel a little guilty rushing through the game and not taking more time to enjoy the scenery, but the game design is to push you along as fast as possible and give you the shots of adrenalin with big action set pieces. It's good at what it does, but the I prefer FPS that feel less on rails.

I was enjoying the campaign until I kept encountering bugs and today I went to play 1 game of multiplayer on PC and I opened up blizzard client and they forcefully started installing warzone 2 (50GB). Like why? Why are they making me install warzone just to play the campaign and multiplayer? I hate activation and its business practices. I don't want the full game on my hard drive taking up this much space, especially when games are getting so much bigger.

Warzone should be its on separate thing and they need to stop with this integration nonsense because I do not care for it.

Update: I uninstalled and it let me install just base game and multiplayer. They have now introduced for main menus on top of main menus!!

Since others have mostly posted about campaign, here's a multiplayer update. TL;DR Despite the typical complaining you'll hear about any CoD game, I think this is one of the best in recent memory.

On Xbox Series X, this launch has been a technically polished experience with very few issues. It’s so quick and easy to get in and out of a match, as well. These things should not be taken for granted compared to some past CoD launch experiences that I remember very well for all the wrong reasons.

I should mention that the battle pass is not turned on yet, and I am not sure how the experience will change after that point. Some recent CoDs have spent too much time highlighting people's cosmetics after or between matches to an annoying degree (and with lots of bugs), but that seems absent here. Hopefully they don't add it back once the battle pass is back on.

Gameplay-wise, time to kill and other fine-tuned details all pass my very scientific “feels great!” test. Been loving the overall pace of matches and having very few unwinnable lobbies. Class customization retains the depth of other recent games but feels slightly easier to manage, along with a UI that's generally pretty fast and easy to use. I have been enjoying all the maps, honestly more than those in the last Modern Warfare. It's a good variety of both look and feel, and they haven't felt super campy or annoying in any way really.

So yeah this is a CoD that I can recommend to multiplayer-focused players with very few reservations. It's not leaning on any unwanted gimmicks, just delivering the solid fast-paced FPS gameplay the series is known for, which I am very grateful for.