
The heavily linear and scripted single-player campaign is also a short game that can easily be finished in six hours. Notable voice acting from Keith David as Sergeant Foley and Lance Henriksen as the all-knowing General Shepherd round out what you'll be hearing, and despite the hokey story, their roles keep the player focused on what is at stake in each mission. Surviving a harrowing gunfight deep inside a prison built within a medieval castle or fighting your way through the alleys and living rooms of suburbia while staring down iron sights never really gets old.Īdding to the experience are desperate radio chatter, blinding snowstorms patrolled by soldiers with itchy trigger fingers, and Hans Zimmer's thundering soundtrack rumbling behind every dramatic explosion.

#Call of duty modern warfare 3 ps3 series#
Although it lacks the punchy excitement of Modern Warfare's keynotes, such as escaping a sinking freighter or slinking through the abandoned ruins of Pripyat, the thrill ride of fighting through an occupied favela in Brazil or staging a rescue mission on an oil rig above the freezing waters of the North Pacific encapsulate what the series does best. Once I separated the missions from the story, each one felt like an exciting set piece filled with plenty of finger-blistering action.

That's what most people will likely pay attention to. Fortunately, the no-holds-barred action quickly smothers the threadbare plot beneath plenty of burning steel and hails of bullets. Modern Warfare 2 is a huge game, and with it comes an opportunity to further its own mythology. Pieces of the plot feel blatantly borrowed from last season's "24," when Jack Bauer had already stopped terrorists from seizing the MacGuffin, allowing them to hack the United States' defense network at will and eventually spinning these elements into a heavy-handed effort to relive the Cold War in the wrong era. Some might argue that such a scene stands out as another example of "games as art." Shows such as "Sleeper Cell," movies like "Traitor," and even Replay Studios' Velvet Assassin, which forced players through the horrors of the Warsaw Ghetto, aptly demonstrated far more poignant moments of sacrifice and self-doubt than MW2's controversial scene. After the first Modern Warfare gave us a believable monster and turned the plot into an international detective story with bullets galore, MW2's villain comes off as Nuclear Man to its predecessor's ultranationalist Superman. One particularly chilling and controversial scene, trussed with plenty of warning alongside the option not to play through it, ultimately suffers when the story fails to carry it. Setting a victimized superpower on the path to war quickly turns what could have been an interesting play on current events into a ridiculously bizarre list of excuses in failing to use a brain.

It takes place five years after the events of the first game, but you wouldn't know it with how little the story tells you. I found it best to think of MW2 as a set of individual missions, since the broken story is utterly shell-shocked by the action.

Knowing what they are capable of only makes MW2's story that much more confusing, especially considering that the talent behind it was responsible for the first Modern Warfare. Infinity Ward had deftly juggled Allied and Soviet viewpoints within its Call of Duty franchise, and Modern Warfare set the stage for a Tom Clancy-esque, post-Cold War conflict. No one buys an FPS for the story, but developers such as Valve and Monolith often disprove that adage. The hype gripping its sequel has elevated expectations to an extremely high level, and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 has perhaps done one better by not dropping the ball … but first, the bad news. Infinity Ward's daring vision for the original Call of Duty: Modern Warfare dramatically shifted it from the battlefields of World War II and into the headlines of the real world.
