Most people are probably playing Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II for the multiplayer. And rightly so – it can give you hundreds of hours of fun. But I wanted to focus on something that gets talked about a bit less: the campaign.
While Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II comes with a number of multiplayer modes, the single-player campaign is both an excellent way to get used to the mechanics of the game, as well as a surprisingly fun experience in itself. Completing it even unlocks operators, double exp, and cosmetics for online.
International Cooperation
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II takes you all over the world and has you working with a diverse group of allies. You switch perspective often, but most often find yourself working as a British special operations unit, with the Mexican special forces and an American unit also taking a prominent role. This along with short levels helped to keep it really engaging.
You find yourself blowing up a terrorist involved in a weapons deal right at the start. The main antagonist of the game is his second-in-command, Major Hassan from the Iranian Quds Force. It also has other expected elements, such as Russians and Mexican drug cartels being included among your enemies. This makes Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II seem fairly stereotypical for an army game on the surface. Despite this, I enjoyed it quite a lot and it does include a few less-expected moments. It doesn’t make Americans the heroes either, which is a common complaint about these types of games. Morals are certainly gray at times here.
This is certainly not a deep story and is more akin to a Hollywood action movie where you can turn your brain off and just enjoy. It has friendship, drama, a few twists, and moments of working outside the rules to get the job done. It really ramps up the tension at points, with it feeling like disaster is just around the corner if you don’t succeed. Action is certainly high too, with moments like steering a missile into an arms deal, and flying into a terrorist to give him a boot to the head.
Shooty Stabby
If I had to describe the campaign of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II in one word, it would be ‘variety’.
I found myself taking out snipers from afar, dodging between cover, fighting my way toward points, and fighting enemies close up while clearing rooms. Some levels had me sneaking around instead, both in large outdoor compounds, indoors in secure areas, and even underwater. There were even points where I had to drive vehicles, jump between them, rappel down buildings, and provide air support. That doesn’t even include sections where I had to direct someone else or craft items.
I never felt like I was doing the same thing often during the campaign, even if most of the time could be described as going through levels and shooting anyone in the way.
The guns themselves are quite varied too. Even as a casual FPS player, I’ve picked up tons of different models of different guns and felt the difference in how they handle right away. Each feels like it controls intuitively and I was jumping walls and headshoting with the best of them by the end of the campaign.
I’m playing on the PlayStation 5 and the controller added to just how good the game controls feel. The vibration feedback really helped immersion and some guns used the adaptive triggers too. As a brief aside, I was using the Defy Pro controller with paddles on the back, which really made taking cover and going into a running slide to dodge convenient.
Look and Sound
You can tell that Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II is a big-budget game at a glance. Graphically it looks great, from the environments to the explosions and the facial animations. Each country we visited throughout the game felt unique too.
Sound is certainly a big factor here too. The voice acting was on point, really helping to draw me into the story. Quite often the characters gave hints on what was needed next too, telling me to push forward or to find something. Even more important was how well it worked to hear where enemies were. At points, I was locating enemies by turning around and hearing which direction they were in. I definitely recommend using a good headset while playing, such as the EPOS H3PRO Hybrid.
Options
As mentioned, I used a DefyGaming controller to play, but it’s possible to use a keyboard and mouse, even on PlayStation 5. It gives quite a lot of options generally too; Individual volume controls for different settings, options around motion blur, control mapping, and more.
One point I’d like to praise specifically is that accessibility options are particularly plentiful. For example, you can change the text size in multiple places, and the background and color of it. There are also options to turn off the 3D effect, reduce shake camera movement, and add a center dot to reduce motion sickness.
Slight Downsides
There are a few minor letdowns. The campaign can be completed within six hours, which is quite short, even if it’s not the main mode people buy this series for. To be fair though, there are achievements like not triggering alarms or rescuing hostages before the enemies can fire their weapons which can extend this. It’s also possible to play on five difficulties, with the fifth being unlocked only after beating the campaign once.
Technical issues popped up occasionally too. It all ran smoothly, except once when it crashed. There were also a couple of times when enemies just didn’t seem to fire on me, even if I was out in the open and pointing a gun at them. Dying occasionally had me restart in a particularly bad place too, where it was difficult to not quickly die again.
Verdict
As someone who hasn’t seriously played an FPS for a while (and used to mostly play Battlefield), I was surprised at just how much I enjoyed the campaign of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II. The story isn’t exactly a masterpiece, but it was fun and kept me engaged. The gameplay is the definite star though and experiencing it through single-player will nicely lead people into the online multiplayer world.
Keeping in mind that this review only refers to the campaign…
CALL OF DUTY: MODERN WARFARE II IS HIGHLY RECOMMENDED
If you would like to see more FPS games with a music mechanic, you may be interested in our review of Metal: Hellsinger.
Many thanks go to Activision for a PlayStation 5 review code for this title.
A gamer since the days of Amstrad and DOS and someone who has dabbled in a variety of professions. He enjoys a wide variety of genres, but has been focusing on visual novels and virtual reality in recent years. Head Editor of NookGaming. Follow him and the website on @NookSite.
