Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2

aka: COD6, CODMW2, MW2
Moby ID: 43382
Windows Specs
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Description official descriptions

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2's single-player-campaign called "For the Record" begins five years after the events in Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. The world is once again at the brink of destruction. The Russians, originally defeated by the Americans, make Zhakaev a hero and threaten once again the peace on earth. Worse: they get help by a known terrorist who tries everything to let escalate the tension into a full-scale-war. In the middle: the player. During his missions he will slip into the shoes of PFC. Joseph Allen, Sgt. Gary "Roach" Sanderson who is a member of Task-Force 141 and the hero of the first game, Captain "Soap" McTavish – leader of said task-force.

As it's predecessor, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 is a first-person-shooter that provides a fairly linear but heavily scripted and action-oriented single-player-experience. The missions take the player all over the world shooting, sneaking and driving through enemy lines to fulfill his various objectives like blowing up a fueling station. To fight all those hordes of ever respawning enemies, he has access to a large collection of modern-world-weaponry but can only carry two weapons plus grenades at a time.

This is also true for the multiplayer-mode of the game which again features an extensive ranking system with the players gaining experience points for killing enemies, winning a round or completing objectives. Once enough experience points have been collected, the player advances in rank and unlocks new game-modes (ranging from deathmatch to pure team-oriented modes), new dog-tags and new weapons and abilities with which he can create his own custom class besides the five standard classes available. Also available is a coop-game-mode for two players called "Spec Ops" featuring several missions going on besides the main campaign in three different difficulty-settings with several different objectives including getting from A to B in a certain amount of time. These missions can also be completed alone however.

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Credits (Windows version)

433 People (426 developers, 7 thanks) · View all

Reviews

Critics

Average score: 90% (based on 76 ratings)

Players

Average score: 3.8 out of 5 (based on 145 ratings with 3 reviews)

Blowing Sequel

The Good
Just like the prequel, this game has a fair share of Army Ranger and Special Forces roles, so you have a good balance of combat style. The variety of weapons are fairly large and the attachments that go with the weapons are diverse. Also some secondary fire modes like grenade launchers add to getting yourself out of a jam. Many of those weapons are conveniently placed to match the combat situation you find yourself in for easier gameplay. The superweapons you access such as the Predator Drone are a welcome addition to the game. The Special Ops is a nice break from the gameplay, where you get to revisit missions you've already played, but play them in a more stylish sort of way.

The Bad
The mouse controls are slightly broken. Due to the ridiculous mouse setup where pressing the left and right mouse buttons together acts as the middle mouse button, you end up accidentally tossing grenades, half the time getting yourself killed by them or retreating into kill zones. The only way to avoid this is to quickly use up your grenade supply and not pick up anymore. Additionally the AI of your allies is pretty poor that they are hardly killing any enemies, you're essentially doing all the hard work without any cover or backup. With all this combined, you feel like many cheap deaths in the game are caused by no fault of your own. If Juggernauts had made it into the main gameplay, the higher difficulties would feel like you're playing the Nightmare difficulty of Doom.

The Bottom Line
This game plays a lot like its prequel but becomes somewhat more realistically political and brutal like the airport massacre. Call of Duty 4 players will like what they find, if not for the lack of help from allies. If you can get around the problems or work with them, it's definitely worth playing from easiest to hardest difficulties, all the while learning better paths and strategies to progress through the missions and complete them. Give this one a go and aim to complete it a 100%.

Windows · by Kayburt (30393) · 2020

The best FPS you are likely to ever find.

The Good
This is arguably one one the best FPS games to come our in a while. That's for a reason. Well, several to be exact. First off, it has what consider the finest multiplayer segment's. It gives you the most varied map's that are highly detailed, each needing different player strategy's. And unlike most recent shooter's that i can think of, it also offer's split screen and system link games for those without Xbox Live. You can also customise not only your weapon layout's, but also the weapons themselves with choice of scope, add on's and other customization's. The perk's that you can unlock just makes specializing them all the easier.

MW2's spec op's co op mode is also a nice touch, adding variation's and a co op buddy to the already familiar single player experience. The single player mode itself, entitled "For The Record", is not new in any respect, but the story itself is certainly top notch and lives up to it's predecessor. And as with COD4, you have an arsenal for all these game modes that will cater for any scenario and taste.

The Bad
The cliffhanger ending. While it is not as awful as halo 2's, i don't like it, because it makes the single player feel like half a game. With is a pain, when you consider you will finish it in about 8 hours of gameplay.

The Bottom Line
Hand's down, game of the year.

Xbox 360 · by Starbuck the Third (22608) · 2010

Tango! Roger! Alpha Six! Take Point!

The Good
Since this game was clearly intended for multi-player purposes, I am going to be fair to it and actually mention it for once. Yes, the multi-player is incredibly awesome and fast-paced with lots of different tactics for each map. Teamwork is pretty essential and going around playing as Rambo is going to get you killed pretty fast, I also love the amount of customization at your disposal that allows you to create several sets with different perks (bonuses), weapons, attachments and items.

Most weapons, items and perks can also be leveled up by using them or completing specific challenges. For example: Killing a lot of dudes using a "red-dot sight" unlocks a "holographic sight" which is an improved version with higher precision. This also encourages the use of different weapons and styles because completing challenges gives you experience points required to level up, some of these challenges are a bit insane (like the one where you need to drop a crate on an enemy's head), but they are mostly pretty straightforward.

The graphics are also insanely good even though I couldn't care less (like everybody else will do in just three or so years), but at this point in time it is pretty amazing to see huge detailed explosions that send debris flying around and the facial expressions on the soldiers when you stab them in the lungs is priceless. These graphics also follow the game into the multi-player where the sandstorms kick in whenever they want and the sun buggers you while you're trying to aim at that pesky guy behind the wall.

Thanks to the fast-paced action and the lack of story this game is pretty easy to play through more than once because the shoot-outs never get boring. Turning up the difficulty makes the enemies do more damage and take more themselves. I still can't joke around too much when playing on the highest difficulty setting, so a challenge is most certainly present. Most of the time the game felt like a silly arcade game where your only goal was to shoot stuff and frankly that never really gets boring if you play it occasionally.

The Special Ops missions which are optional tasks you and a friend can perform, most of the time they are parts of the single-player mission that were rather challenging, but with a timer or different goals. There were also a lot of parts that I had never seen before. (never played those and never will). I wanted to get the maximum amount of stars on each mission, so I had a lot of fun when me and my cousin tried to make it past insanely strong enemies on the highest difficulty while racing to an exit with the timers running out.

The Bad
The story-line is very scripted and that was confusing at first, what I mean is that there are a lot of scenes where certain tactics work, while normally they wouldn't. The most notable was when there was a big vehicle with a machine gun shooting at me and the Sergeant ordered me to throw a smoke grenade which made the thing stop firing and moving, but minutes later I encountered another one which laughed at my silly grenade and kept firing. Smoke grenades also don't affect normal infantry or anybody else except for you. There were also scenes where I sneaked past the enemies, but done outside such a scene only resulted in the enemy turning around and shooting me in the face.

The story is very short and very hard to follow and that last complaint comes from somebody who fully understood the story in World of Warcraft, F.E.A.R. and Timesplitters 2. The problem is that the game doesn't really introduce you to who the characters are and what the groups they work for do, probably assuming everybody already played the first Modern Warfare game or just doesn't give a damn. I went through the entire story and every time I finally started to understand who my character was it made me jump to a whole other character or just kill the one I was playing as.

It also gives me the impression that it's deliberately trying to be a parody of dramatic movies because every single cut-scene is filled with dialogue that consists almost entirely out of lines that sound like they were taken from a Civilization game ("History is written by the victor", "Sure it matters who has the biggest gun, but it matter a helluva lot more who's swinging it" and etc.). It just sounded way too clever for a game like this which, for me, sapped any seriousness out of what little plot there was.

Something that always pissed people off when we were playing the game's multi-player was that bullets magically disappear if the one who fired them dies, which made for some annoying moment where both people first a shotgun and one person doesn't get hit at all. Also obnoxious were several glitches and camp spots that were next to impossible to reach. Some of the weapons and items could also be very annoying and overpowered like the grenade launcher that is unlocked very early for every weapon and could easily instant kill anybody with just one shot and the scavenger perk that allowed players to pick up packages with resupplies almost constantly.

The Bottom Line
Games like Modern Warfare 2 make me feel sorry for the approvers here on Mobygames. They spend so much time approving our work and then games like these show-up, games that are so short and easy to review that I could write two complete reviews a day if there were more of them. After this game I will take a bit of a break from reviewing just to show I am really sorry, but let's get to the bloody point already:

CoD: MW2 looks beautiful and has an awesome multi-player, it is not entirely flawless and has some very annoying glitches in both the single-player and multi-player. If you want to get your hands on a good and fast-paced multi-player fest then I suggest buying the latest game in the series because a lot of people have abandoned this game already, but it's still pretty sweet to have around for parties.

Xbox 360 · by Asinine (957) · 2011

Trivia

1001 Video Games

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 appears in the book 1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die by General Editor Tony Mott.

Energy drink

Special "Assault" flavored Monster Energy drinks were produced to coincide with the release of the game.

German version

During the infamous airport level, attacking a civilian results in an automatic mission failure.

References

  • If you listen to the background chatter while you run the pit in S.S.D.D, you will here references to a "guy with a mohawk" and another "Some other dude with a skull ski mask" having run the pit before you. This is more than likely to be Soap and Ghost.
  • Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 contains a couple of references to the Michael Bay film The Rock.

The first one is in the gulag, when you are going through the shower room, with enemies shooting at you from the upper levels. This is almost a carbon copy of the shower scene in The Rock.

The second reference is the green smoke flares that the player uses to signal US fighter planes whilst he is in the White House.The film also features green flares to warn off US planes. * The mission Wolverines is a reference to the war movie Red Dawn by John Milius. In that movie the Soviet Union launches an airborne assault against the USA. The movie told the story about a couple of high school students which form a guerrilla group called Wolverines.

References to the game

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 was parodied in an episode of "Die Redaktion" (The Editorial Team), a monthly comedy video produced by the German gaming magazine GameStar. It was published on the DVD of issue 03/2010.

Sales

The game was considered the biggest launch of any video game or movie with 5-day sales topping $550,000,000, surpassing GTA IV (which was $500 million) and Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince (which took in $394 million).

Awards

  • 1UP
    • 2009 - Best Xbox 360 Game (Readers' Choice)
    • 2009 - Best Shooter (Editors' Choice)
    • 2009 - Best Shooter (Readers' Choice)
    • 2009 - Best Multiplayer Game (Editors' Choice)
    • 2009 - Best Multiplayer Game (Readers' Choice)
  • 4Players
    • 2009 – #3 Best Game of the Year (Readers' Vote)
    • 2009 – #2 Best Action Game of the Year
    • 2009 – Best Sound Effects of the Year
    • 2009 – Biggest Insolence of the Year (for the the so-called „uncut“ German version)
  • AceGamez
    • 2009 - Best Shooter
    • 2009 - Best Multiplayer Game
  • Cheat Code Central
    • 2009 - - Best FPS/Shooter Game
  • G4
    • 2009 - Best Multiplayer Game
    • 2009 - Best Shooter
    • 2009 - Best Sound Design
  • GamePro
    • 2009 - Biggest Risktaker
  • Game Informer
    • 2009 - Best Xbox 360 Game (Readers' Choice)
    • 2009 - Best Shooter (Editors' Choice)
    • 2009 - Best Shooter (Readers' Choice)
    • 2009 - Best Competitive Multiplayer (Editors' Choice)
    • 2009 - Best Competitive Multiplayer (Readers' Choice)
  • Gamespot
    • 2009 - Best Xbox 360 Game (Readers' Choice)
    • 2009 - Best Shooter (Readers' Choice)
    • 2009 - Best Competitive Multiplayer (Readers' Choice)
    • 2009 - Most Memorable Moment (Readers' Choice)
    • 2009 - Most Surprising Game to Make it Past Aussie Censors (Readers' Choice)
  • GameStar (Germany)
    • February 05, 2010 - Best Multiplayer Game in 2009 (Readers' Choice)
    • February 05, 2010 - Best PC Action Game in 2009 (Readers' Choice)
    • February 05, 2010 - Best Console Action Game in 2009 (Readers' Choice)
  • Gamespy
    • 2009 - Game of the Year
    • 2009 - Multiplatform Game of the Year
    • 2009 - Multiplayer Game of the Year
    • 2009 - Multiplayer Gamers' Choice Award
    • 2009 - The Weapons of Mass Destruction Award
    • 2009 - The Stay Away, Michael Bay Award
  • GameTrailers
    • 2009 - Game of the Year
    • 2009 - Best PS3 Game
    • 2009 - Best Xbox 360 Game
    • 2009 - Best PC Game
    • 2009 - Best Multiplayer Game
    • 2009 - Best First-Person Shooter
  • GameZone
    • 2009 - Best Xbox 360 Game
  • IGN
    • 2009 - Xbox 360 Game of the Year (Readers' Choice)
    • 2009 - Overall Best Shooter
    • 2009 - Overall Best Shooter (Readers' Choice)
    • 2009 - Overall Best Multiplayer (Readers' Choice)
    • 2009 - Best Xbox 360 Shooter
    • 2009 - Best Xbox 360 Shooter (Readers' Choice)
    • 2009 - Best Xbox 360 Multiplayer Game
    • 2009 - Best Xbox 360 Multiplayer Game (Readers' Choice)
    • 2009 - Xbox 360 Award for Visual Excellence
    • 2009 - Xbox 360 Award for Visual Excellence (Readers' Choice)
    • 2009 - Xbox 360 Award for Excellence in Sound
    • 2009 - Xbox 360 Award for Excellence in Sound (Readers' Choice)
    • 2009 - Best PS3 Shooter (Readers' Choice)
    • 2009 - Best PS3 Multiplayer Game (Readers' Choice)
    • 2009 - Best PC Shooter (Readers' Choice)
    • 2009 - PC Award for Visual Excellence (Readers' Choice)
  • Machinima
    • 2009 - Game of the Year
    • 2009 - Best Multiplayer
    • 2009 - Best Control
    • 2009 - Best Replayability
    • 2009 - Best Original Score
    • 2009 - Best Weapon (AC-130 Gunship)
  • Spike TV
    • 2009 - Best Shooter
    • 2009 - Best Multi-Player Game

Information also contributed by havoc of smeg and MegaMegaMan

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Contributors to this Entry

Game added by Sicarius.

Macintosh added by Sciere.

Additional contributors: jaXen, Big John WV, Chris Jeremic, Caelestis, Patrick Bregger, Starbuck the Third, Victor Vance, FatherJack.

Game added November 19, 2009. Last modified January 24, 2024.