[MW2] Review and Impressions

Hey folks, I have clocked in somewhere around 50 hours since launch plus a few days in the beta and have finished the campaign. All of the ARs, SMGS, BRs, and most of the marksmen weapons are done. In all of this time, I have two things to say before I write the review.

1) If you do not like Call of Duty, this game will not make you like it and change your mind.

2) If you like Call of Duty, used to play or still do... This is the game you should be playing.

With that being said, MW2 is much closer to the original modern warfare rather than 2019 or vanguard. Though is draws heavy inspiration from the things in vanguard coupled with polished systems from 2019 MW2 is definitely a solid attempt at defining a new generation of CoD. Is it a total success? Monetarily Activision, IW, and Sledge Hammer will make out like bandits, as a consumer, well we didn't get a reskinned 2019 and 2 years of support is a solid win in my book.

Instead of writing out what I like, dislike, and what needs to change I am instead going to review a handful of different aspects of the game and sprinkle in the likes and dislikes. TLDR; Solid game, lots of change, but lots of fun.

Performance and Quality

I am currently playing with Radeon 6800 XT, Ryzen 9 5900X, and 64gb of ram and in terms of performance the game runs great. It actually runs better than 2019. I really like that IW moved away from the monotonous gray/tan tones from 2019 and adopted the more colorful style like they used in Vanguard. To me it makes the maps feel more varied, especially certain locations are easier to memorize due to pops of color. The effects used in game are top notch - though all particle effects with RT utilize an automatic renderer which adjusts the quality on the fly so sometimes explosions and fire effects get descaled to comical levels of crap.

The textures and weapon animations look great, if you get a quiet moment in a match really look at the attention to detail IW used to create reload, switching, and sprinting animations. Something that is large unnoticed is the character models are no longer static. If you watch team mates turn and move you will see their characters lean into the turns, hunch forward when stopping, and as they move ADS around the operators will lean. Very immersive stuff.

In this new life we all live its pretty common for games to release with substantial amount of problems. Console issues are separate but to me the PC experience was pretty smooth. Day one there was an issue with Nvidia cards that was quickly fixed, and then an issue with FSR that was fixed on day 2. In the first couple of days there were some minor bugs with weapons not unlocking correctly and camos not tracking properly. None of these are game-breaking, if you are camo hunting on day 2 please go shower, but I can see the annoyance it'll create. Match-making has been the buggiest but even that wasn't as bad as 2019 infamous no parties for 6 days problem.

There is a relatively common crash caused by the GPU fidelity, I have not experienced this but from what I can tell its something to do with 2000 series cards and DLSS.

Sounds

They definitely improved sound across the board in MW2, but that isn't saying that much since 2019 had excellent sounds as well. But, they did something for the first time ever, every weapon has its own unique sound now. It never made sense in 2019 that an AK47, AKM, and AK103 all made the same sound despite having different caliber sizes. But the true win here is just how well you can hear and visualize things in the game. For instance, if you hear a shot I can easily tell how far it is, which direction, is above me or below. Its incredible because there are so many shooting games out there that suffer with poor audio optimization.

In terms of voice lines they are of good quality just very little variety. Its at the point where if I hear "Shadow Company go" one more time I will mute the game... wait I all ready muted voice lines. The operator lines are pretty good, most of the voice acting work is very solid and fits the situations pretty good even though Roze screaming "On your six" sounds more like she is calling out a spider on my back rather than saying she is behind me.

The music is good, but I muted that shit after about 1 hour.

UI and UX

So the UI and the UX as whole is crap. But, when its broken down into individual components there are few things they did right.

The main screen is actually not bad, I have actually began to fancy it lately because of two reasons alone. The tiles indicate everything you can play all splashed onto one screen with just one wheel down for more options. The 2nd, what ever you are doing if you go back to the main screen it'll stop match making which is a nice little TLC. In 2019 and BO if you hit that back button at match-making you can go to the main screen but the match making will still happen so then you get automagically sent into a game.

The social panels are redundant as hell - you select a menu button with four options, Settings, Social, Messages, and some other bullshit. Then you click Social, then it'll show you people you met recently in huge boxes, but your friends, party, and channels are once again inside another menu. Its nice they added a party button at the top right so you can at least see your party but c'mon, 1 button for settings, 1 button for socials, and 1 button for character/barracks/ect.

The build-a-class is hot garbage - besides the horizontal scrolling which isn't even the worst offence, but the sub-menu when hover over things sometimes are on the top and other times at the bottom. The only things I can say is they should had two different windows - one for Load Outs and one for Gunsmith. When you hover over a load out you can either select gun or kit and go from there and edit. The gunsmith looks good but once again they decided to use graphical bars instead of numerical data to show you weapon and attachment stats. It gives you shit to work with and then you cant trust the comparison between weapons because there are no standard values. 75% of one guns mobility might be 188ms sprint-out time but another gun at 75% mobility could be 375ms sprint-out time... how would you even know?

Lastly, the camo screen. Fuck you. Put each category into a folder than can be expanded or closed. The camo texture colors should show when something is unlocked, everything is grey and its hard to see the little Lock symbol as well.

Mechanics

Now we are getting into the meat... Mechanics are divided into things you experience in matches and things that you experience in the back-end or menus, or systems.

Let's start with the way weapons and attachments unlock. Inside each family of weapons each gun will contribute a few attachments for the group and a few global attachments. To really get everything unlocked you are forced to spread out and use a wide variety of weapons. I can see why some people wouldn't like this, there is a gun or two you want to use but you cant until you use a bunch of other ones. Me, I think its great, there was about 5 weapons I wanted to use and probably 10 weapons I would use but like many months later. Because I had to use every gun 4 of those 10 are actually my favorite weapons now. I really like the variety of attachments because as you progress through the game there is so much more tinkering you can whether it be temporary or more advanced changes. Instead of having to max a weapon because they suck until you get all of your attachments you only need a handful of levels to start putting what you need on. Also, since attachments for the part are global you only have to unlock them one time.

This rolls over into the camo (outside of the shit menu) I think the new system is incredible. No more do I have unlock Red Skull camo on every single gun to use it.. Unlock it once and you get it for all of your weapons. Since there are a wide variety of ways to get camos, you can simply just keep on playing and naturally you will acquire alot of them especially if you spread out and really widen your arsenal. For the grinders out there, do know there is SO much to do and you really can either focus on one thing at a time or spread out. I will start working on gold at some point this week but Im actually not in a rush this time.

The perk system is pretty divisive in the community but I am enjoying it. To me, matches play out differently now, you can lump them into Early Match and Late match. I find myself changing load outs more often during game rather than just riding out the same class no matter what. There is a heavier reliance on audio-visuals ever than before which to me creates better immersion and also closes skill gaps between players. IW definitely tried to make things more realistic with extreme nerfs to bunny-hopping, prone boning, and reload cancelling which is actually refreshing and changes the way we play the games. I find them to be less frantic now and more deliberate but coupled with great movement mechanics still is a fast paced shooter. The biggest takeway is there are actual firefights now rather than just jumping into your enemy and slapping you nutsack to their face while you shoot them

They introduced swimming mechanics and I think its very smooth how they did it. I actually like that there is only 1 6v6 map that has swimming in it so it doesnt feel novelty and shoved into everything. It definitely creates a different way to play and I feel like a lot of people have been ignoring it. I for one am abusing the shit out of it since you can use a pistol and throwing knives under water. But all-in-all, it feels good, its simple, and you can shoot you gun if you are on the surface.

 

Game Modes

Nothing really changed in the traditional game modes so instead I want to talk about Invasion and Prisoner Rescue. Prisoner Rescue is the newest 6v6 where once team has to rescue 1 or 2 hostages while the other team defends. Its a lot of fun, but there are a couple things that give the attackers massive bonuses but perhaps they will tweak it down the road. Invasion is a total blast, large maps with players and AI means you are always busy. Also great way to lvel up guns.

Maps

I will have a separate guide for the maps coming in a few days but I really like the maps. There are some that are okay, but overall they all look good and fit the new scheme of the 6v6 CoD. MW2019 I didn't like most of the maps, they were bland and frustrating, and then the night maps were stupid. They are quite the variety on their hands from Mexico to Chicago to Iran? to Russia to France? Who knows but theyre great.

Final Score

If the game took a few more of the best aspects of Vanguard and brought them in we would have a serious winner. I will give IW and Sledgehammer credit for drawing tons of inspiration from Vanguard, Tarkov, and BF games to push CoD into the future. Its pretty good, its a lot fun, but its better with buddies.

If you like CoD get this game, if you havent played CoD in awhile then get this game, if you hate of CoD then this one will not change your mind.