Xbox 360 Review - Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2

Inifinity Ward set the bar high with Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare and set a new benchmark for storytelling in first-person shooters by using the genre's immersive qualities to great effect. Like Valve and their Half-Life series, events always unfold through the eyes of the character which greatly improves the emotional and dramatic impact of those events. Fortunately, Infinity Ward have taken what they learned from Call of Duty 4 and improved on their already winning formula with grander set pieces, more thrilling action sequences, and more of the intense, emotional moments that everyone so loved in the first game. They certainly know how to tell a story, even if it's fairly nonsensical.

The major faults in the single player campaign is the story itself. It kicks off with a bang, introducing new characters and bringing back the SAS hero from the first game, John "Soap" Mactavish, now in a mentor role, much like Captain Price in Call of Duty 4. The story ramps up with the infamous "No Russian" mission (which I will get to later), but eventually it just turns into a ridiculous mess. Without giving anything anyway, once you beat the game you'll be left with plenty of unanswered questions and some poorly explained plot developments. That aside, I did say that Infinity Ward knows how to tell a story, and I was enthralled all the way through, even when I was unsure of what was going on.

The action is as intense as ever. This is another high point from Call of Duty 4 that the developers improved upon in Modern Warfare 2 with a bigger arsenal and a variety of new locations. The shooter mechanics are as solid as ever and the new environments only compliment them. There seems to be more stealth sections than the first game, but contrary to the normal taboo of stealth sections in action games, they offer some of the greatest moments in the game. One of the most fun additions to Modern Warfare 2 is the riot shield and figuring out how to take down an enemy wielding one. It's pretty terrifying when someone is rushing at you and deflecting all of your shots, but the way it forces you to think of your feet is just good game design.

In the end, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 boasts a great single player campaign, but the convoluted story keeps it from being amazing. Some of the twists exist solely for shock value, making the story as a whole far less intelligent than the first game, and making this the only section of my Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 review to not get a perfect score.

When I write reviews, like with my Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 review, I'm always hard pressed to think of an accurate way to describe good visuals. If a game suffers graphically, that's easy to point out. But in this day and age, graphical power has gotten so good, the only way to describe visuals like this is "life-like." The locations, character models, and textures on everything look fantastic and show an obvious improvement over the game's 2007 predecessor. The game's framerate always runs smooth, even when in the most intense firefights.

Possibly the most impressive of all the visuals are the character animations. I'm a sucker for good character animations. In a game like this, which relies on realism to support its immersive quality, stiff or limited character animations can really ruin it for me. That's why it's so refreshing (and satisfying on a purely visceral level) to watch characters get blown backwards or spin around when I blast them with a shotgun. War is hell, and Infinity Ward knows it.