I have no idea how to start this one so we’re just going to jump right in. Lots of people were complaining about the new Modern Warfare 2‘s multiplayer gameplay being a “sluggish, unresponsive step back” during the beta but unless you’re a tryhard that bunny hops and slides everywhere you won’t notice how they’ve reduced the ability to abuse some of those movement options. The multiplayer still feels like Call of Duty, primarily the 2019 Modern Warfare reboot, but unfortunately the game is marred with severe technical issues and some questionable design choices that at time of writing are severely hampering the game’s opening week.
We’re going to talk about the most relevant updates to the gameplay mechanics first and then go into the technical stuff later, as I’m assuming the latter will be fixed in the future. The strangest change is probably the perk system, which seems to change with every Call of Duty despite the concept of “three or more passive bonuses you can select for your character ” sounding so simple. In Modern Warfare 2 you get four perks (two blue, one orange, and one green) but only the blue ones are active at the start of every match and eventually the orange and green ones will “activate” as the game goes on. The logic behind this seems to be that they want more powerful perks to not be active right away, but the orange and green perks unlock so quickly you’ll basically be online within two or three minutes of a game anyway. I saw people say that in the first beta the perks took a long time to unlock so Infinity Ward reduced the time it took for it to happen, but if our only two options are “takes too long” or “so short it’s basically irrelevant” then I think we should just take the third choice and not have in-game activation at all.
Next we have the gun customization, or “Gunsmith” as CoD likes to call it, which continues to boggle the mind of my 2009 self that we had to pick a special perk to be allowed TWO attachments in the original Modern Warfares and now we’re drowning in scopes, grips, barrels, suppressors, etc. There’s a lot to like here in the new Gunsmith, from the usual variety of attachments to the loving detail in each gun’s rendering, but the best new feature is that attachments are unlocked cross-weapon. No longer will gun unlock trees be cluttered with twenty different kinds of scopes! No longer will you need to unlock the red dot sight more than once! It’s a brave new world… on paper. While attachments are now semi-universal there is the small problem of actually needing to now use every single gun to get every attachment, rather than just focusing on the guns you like. More on the need to do that in a second, but while it’s nice to pick up a new gun and be able to put a scope on it essentially immediately, the scopes that you have at your disposal are limited based on which guns you’ve played with. This isn’t such a huge problem if you’re a devoted fan that was going to grind out every gun to max level anyway, but if you’re someone who was just going to stick to the few guns they actually like it becomes a bigger issue.
Speaking of grinding out guns, the Gunsmith’s cross-unlocking goes a step further with one other new feature: receivers. As shown above many guns are no longer unlocked through leveling up your profile and instead you unlock a new “receiver” for the gun’s body by leveling up individual guns, which in turn unlocks an entirely new gun. You’ll still get a handful of new weapons from leveling your profile like in every other CoD game, but to get specialized gun variants or even some classics you’ll have to unlock them through using other guns. Some of these variants were in the 2019 Modern Warfare as well, for example the LMG variants of the AK and the AUG which were made by just slapping drum magazines on the aforementioned weapon, but now they’re standalone guns in their own right. Unfortunately this once again penalizes players who don’t want to use one type of gun just to unlock another, as you need to do things like use a battle rifle to unlock the MP5 (something SMG players love to do is spend twelve hours playing with a low ammo capacity weapon), an LMG to unlock an assault rifle, or two marksman rifles to get to sniper rifle unlocks. On the one hand it’s really cool to see a gun “evolve” into these variants, but on the other I really hate that I have to use weapon classes I despise just to get to guns I actually like.
And I’m using the guns I despise now rather than later because of how overtuned a lot of things are in Modern Warfare 2 right now. Time to kill is ridiculously quick, most of the time, with even basic pistols killing things in two or three hits and things like marksman rifles, shotguns, or sniper rifles essentially always killing in one hit as long as you’re hitting anything above the waist. I have to imagine some of these will be nerfed in the coming weeks, much like how the 725 shotgun was nerfed in 2019, and since I need to use this overpowered nonsense to unlock weapons I’d much rather be using it’s in my and everyone else’s best interest to take advantage of it. To be clear I don’t mind low time to kill as long as it’s consistent, but as people get better and better with these “one shot, one kill” weapons I’m sure the hammer will come down just to make the game more enjoyable for everyone.
Outside of the usual game modes you’re probably expecting by this point (Team Deathmatch, Domination, Search and Destroy, etc) there’s a few new modes that they’ve added to Modern Warfare 2 with mixed results. Invasion is essentially CoD‘s answer to Titanfall‘s primary game mode, a 20 vs 20 PvP match that also includes 20 AI soldiers on either side. It plays out basically as a more crowded Ground War mode with big maps with lots of vehicles and violence, and while it’s a great way to level up (since AI kills count the same as player kills for points) the AI doesn’t count as kills for your killstreaks and are frankly just a waste of ammo to fight. Meanwhile Ground War returns but with much better map design in my opinion, with many more buildings that you can fully explore and use to easily avoid the vehicles that were such a scourge in 2019’s Ground War. In fact most map design in Modern Warfare 2 is better than its 2019 predecessor, with generally less horrific wide open spaces and more variety of close and medium range arenas in each map.
The other new mode is Prisoner Rescue, which acts more like a hardcore version of Capture the Flag than a mode akin to what you might encounter in Rainbow Six. There are two hostages on the map and the attackers are awarded a lot of points for each they rescue while the defenders are awarded half as many points for each they retain. Outside of the obvious lack of terrain destruction the mode differs from Rainbow Six in two key areas: first while there are no respawns there are revives for even when a player is “dead,” which cuts down on the pressure a little as long as you aren’t the last man standing. Second there is no set up phase, so the defenders are immediately at a disadvantage with at least one hostage that spawns far away from them (practically equidistant to the attackers) and have to make a mad dash to prevent at least a 50% deficit at the end of the match. This is all to say it isn’t a horrible mode, but it’s not very well thought out and really doesn’t work for how Call of Duty is innately designed. I wonder if there will be future changes to this mode that improve the spawn location to be more advantageous to the defenders, but until then it seems too attacker favored for me.
Warzone 2.0 and the new “DMZ” mode aren’t out yet so the only thing left to talk about before we get to the game’s mess of technical problems is the Spec Ops mode. Revitalized in 2019’s Modern Warfare to feature four player co-op it is now back as just a two player co-op experience like it was in the original Modern Warfare 2. There’s only three missions so far and they are framed as tangentially related to the campaign, complete with one that’s a “going dark” style mode which I quite enjoy, and the experience you earn for completing these missions carries over to your multiplayer profile which can be a nice way to grind those weapons you hate. However the AI is dumber than a box of rocks, generally just blindly running past you or just completely blanking on how to handle you hiding on a roof. To make up for this they do have armored units and juggernauts, which I think is to the detriment of player enjoyment because armor was one of the worst things about the campaign and juggernauts take six rockets to kill. But I guess if it didn’t have a few roadblocks we wouldn’t have to try hard to get those three star scores, I just hope future Spec Ops missions (which I assume they’re going to make) won’t have juggernauts.
And now it’s time for the reason why this game is getting review bombed on Steam and Metacritic: the technical problems. Hopefully these will all be resolved in the near future and anyone reading this is a few months will be able to say no one is talking about them any more, but here in the moment the game is honestly a bit of a mess. The crashing is the most consistent problem and it is somehow even worse now than it was during early campaign access, as last week it was only crashing once every two hours or so and now in campaign it seems to be crashing every five to fifteen minutes. I haven’t had as many crashes as other people have in the multiplayer but it does happen and it’s always frustrating, especially since there doesn’t appear to be an obvious gameplay trigger that causes the crash. It’s clearly one particular set of files though as that exact same number of files and the exact same size keep getting identified and redownloaded if you validate after every crash, so hopefully that will help them identify the problem.
Then there’s the things that have broken the game so hard that they’ve had to be removed to fix it post-launch. Pinging locations to send your allies information was active for two hours before someone discovered an exploit where you could ping enemies while dead and that would mark them forever. The weapon tuning I mentioned on the above picture was disabled to reduce crashing, which doesn’t seem to have helped. God only knows what other things are going to be removed or delayed in release while they’re fixing these issues and the ones that follow, but it’s rough to see multiple key features disabled for days or more at a time, especially with no word about when these problems may be fixed.
The UI is still a mess as well, though I will acknowledge that the UI is at least easier to navigate than it was in the beta. However this doesn’t stop the many, many glitches that affect the UI, generally in the vein of the incorrect icons showing up on various parts of the interface. The game will routinely show you with the wrong perks equipped, the wrong weapons selected, blank squares where weapon unlocks should be, or just won’t show that you’ve unlocked something at all until after you restart the game. During the game searching and pre-game lobby every player on screen will be shown holding your default starting weapon rather than their own build, and players will sometimes be stuck showing as skins that they haven’t selected or even unlocked. Other players have reported being unable to use killstreaks in-game or getting stuck on invisible geometry, straight up being unable to find a match until you switch to playing co-op, and you also can’t see the orange or green perks of enemies that kill you in the kill-cam, which I have to assume is unintentional given everything else. I’ve also had the game map flicker in and out of existence throughout matches, though that only started happening after I installed the latest drivers so I’m willing to blame that on someone other than Infinity Ward right now.
There were a lot of people online singing the praises of Modern Warfare 2 as feeling like a more “complete” or “more rewarding” launch than games like Halo Infinite or Battlefield 2042 was on its debut, but with all of these technical issues it almost puts them on the same footing in my mind. While the gameplay itself is as good as ever and the updates to the Gunsmith creates some interesting possibilities, the severe number of glitches that either make the UI unreadable or the game itself unplayable make this a very shaky launch for a CoD game. I hate that we’re in a world where games are rushed out the door in an incomplete state and the developers have to scramble to keep everyone engaged while they fix the things that plague the launch for the next one to three months. It wouldn’t even be that bad with all the UI bugs I mentioned if the constant crashes get fixed, even if it’s still inexcusable, but until the crashing is resolved I would recommend investing your time in a more stable game.
