Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II (2022)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r72GP1PIZa0

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II (2022) is a textbook example of why it both sucks and doesn’t suck to spend your time with a CoD campaign. On the good side, the presentation is slick, making cutscenes and in-game visuals a lovely spectacle. Also the gunplay is reliable, performant, and fun. MWII’s character movement is also pretty sophisticated, offering a very understandable kit of speeds, capabilities, and techniques that reward mastery yet don’t distract from the aiming and shooting.

Amazing, right? Best CoD ever? Well no. The main campaign spends so much of its time in this rigid, linear-to-a-fault, hellscape of gross politics where you’re constantly being chaperoned and rarely cut free to enjoy the potential of a more free dynamic and fun sandbox that exists here. It kind of feels like that solid core gameplay is never really taken advantage of. The latter half of the game does finally begin to break free in some genuinely fun missions, but since that takes a few hours to really get to, it feels too late by the time it arrives.

Fortunately, the multiplayer doesn’t have as many of those burdens—and in fact shows some genuinely interesting potential for the future of CoD (and maybe even shooters more broadly). Since the season two update, Warzone 2.0 has shifted to meet player demands, with the update pruning unpopular decisions such as the 2v2 gulag and dramatically more involved item management. But CoD’s more creative ideas are let loose in DMZ, a PvPvE game mode now spanning three unique maps with a wide variety of spontaneous PvE and PvP scenarios ready to break out at any moment, unscripted and full of potential. And with the series’ first-ever raid in the MWII multiplayer, CoD is shaping up to be the kind of stat-free co-op shooter that has been sorely missing in recent times. — Claire Jackson