The Call of Duty franchise has always been one of my favorites, especially when the original Modern Warfare was released. I play these games for the multi-player aspects not the single player. To be honest I don’t think I have completed a Call of Duty story since the second one. Modern Warfare wasn’t completely revolutionary but t gave multi-player goals, and achievements really making multi-player a lot of fun.
So when I heard Modern Warfare 2 was coming I was defiantly ready to see the improvements they had made to the game. Immediately after doing some research I found that many people were complaining about the lack of dedicated servers. (For those of you that don’t know, a dedicated server is a server hosted by a third party that a person or clan pays for, and there for have admin control over) For me this meant that there would be a lack of consistency, I wouldn’t be playing with the same guys I would usually play with and that didn’t quite feel right but I got passed it and bought the game anyway.
My multi-player experience I’m sure was like most peoples, jump in to a game play a few rounds, and host disconnects, and then find another game to jump in to. During prime time hours this works great. There was little to no trouble in finding games. When less prime time hours came around though, I was out of luck. If I did find a game, it would be with a host somewhere in Russia and the lag was horrid. Another issue I found right away was that if I wanted to play with my clan mates from Canada and New York, I would have to deal with significant lag. Though that’s all technical stuff and says nothing about the game itself.
The multi-player game when you have a decent connection is actually a really good time. All the weapons attachments and new perks added make the game a lot more dynamic. Combat really goes vertical in this game too, you can jump from roof top to roof top, really making this game feel a bit like parkour, and actually really cool. The kill streak rewards take out a lot of the constant air strike spam we saw in the first game. New grenades and throwing knives make for interesting kills. The riot shield though a bit silly actually can be a lot of fun (and it serves as a nice anti-hacker tool). Over all I really had more fun with this game then I thought I would. But there are still a few things I really hate. First IWnet, possibly one of the most annoying things about this game is connecting to a game then half way through the host rage quits, then the game ends. Hackers are here and there, but in my opinion they shouldn’t be there in the first place. I really don’t think I played more than five minutes with a hacker in the first game. I don’t blame Valve so much for this; the VAC is a great system for the most part. I just still feel that dedicated servers would allow admin to ban most hackers. Still the game is a blast. But I don’t think it will be my long term FPS, I have high hopes for Battlefield: Bad Company 2. Only time will tell.
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tough but fair