This game is breaking sales records like mad, 4.7 million copies on day one, people were pretty excited for this game. Even some news about broken street dates and all kinds of shenanigans. I’m going to break the review into single and multiplayer because the difference is really night and day.

Single Player

[Author Note: The single player campaign is pretty hard to talk about without hitting spoilers at all I may disclose environments, but not locations, and impact of scenarios but not details of the plot, I apologize if I've said something that you would consider a spoiler]

Wow, what an experience, the action here is was totally relentless, it feels like they took the 5 good episodes of a season of 24, cut everything to do with character development, tied it to a first person shooter and shipped it. Sounds great doesn’t it? Well it’s not really.

With regards to the story it seemed like the motto here was shock the player with some very extraordinary circumstances. The background for the most part is delivered between missions through dialog played over top of a map showing where your mission is taking you, I found them forgettable for the most part. The rest of the story is delivered through the mission itself, and the banter from your commanding officer. The story itself is epic when it gets right down to it, there is a lot going on, and there certainly can be a lot of emotion to be felt there… including ‘discomfort’ which I find to be an unusual word to use when reviewing a game. This leads me to my biggest problem with this game. The entire single player experience on the normal difficulty is completely in roughly 5 hours, thats way too short, the effort to make it intense as it was tells me that it wasn’t just a toss in, but it wasn’t long enough to be of value in my opinion.

You aren’t given much of an opportunity to build a relationship with these characters so the plot as it relates to these characters doesn’t really have an impact like you’d expect. I had the same relationship to the named AI fodder as I did with plot characters, and in most cases the player character as well. That was definitely a big detractor for me, a lot of … “oh this is happening now?.. oh well” moments.

As far as gameplay goes this is more or less your standard fare first person shooter, they’ve introduced a “snap targetting” system, which essentially translates to; if you’re close to a target when you look down your sights, you’ll be on the target by the time you get there which can make for some very quick combat, but a lot of the time it feels like cheating. It actually got to the point of annoyance for me because it seemed at points that they overloaded areas with baddies beyond what I felt were their capacity. On top of that they seemed to spawn in waves from areas you may have already cleared which was sort of frustrating. Some of my favorite parts of the game are when you are asked to breach some walls with enemies behind them, you go into a “bullet-time” sequence for a few seconds when you have to scan around to shoot bad guys, while avoiding hostages and what not, very good moments for sure.

Some of the environments are original and very fun, for example, one of the missions takes you into the middle of suburbia and your moving from house to house locking things down, and various objectives in a block between restaurants pretty fast paced I think that was my favorite mission.

I would have a really hard time recommending this game to anyone like myself who primarily plays games for the single player experience. For the most part I avoid playing online with strangers, mostly because hearing kids yell into their microphones is never fun to me. It’s just too short, and kind of “meh”, but go ahead and rent it for the epic-ness that it is. definitely worth $5 for the weekend and not $60.

Mulitplayer

It wouldn’t be fair to simply discuss the single player for this game, it is clear (painfully for single player fans if you’ve read the rest of my review) that the focus of this title is the multiplayer.

I put close to 20 hours into it so far mostly into a mode called “ground wars” which is simply a mix of team deathmatch and domination game modes. The maps were solid most with some form of vertical element to them all of them were easy to pick up but usually fairly tricky to find the hot spots.

The attachment/perk carrot is still as compelling as it was in the predecessor, and they come a pretty steady pace early on so you feel like you’re succeeding even in defeat. For those who don’t know, as you level up your character and use weapons and attachments you gain access to new weapons and attachments, like a new machine gun, or one of several types of scope attachments, silencers, shotgun or grenade launchers, heartbeat monitors etc.. so you end up with lots of options when it comes to customizing your load out for each map. My personal favorite load out at the moment is to equip the bling perk (2 attachments on your primary weapon), I use the heartbeat monitor, and a silencer on my m4, and for a secondary weapon a silenced shotgun… I go sneaking around trying to shoot people in the back… very fun… with this example I hope to demonstrate that Ive customized my load out to suit my play style… I could have easily gone with sniper rifles, quick reloads, recoil reduction and what not and may depending on my mood for the day! In any case this level of customization adds so much fun to the game.

The match making isn’t great, when I was getting started I saw a full team of people less than level 5 playing against a full group of players closer to level 20… very one sided, that seems to have leveled off as there are more players playing, and it can be kind of slow to get into games, there is a fair amount of drops it seems, and usually only happens when you’ve only got 30 mins to play or something but all in all, these can be forgiven. The game lacks a ‘mute all’ button which would have made my day, I spend the first part of each round filtering out the people with crazy background noise or screaming kids… I really hate that about online console gaming. Ahhh well.

In terms of multiplayer this game is awesome, the recommendation is simple here, if you like first person shooters for online play, this is likely the game of the year for you… If you’re like me and only kind of interested in the multiplayer to play once in a while, I think you’ll still get your moneys worth out of this one, it is a good time to be sure, and probably shouldn’t be missed.

Pretty busy week, and might be last burst week before the holidays the only title left after this on my radar is “The Saboteur”.

New Super Mario Bros. Wii: I just picked this up, and the girlfriend and I played through the first world, from what I’ve seen so far having more players on the screen is a lot like having more baddies on the screen, I’ve been bumped into so many holes its not even funny, that was just with 2 of us, 4 players might be a little out of hand. In any case, it’s more side scrolling Super Mario action, if that’s what you’re looking for, you won’t be disappointed.

Assassin’s Creed II: Ubisoft’s much anticipated sequel to what I thought was a mediocre original. Ubi claims to have corrected every issue I had with the title, and I believe them, unlike movies, sequels tend to be better anyway, and if they fix the pacing, I’m sure I’ll have a good time with this. My only concern is the length of the game, I haven’t heard much about it in this regard but I doubt there will be a ton of replayability in this one. Regardless, I will be grabbing this on Tuesday.

Left 4 Dead 2: L4D2! sometimes you just want to unload bullets into fodder… thats what L4D is about and the sequel though it may not be a huge departure from the original, it should not disappoint when the need to destroy zombies arises.

Those the big ones on my list, but there are a few other notables that might be right for the right niché.

Tony Hawk Ride: I’ve never shied away from peripherals when they seemed reasonable, this one… I’m not so sure, sensors on the sides for pushing and for grabs, and motion sensors for the orientation of the board, but from what I know of skateboarding, I don’t know how they’re going to get all the good stuff into the amount of moves they’ll be able to track. I’m going to pass on this one, but I’d love to try it I’m just not sure how heh.

LEGO Indiana Jones 2: The Adventure Continues: I played one of the LEGO games on the original xbox, I think it was star wars one, I can certainly see and appreciate the charm, and the humor of the LEGO titles, but the gameplay traditionally hasn’t done it for me. If you’ve liked the rest of the LEGO series of games I’m sure this won’t stray far from the formula and it should be a good time.

God of War Collection: rehash of  God of War 1 & 2 for the ps3, this is interesting to me since I only played part of the first one, and didn’t finish it, didn’t even play the second one. I liked what I played though. I’m not a fan of the timing though, I may pick this up if I’m hurting for some action after the holidays, and after Darksiders, and before God of War III.

Like I mentioned, pretty hectic week for releases, but this might be the end of it for the season which saddens me a bit the last few months playing and talking about games has been awesome.

PS: Review for COD:MW2 is on the way soon.

Further evidence that online petitions and boycotts are joke.

https://steamcommunity.com/groups/BOYCOTTMW2/members

I skimmed the list, and I didn’t see a single page with people online that didn’t have at least 1 person playing MW2…. this is incredibly funny to me… at least leave the group so you leave the rest with some credibility at least.

Just terrible