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.
