Get ready to run and shoot and run and shoot and run and shoot and… wait what the hell happened to the game? Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 is easily the most shooting gallery affected game I’ve ever played. The running through corridors and shooting enemies who appear in said corridors never really gets interesting. It gets the adrenaline going, gets the hoo-rah going, but never really anything beyond that. The story may as well be non-existent and I’m not going to discuss the mall scene, because in comparison to Homefront the entire sequence is apparently tame by videogame standards and practices.
The experience of Modern Warfare 2 is really the experience of running and shooting and then turning it onto the hardest mode and finding out the game’s not about running and shooting, but hiding behind buildings and slowly sniping the silly shooting galleries you endlessly face. The incredible about face the game takes as the difficulty ramps up seems a bit strange, since the pacing of the game becomes monotonous, entirely bogged down with mindless kill drones that you have to kill while droning on. The skew of the experience due to variable difficulty levels is something that’s a bit sad, since the expectation of being entertained pervades the industry. Rather than challenge the individual, designers are instead satisfied with monotony.
What’s worse is that when games have five difficulty levels, tweaking needs to occur for each, extending the necessary playtesting. There are many games that clearly do little or no playtesting on variable difficulties, and for a game like Modern Warfare 2, where the experience itself is supposed to continually be testing your adaptability to the next shooting gallery, the necessity of difficulty levels seems specious at best. To make a player better at a game involves knowing how to adjust the challenge, and few games in the first-person shooter genre have any idea how, mostly because making enemies more difficult means creating better AI, not meatier opponents and squishier players.
The idea of difficulty settings has replaced such necessity however. Need a difficult first-person shooter? You die in one hit, the enemies are bullet sponges! Except this is the problem and exactly what Modern Warfare 2 suffers from. The enemies aren’t playing any smarter, you simply have to because you’re exponentially weaker than you once were. Lauded games in the single player are rare because of such defects, but because there is an effectively easy out, AI scripting has fallen to the wayside. Modern Warfare 2 is average in all the ways that most first-person shooters are average, and the AI is just so noticeable because of the shooting gallery effect the game creates, with nothing effectively distracting you from it.
Recommended: No