This is the third year in a row I’ve been lucky enough to review a Call of Duty title; I found Black Ops: Cold War thrilling and Vanguard serviceable. I’ve been playing ever since the original Call of Duty: Modern Warfare became a smash hit in 2007. Now that the sub-series has had its reboot, I was excited to dive into Modern Warfare II, expecting an all-out great time from the most popular FPS franchise today. So, how did the 2022 offering pan out?

Since this is a game about shooting, let’s get the throwaway story out of the way. Notables from the original iteration, such as Captain Price, Soap, Gaz, and Ghost are present and like every modern-setting Call of Duty before it, there are deep-implicated issues in the Middle East. It’s up to the SAS to clean house to prevent a nuclear conflict. This “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” approach got tired ten years ago, but as I mentioned, nobody plays CoD for the story.

There are several things to expect with a Call of Duty that Modern Warfare II follows: the guns feel great to control, there are missions dedicated to sniping using an AC-130 and utilizing a vehicle, and it’s a brief one-and-done experience with over-the-top moments that are designed to stick in your head. The visuals are lifelike. You may have seen the viral video of the Amsterdam level. It really does look that stunning. These franchise staples will never leave, for better and for worse.

Sadly, the missions are an absolute slog to power through. As Call of Duty campaigns take a quality-over-quantity approach, I have to wonder what went wrong in the design process to make the single-player experience so positively lifeless, busted, and formulaic. NPCs talk over each other, fail to progress as scripted, move with less fluidity than they did in the original Modern Warfare games, and enemies are either predictable or beefed-up in armor that takes entirely too many hits to feel satisfying. Pop-in is prevalent, I’d be much more immersed without it, as the game is as gorgeous as can be otherwise.

These frustrations in Modern Warfare II are most-felt in the missions where you aren’t behind a gun in guerilla warfare. The sniping mission is almost copy/paste from the brilliant “All Ghillied Up”, except you’re mindlessly picking off enemies from afar with no gusto or bravado. I even had a scripted event fail twice after painstakingly lining up the perfect shot. The AC-130 mission frequently intersperses civilians with enemies, punishing you for waiting too long with game over screens thanks to laser-accurate RPGs.

The vehicle mission made me want to tear my hair out as you are tasked with following a truck that drops instant-kill mines, which you cannot reach unless you are going full speed. Oh, and you have to shoot them whilst in a moving car. When I finally took out this mine truck, I jumped to another car to car-jack it, but the game thought I landed on the ground and I watched the game over screen occur while I landed on the new car. The infuriating bugs and insipid level design just don’t compute to me, from the same developers of the 10 out of 10 experience the original Modern Warfares provided.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II is a $69.99 game. It is also a game with a campaign devoid of fun, a sense of accomplishment, or gameplay polish. If you’re looking to subject yourself to the worst Call of Duty campaign experience to date, this is the game for you. It baffles the mind that a AAA studio can fumble this badly with one of the highest budgets in all of media. Yet Infinity Ward did just that. This is another blunder to add to Blizzard’s list in recent years.

A PS5 review code for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II was provided by Activision Blizzard for this review.

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Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II

$69.99

3

Score

3.0/10

Pros

• Best-in-Class Visuals
• Guns Feel Strong

Cons

• Littered with Bugs
• Atrocious Level Design
• Insufferable Sniping/AC-130 Missions
• Inconsistent Difficulty
• Awful Narrative