[Consol Games] Review: Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 | This Week in Business

[Douma]

We have a Critical Consensus recurring feature that rounds up other people's reviews, staff Game of the Year write-ups, and our Why I Love series of developer-penned pieces on games, so we're not completely devoid of subjective assessments of game quality. We've even toyed with a non-traditional substitute for reviews.

But a proper review section? We've never had one in more than 20 years of GamesIndustry.biz. And as a video game site, that's made us a bit of an outlier.

So we're changing that this week as we run our very first formal review of a game. And we thought there would be no better way to debut the new section than with a review of the very biggest game of 2022, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2.

Modern Warfare 2 looks absolutely stunning. The tough cool guys with guns have never looked tougher or cooler. And their guns? Forget about it. They're gunnier than ever.

Our favorite soldier Ghost hasn't looked this totally badass since he first appeared all the way back in Modern Warfare 2. I particularly like the way his skullface tooth drool dribbles down his chin and onto his chest. Attention to detail like that goes a long way to making Modern Warfare 2 the most modern warfare yet.

Ever since the PSone days, my standard for a first-person shooter has always been that it has to be fun to shoot the weapons in a completely empty room. Partly because the PSone didn't have the horsepower to make other kinds of rooms, and partly because I can think of no downsides to making guns into symbols of pure entertainment even when stripped of any narrative context.

Having millions of players' only associations with guns be joyful ones is probably a perfectly healthy thing and does not at all intersect with the interests of the gun lobby keeping us from passing any kind of meaningful gun control, and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 does a fantastic job of capturing that joy.

This Call of Duty comes through loud and clear thanks to excellent sound design that effectively strikes a balance between being impactful but not so vivid as to make you really think about what's happening to human flesh and organs as you spray endless bullets through each environment and enemy.

Kudos to the voice actors as well, because the cries of pain and enemy death rattles likewise make it clear you've hit your targets, but stop just short of echoing through your dreams and haunting your waking hours, creating a prison of memory from which there is no escape. There's a thriving and active Call of Duty community, so you'll always have plenty of Call of Duty fans to hang out with at any hour, day or night!

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