This is a quick review of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 for the Xbox 360. First off I'll just say that I think a lot of the reviews out there are extremely harsh to the point of being juvenile, not to say that I think this is one of the best FPSes out there. I'm also not much for single player, only playing an hour of two of it, as I'm much more in to playing a FPS in multi-player.

The single player part of the game that I did play was fun and interesting. It wasn't just a FPS with some story elements (although it felt gimmicky/cliche). It was a rather unique experience. I like little mini-games to keep me interested so I'm not being drowned by boredom just trying to get to the end. People say you can romp through the single-player in a matter of hours but I think that's probably a good thing. I spend almost half an hour on the part with the civilians in the airport just blowing the crap out of them. It's fun being a terrorist! If it's fun enough to do a part of a mission over and over again, someone did something right. The story did seem stupid. Enough of my friends beat it to know that the story is definitely not the highlight as the ending is abrupt and dreadful. But still, I don't play a FPS for the single player.

The multi-player's biggest downfall is the leveling system to me. The stat-tracking is okay even if it is only a few statistics and a bunch of awards for personal viewing. Personal titles and emblems are a nice tough even if they just sink in to the UI. But the lengthy grind to unlock weapons and others is just terrible. I'm a big fan of America's Army training/certs for weapons as opposed to just an XP grind. The leveling system would be a much better concept if they took a step to look at the next concept.

Player matching is almost non-existent. That's utter crap considering you can't browse for games. You pick a gametype (only one doesn't allow Live parties to join together), and it throws you in to a game with an empty slot and a good ping. I understand these aren't dedicated servers and so many Xbox games are like this since Halo, but this really needs to stop. You need to pick a whole slew of options considering the server you join is almost the deciding factor on whether you have fun or not. The only saving grace is that between games it constructs teams based on their scores from the last round of the last game. But when you're put against people twice your level, which is a huge advantage in not only skill but loadout selection as well, one guy usually dominates the other team while the rest of them just pick off stragglers. This accounts for almost half the games to be no fun.

Continuing with randomly selected people to run these dynamic servers, that's still a bad idea. People drop and join games constantly. Every other game the server player lags for a couple minutes, drops, then a new player is selected to host, he drops because he didn't want to wait the two minutes it took for that to happen, and the game ends because it gives up. Such an irritation.

The weapons are really nice. Each one feels pretty realistic as far as gaming goes and none of them really feel that overpowered. Some of them better than others. That is until you get some of the perks or unlock the better attachments. Akimbo and the M203 attachment should have some *real* drawbacks. But overall they feel balanced. I mostly enjoy the inaccuracies of some of the guns along with their recoils. It's deceptively fun trying to snipe someone with an assault rifle from half the map. It's at that point right before annoying would kick in. The first two death streak perks are terrible. Stealing the loadout of people who kill you after your fourth death is only useful if you don't have anything to choose from. So it's already useless by the time you get the second one. But then the second one makes 25% of your screen glow piss when you spawn for 10 seconds so you think about switching back. Since it's for 10 seconds, it's only useful if you're getting your ass handed to you. But if that's the case, double life just means being able to sprint away when you spawn. Martyrdom isn't nearly as useful as it used to be, but it's a hell of a lot useful than those joke streaks.

Options. Where are the options? Not being able to tweaks things like the UI, sounds, and graphics is something we stopped doing years ago. Maybe I've been playing PC games for a long time but not all TVs are the same. I had to play on a monitor so I could see most of the maps. On the TV in the living room, half of everything just blends together due to the colors and ambiance.

Speaking of the maps, they were nice at first. When I thought they were chaotic because I was unfamiliar with them. Once you get to to know them, you realize how ill though out a lot of them are. Most of the maps involve two regions where everything is rather open/lots of paths. And then two places that join them where there's a bottleneck and either one can be covered effectively with little effort. At the beginning it's also less apparent because you don't have a lot to work with. Once you have the goodies to camp well, it's abysmal. It turns in to a waiting game to see if someone can get lucky. They tried to help this in Search & Destroy by making the spawn points in most of the maps, in lack of a better term, retarded. I'm not sure what they missed, but having both teams almost equidistant from two places only one of them is supposed to defend is dumb. One attacks, one defends. It's more like both attacks and the other one can win the game through another objective. Half of the maps feels extremely similar and t feels like they just tried to stick as much stuff as they could in them. Not to mention it's obviously apparent these maps, except for a couple, weren't designed with a controller in mind.

This game suffers a lot from lack of interest in tactics and more emphasis on firepower and speed. Knowing where someone is and what they're doing means very little. Even if they don't know where you're at, there's a good chance they'll pull out some shenanigans. When you feel robbed, it's very frustrating. And robbing others when you know they are extremely superior in terms of skill even gets pathetic. The kill cam really adds a level of ridiculous to it since you have to watch it again.

I'm not a big fan of being able to hold on to kill streaks for as long as you want. The randomness of the care packages makes this even more super annoying. Picking off the same noob a few times and using a care package to get an AC-130 on a deciding round is total horse shit. The game has enough random, lucky bullshit going on and the ability to exploit kill streaks sets it over the top. The Ground War gametype becomes unplayable at higher levels because of the killstreaks. It's like a dice roll to see who gets to end the game 50-3. You don't even try. You just wait to see if lady luck has graced you for the round.

There should be a grace period for customizing your loadouts once you join a server. So many times I've been stuck with a crappy loadout because I joined a server while waiting for it to finally connect to one. Which is funny because the intermissions between games are so ridiculous. Unless the server is fun, I'd rather leave and join another one because it takes a full minute to get another game going. I know Xbox Live is all about the trash talk, but I can't fill up a whole minute of banter even with material ready ahead of time.

Overall I felt the game was pretty good but I was more driven by the leveling system to keep playing than the actual fun factor. If I get a chance to play it on the PC I'll see if it feels better, but the Xbox 360 version was only worth a rental. Out of the 20 hours I played, two eight-hour sessions and a four-hour session, I probably had fun for a total of 10 hours.