Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II (2022) is the sequel to the re-imagined Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (2019). The game features some frenetic firefights, lavish visuals and more spy-on-spy action than you can shake a stick at. Despite all these qualities, it is perhaps one of the most disappointing Call of Duty entries in years and serves as a testament to how Infinity Ward has lost their way and need to regroup. The game fails at almost every single game play objective it set out to achieve and, consequently, misses an opportunity to catapult itself to the upper echelon of contemporary, AAA first person shooters.

Starting with the positives, CoD: MW II has truly beautiful, atmospheric and performant next generation graphics. Volumetric lightning, HDR, character models and map architecture are all top notch and it is a joy to finally see CoD take its place as a graphics powerhouse befitting from such a venerable, AAA studio. The game's voice acting and soundtrack are excellent and global sound effects like ancillary sounds/bullet travel help create a believable environment. Gun play is sublime, with punchy, differentiated weapons and a variety of applicable add-ons. CoD includes a battery of game play modes including singleplayer, multiplayer, co-op and more. The game is truly performant and netted a respectable, upscaled 95 fps @ 4K high on a 6 year old Radeon VII.

Unfortunately, that's where the positives end. The title suffers from staid, repetitive missions, frustratingly over-long set pieces, absurd game play events and perhaps one of the most foolhardy plot lines I have ever had the misfortune of experiencing. While you get the usual fare in this game, including A-120 strikes, Republique-style ally guided missions and the plethora of sniper missions/night vision assaults, the game has been assembled, lacking even the most basic game play testing. Enemies will spawn behind you, walk through walls or camp behind objects, only to shoot you as you cross into their field of view. At moderate-high difficulty levels, this type of AI programming and map design prove extremely frustrating and unfair, requiring multiple play-throughs to complete. The AI vacillates between bouts of telepathy, x-ray vision and abject stupidity, often being able to see you in an adjacent room, through three walls and other times missing a pile of dead cohorts just a few feet away.

It is this terrible mission design and piss-poor AI that punishes CoD: MW II so much, since the game is based on numerous stealth/avoidance missions. What should be a tense game of cat and mouse quickly ends up becoming a litany of AI exploits instead to simply progress to the next malformed set piece. At one point, while trying to stealthily infiltrate the Mexican drug lord Sin Nombre's mansion, I acquired the attention of several guards. I happened to be in a bathroom, with no windows, on the second floor at the time. The guards were all on the first floor, outside of the structure, not that it mattered.

The game quick saved the occurrence and I soon found myself dying over and over and unable to reset the stealth parameters of the mission. How did I bypass the issue? I camped the bathroom, and shot henchmen as they teleported into the bathroom and walked through the door. After slaying about 20 goons, I had created an almost impossible to traverse, 4-foot pile of bodies clogging the bathroom door, which protected me from the incoming hail of gunfire and grenades. I completed my duties and calmly proceeded with the mission. Easy? Sure. Satisfying? Hardly.

Unfortunately this happens over and over and over in CoD: MW II. Stealth is terribly realized and almost always it's easier to cheese the AI than actually play the game as intended. For example, during the final mission against Hassan, the final boss, you are disarmed and forced to play cat-and-mouse with two of his annoyingly cheesy, armored goons. They have automatic weapons and you're forced to dash around, hoovering all the ingredients you can find so you can craft rudimentary tools and weapons. Unfortunately, the AI glitched and the enemies soon kept running behind me, impossible to shake.

No amount of ducking behind corners, memorized quick-play bomb defusing key presses or flat out sprinting kept them away from me, as they would simply pop into existence and teleport right next to me, firing away. I beat them both by hiding behind a door as they impotently punched it trying to incapacitate me. I calmly defused the bomb and then sprinted past them when I was done, to find the missing materials I needed to craft the necessary tools and weapons. This happens *all the time*. It felt like a dullard type of an FPS Elden Ring.

The plot fares no better with a primitive, uninteresting tale about multinational super spy, wokejob strike teams, stolen stinger missiles and a mismatched, Frankensteined quilt of enemies including Iran, Mexican drug cartels, Shadow Company and the US military. Oh and of course the Russians are in there too. You play as Gaz or Soap but skip any lengthy bouts as the infinitely cooler elder statesmen Price and Ghost. You kill most targets as your AI stands behind impotently as you proceed from one inane mission to the next, often undoing the very thing you accomplished minutes earlier. This is especially egregious when you spend two different missions capturing dangerously murderous Iranian terrorists and Mexican drug lords, only to be forced to release them without any information, simply because they demand you do so in the name of legality and justice.

Multiplayer is no better with an abusive, rotten environment, predicated on feeding whales an ever-larger stash of multiplayer trash that they can use to show off as they play in multiplayer matches. Want to jump in and experience intelligent matchmaking that will pit you against similarly-skilled enemies? That is a pipe dream. In over 3/4 of my 20 online matches I routinely faced teams of 1250+ level players against my rag-tag squad of single-digit noobs, wannabes and mid-level players. Do you want to play a game where you can craft a build, choose the weapon of your choice and have fun? Forget about having that kind of freedom in Cod: MW II. You start using demonstrably weaker weapons and unlock newer, stronger, more accurate, farther-striking weapons after sickening amounts of MMO-like grind. Mods, perks, and even the dearth of decent cosmetic items are all locked behind Great Wall of China-sized walls of insurmountable grind. Heaven help you if you jump into this game a few years after release.

To level and unlock new loot, you need to accrue experience, and win matches but it's precisely the lack of necessary tools that will hamper your ability to do so. Players all ramble on in group chat, to the detriment of tense, interesting games. You find yourself muting everyone, so you can hear important auditory cues and excise what little bit of social interaction this game has available. Most players are toxic and those few that aren't, don't stick around long enough to help make the game more bearable. CoD: MW II is badly assembled, causing me to crash half a dozen times. While some were simple fixes that required a quick execution of Task Manager, two particular crashes lead to black screens that required a system restart. Worse, the restarts damaged the graphics driver and I was forced to enact a MS System Restore (thankfully) to salvage the system.

With better and more mature/coherent plotting, more forgiving and rewarding multiplayer and better attention to the campaign game play, CoD: MW II had the chance to secure a score of a 9 or 10 and exist as a sterling example of FPS gaming. Instead, much like its hollow ending, the title is just a bitter reminder of the lazy, disinterested job carried out by Infinity Ward.

Not worth the time. There are better games available.

6.5/10.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II (2022) is the sequel to the re-imagined Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (2019). The game features some frenetic firefights, lavish visuals and more spy-on-spy action than you can shake a stick at. Despite all these qualities, it is perhaps one of the most disappointing Call of Duty entries in years and serves as a testament to how Infinity Ward has lost their way and need to regroup. The game fails at almost every single game play objective it set out to achieve and, consequently, misses an opportunity to catapult itself to the upper echelon of contemporary, AAA first person shooters. Starting with the positives, CoD: MW II has truly beautiful, atmospheric and performant next generation graphics. Volumetric lightning, HDR, character models and map architecture are all top notch and it is a joy to finally see CoD take its place as a graphics powerhouse befitting from such a venerable, AAA studio. The game's voice acting and soundtrack are excellent and global sound effects like ancillary sounds/bullet travel help create a believable environment. Gun play is sublime, with punchy, differentiated weapons and a variety of applicable add-ons. CoD includes a battery of game play modes including singleplayer, multiplayer, co-op and more. The game is truly performant and netted a respectable, upscaled 95 fps @ 4K high on a 6 year old Radeon VII. Unfortunately, that's where the positives end. The title suffers from staid, repetitive missions, frustratingly over-long set pieces, absurd game play events and perhaps one of the most foolhardy plot lines I have ever had the misfortune of experiencing. While you get the usual fare in this game, including A-120 strikes, Republique-style ally guided missions and the plethora of sniper missions/night vision assaults, the game has been assembled, lacking even the most basic game play testing. Enemies will spawn behind you, walk through walls or camp behind objects, only to shoot you as you cross into their field of view. At moderate-high difficulty levels, this type of AI programming and map design prove extremely frustrating and unfair, requiring multiple play-throughs to complete. The AI vacillates between bouts of telepathy, x-ray vision and abject stupidity, often being able to see you in an adjacent room, through three walls and other times missing a pile of dead cohorts just a few feet away. It is this terrible mission design and piss-poor AI that punishes CoD: MW II so much, since the game is based on numerous stealth/avoidance missions. What should be a tense game of cat and mouse quickly ends up becoming a litany of AI exploits instead to simply progress to the next malformed set piece. At one point, while trying to stealthily infiltrate the Mexican drug lord Sin Nombre's mansion, I acquired the attention of several guards. I happened to be in a bathroom, with no windows, on the second floor at the time. The guards were all on the first floor, outside of the structure, not that it mattered. The game quick saved the occurrence and I soon found myself dying over and over and unable to reset the stealth parameters of the mission. How did I bypass the issue? I camped the bathroom, and shot henchmen as they teleported into the bathroom and walked through the door. After slaying about 20 goons, I had created an almost impossible to traverse, 4-foot pile of bodies clogging the bathroom door, which protected me from the incoming hail of gunfire and grenades. I completed my duties and calmly proceeded with the mission. Easy? Sure. Satisfying? Hardly. Unfortunately this happens over and over and over in CoD: MW II. Stealth is terribly realized and almost always it's easier to cheese the AI than actually play the game as intended. For example, during the final mission against Hassan, the final boss, you are disarmed and forced to play cat-and-mouse with two of his annoyingly cheesy, armored goons. They have automatic weapons and you're forced to dash around, hoovering all the ingredients you can find so you can craft rudimentary tools and weapons. Unfortunately, the AI glitched and the enemies soon kept running behind me, impossible to shake. No amount of ducking behind corners, memorized quick-play bomb defusing key presses or flat out sprinting kept them away from me, as they would simply pop into existence and teleport right next to me, firing away. I beat them both by hiding behind a door as they impotently punched it trying to incapacitate me. I calmly defused the bomb and then sprinted past them when I was done, to find the missing materials I needed to craft the necessary tools and weapons. This happens *all the time*. It felt like a dullard type of an FPS Elden Ring. The plot fares no better with a primitive, uninteresting tale about multinational super spy, wokejob strike teams, stolen stinger missiles and a mismatched, Frankensteined quilt of enemies including Iran, Mexican drug cartels, Shadow Company and the US military. Oh and of course the Russians are in there too. You play as Gaz or Soap but skip any lengthy bouts as the infinitely cooler elder statesmen Price and Ghost. You kill most targets as your AI stands behind impotently as you proceed from one inane mission to the next, often undoing the very thing you accomplished minutes earlier. This is especially egregious when you spend two different missions capturing dangerously murderous Iranian terrorists and Mexican drug lords, only to be forced to release them without any information, simply because they demand you do so in the name of legality and justice. Multiplayer is no better with an abusive, rotten environment, predicated on feeding whales an ever-larger stash of multiplayer trash that they can use to show off as they play in multiplayer matches. Want to jump in and experience intelligent matchmaking that will pit you against similarly-skilled enemies? That is a pipe dream. In over 3/4 of my 20 online matches I routinely faced teams of 1250+ level players against my rag-tag squad of single-digit noobs, wannabes and mid-level players. Do you want to play a game where you can craft a build, choose the weapon of your choice and have fun? Forget about having that kind of freedom in Cod: MW II. You start using demonstrably weaker weapons and unlock newer, stronger, more accurate, farther-striking weapons after sickening amounts of MMO-like grind. Mods, perks, and even the dearth of decent cosmetic items are all locked behind Great Wall of China-sized walls of insurmountable grind. Heaven help you if you jump into this game a few years after release. To level and unlock new loot, you need to accrue experience, and win matches but it's precisely the lack of necessary tools that will hamper your ability to do so. Players all ramble on in group chat, to the detriment of tense, interesting games. You find yourself muting everyone, so you can hear important auditory cues and excise what little bit of social interaction this game has available. Most players are toxic and those few that aren't, don't stick around long enough to help make the game more bearable. CoD: MW II is badly assembled, causing me to crash half a dozen times. While some were simple fixes that required a quick execution of Task Manager, two particular crashes lead to black screens that required a system restart. Worse, the restarts damaged the graphics driver and I was forced to enact a MS System Restore (thankfully) to salvage the system. With better and more mature/coherent plotting, more forgiving and rewarding multiplayer and better attention to the campaign game play, CoD: MW II had the chance to secure a score of a 9 or 10 and exist as a sterling example of FPS gaming. Instead, much like its hollow ending, the title is just a bitter reminder of the lazy, disinterested job carried out by Infinity Ward. Not worth the time. There are better games available. 6.5/10.