If you love a good microscopic comparison there’s nothing like the release of a new Call of Duty to get forensic with - the minutiae of recoil models and movement techniques all become of paramount importance.

Modern Warfare 2 has more community hype behind it than any recent COD release, too, with the promise of an effective franchise reboot to go with it, all while Xbox’s buyout of Activision rumbles on in the background. We've completed its campaign and played an unhealthy amount of multiplayer, and we're here with our full verdict on MW2.

Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 tips and tricks: How to get better at COD MW2 photo 2
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (2022)

Modern Warfare 2 delivers a well-paced, varied campaign that feels like playing a great action movie. The multiplayer side of things has a solid core and we've no doubt it'll be polished up in the months to come, but its state at launch is disappointing.

Pros
  • Gunplay is as good as it's ever been
  • Solid campaign
  • New levelling system is smart
  • Good maps
Cons
  • Campaign difficulty spikes weirdly
  • Bizarre UI is a disaster
  • Prone to glitches

Campaign

Modern Warfare 2's campaign picks up a while after the last game, with Task Force 141 effectively now global do-gooders, this time embroiled into a chase for missing missiles by the US's General Shepherd (a familiar name from the original MW2).

The story is hokey but plays things straight enough to get away with it, full of plot twists that don't hold up to much scrutiny but let the action keep propelling itself along, and that's all you really want from a good COD.

That action sees you control a range of characters, from series stalwarts like Soap and Gaz to newcomers from the Mexican Special Forces, all accompanied by icons like Captain Price and Ghost. The decent repartee between squad members while you play underlines just how lukewarm the script was in Vanguard last year.

The action itself, meanwhile, is ramped up as always - starting with simple infantry missions against relatively weak targets, making you feel like the special force you're supposed to be. Things build up via extensive car chases (fully controlled by you), stealth sections that bring in crafting elements, and sniping galleries that transform into shootouts rapidly.

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Activision / Pocket-lint

A sour note, though, is injected by the proliferation of enemies wearing body armour and helmets that take absurd quantities of ammo to drop. These are fine as periodic mini-bosses, but are draining and frustrating when deployed in every encounter, as they are past a certain point.

They contribute to a few weird spikes in difficulty, including a full boss fight late on in the story, that make you feel like you've accidentally opted into the game's Veteran mode unwillingly.

The campaign makes up for that odd oversight with visuals that pack in a load of flavour and variety. From mountainous deserts to craggy forests and remote military bases, each level of MW2 looks great.

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Activision / Pocket-lint

Voice acting is terrific across the board (albeit in a very tropey way), and the quality of cut-scenes between missions is only getting better with each outing, bookending story moments nicely for those paying attention.

Modern Warfare 2 has a swagger and an assurance about it that underlines Infinity Ward's deserved reputation as the original and the best as far as COD goes.

Multiplayer

On the multiplayer side of things, Modern Warfare 2 is an interesting beast - it feels tangibly related to MW2019, but there are some fairly major changes at play, as well as some baffling missteps.

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Activision / Pocket-lint

Firstly, this is a slower Call of Duty than we can remember for ages, stripping away rapid movement options like slide-cancelling to ensure that players have to be more deliberate as they slink through the maps on offer.

A new dolphin-dive move lets you chuck yourself into the fray, but it delays your weapon firing, as does dropping into a prone position, all of which means that you won’t see quite the same level of farcical movement around the place as you play. A new ledge-hang mechanic, meanwhile, feels frankly unnecessary.

For our money, this is all great - movement was getting out of hand in COD, and we’re looking forward to this slowing down of things coming to Warzone 2.0, which is coming shortly after Modern Warfare 2’s release.

It makes for a slower and more considered approach, bringing back some of the tension that only Modern Warfare 2019 has really managed in recent years, especially in modes without respawn mechanics.

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Activision

This is added to by a new recoil system that is really interesting - while the guns have kick and take some getting used to, just like MW2019, it’s the significant visual recoil that’s really striking. Shooting a heavy machine gun feels and looks as weighty and bouncy as you would assume it is in real life (or a lot closer to it, anyway).

Another site of change for Modern Warfare 2 comes from its dopamine-injecting progression system, which is a lot more complicated than it used to be. Where most COD games have let you level up as you play, unlocking new weapons as you rank up, and attachments for individual weapons as you use them, here things are more nuanced.

You’ll still level up and earn weapons but some weapons will only be unlocked by using a related weapon for a certain amount of time. These unlock trees offer you a secondary set of objectives to chase as you play, and encouragement to actually try a range of weapons out.

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Activision

Once you have unlocked some attachments for a weapon, a newly-upgraded Gunsmith system lets you kit them out exactly as you like, and it’s as detailed as any enthusiast could ask for. We’re mostly just thrilled to see that we’re back down to a maximum of five attachments, removing the absurd overkill of Vanguard’s approach.

Launch issues

All of that is good news for COD aficionados, but it comes against a backdrop of some really odd decisions that have made MW2's launch a little bit messy.

For one thing, it has an unequivocally clumsy and messy menu system that makes it hard to find the information you're looking for and can transform the time between matches into a frustrating puzzle.

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Activision

As a sample of the UI failures at play, activating an XP token (something that COD has offered for years) leaves you without any indication of success or how long is left on your timer.

There's also absolutely no way to see your lifetime stats, from playtime to kill/death ratio or win rate, another completely basic expectation.

That's UI, but there are some oddities on the gameplay front, too. Infinity Ward has changed the perk system in a major way, gating two perks as mid-game unlocks - it's an interesting idea that can change how you play even during a match.

However, with Ghost locked behind the final barrier, it means that early and mid-game UAVs are now incredibly powerful, and playing stealthily is near-impossible if others on your team are giving up cheap kills for killstreaks. It's a change that didn't really feel necessary, and we'll be interested to see how long it survives.

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Activision

There are also a lot of bugs and glitches, from game crashes to visual issues and broken pieces of equipment. Gunsmith's final tier lets you tune weapon attachments for totally unique builds, but this is disabled at the moment as it wasn't working at launch.

We've also spawned into matches where every player had the same attachment-free M4 assault rifle with no equipment or killstreaks, and while this was a fun novelty, it was also a very clear and persistent bug that should have been ironed out well before release.

This is no Battlefield 2042, given how impressive the core gameplay is, but Modern Warfare 2 is nonetheless the latest in a trend of huge multiplayer games releasing before they were quite ready for the wider world.

Verdict

Modern Warfare 2's campaign left us with a good impression. It's a bombastic affair that feels like the result of a team doing what it knows best and takes you through a variety of tightly-paced set pieces, one after the other.

We do think Infinity Ward has some fine-tuning to do regarding the difficulty in a few places, but it's not a big enough problem to spoil anything.

The multiplayer side of the equation is more complicated - there's a core to Modern Warfare 2 that feels superb, with recoil and gunplay that's unrivalled in the mainstream. It's undermined at launch by bugs and content gaps, but we're pretty optimistic that in six months this will be a Call of Duty in the prime of its life.