Modern Warfare 2 Single Player Review

I've been playing Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 pretty solidly for the last week and a half and have pretty much experienced everything the game has to offer at this point. Let me spoil the whole review for you right now: this game is good. Really good. If you played MW1 and liked it, buy this game. That's all you need to know.

As the game has 3 pretty distinct pieces (single player, special ops (co-op), and multi-player), I'll be reviewing them separately. Today: single player (expect some minor spoilers below).

Loved

• Familiar Yet Different. I was quite pleased to see some of my favorite characters return in this game: Soap, Ghost and even Price. They all have unique, interesting personalities and it was great to have them along for the ride again. MW2 definitely feels like a sequel to the first (something new for the CoD franchise), which is a good thing. I very immediately felt at home with the characters and weapons while at the same time was quite pleased with what was new.
  
  
• No Russian. I'm pretty sure everyone on the internet has commented on this controversial level by now, quite honestly I'm tired of it. This level worked for me. It made me angry. It made me hate terrorism and Mahkarov in particular. It evoked emotions and was "good" the same way Schindler's List did those things. I still don't understand quite why people are so upset about it; it's like it fully incenses some people. Here are two links to articles that I felt did a great job of expressing my point of view.
  
• http://www.destructoid.com/blogs/covah/why-no-russian-was-necessary-in-mw2-spoilers--154852.phtml
• http://www.deseretnews.com/blog/31/10007201/First-person-shooter-Video-game-blog-Over-the-line.html
  
  
• Interesting Locales. I was a little surprised by all the places I ended up in this game: an airport, an Afghan desert, some time in the frozen wilderness, Brazil, American suberbia, even The Mall/The Whitehouse. They did a great job in each of the various locations; the "set pieces" were truly great. There were few if any levels that felt like duds to me. All of them had superb art and solid level design. Kudos to Infinity Ward on that one.
  
  
• Weapons. This is probably more true about the multi-player, but the single player campaign has some new and interesting weapons. The stealthy snow levels in particular had some of my favorites: a silenced sniper rifle and a gun with a heart beat sensor on it. While lots of the guns aren't all that new, the game does a great job of giving the player a pretty wide variety of great weapons. It definitely adds to the fun of the game.
  

Hated

• What the hell is going on? When I finished the single player, I had absolutely no idea what or why various things had happened. The story is WAY too disjointed and convoluted. I literally had to go read the plot review on the Wikipedia page for the game to get an satisfactory insight into the story. I heard somebody else comment that it was like they came up with all these interesting places to have you fight in then spent the rest of their time trying to bend the story into those locations... quite honestly it felt a little true. The story was Mission Impossible ridiculous; it made no sense at all.

Other than the crazy story, there is very little to say wrong about the single player. It's fun, it's action packed, and it's solidly better than the first game. It was definitely short (<6 hours on Hardened), but if it had gone on any longer, it probably would have been too long. While I'm not sure I could recommend the $60 sticker price for the single player only, it is without a doubt a solid experience. Luckily, the single player is the weakest part of this brilliant game. Expect my other two reviews to follow soon.