Modern Warfare 2 is one of those rare sequels that is actually an improvement over the original.  The single-player campaign took me about 7 hours to finish on regular, so don’t buy this game for single-player.  The lasting value is in the multi-player experience, which is similar to, but subtly improved from, Call of Duty 4.

The single-player campaign was fun, but it’s basically the same as every other CoD:  Follow the script, shoot what you’re told to shoot, and you’re done.  It doesn’t take very long and leaves you thinking, “I paid $70 for that?”

To be fair, there are some “special ops” missions which are essentially random, story-less missions you can play solo or coop, but the multiplayer is really the only reason to play this game.

Pros

Multi-player improvements come in the form of bazillions of new perks and weapon unlocks.  Ranks go up to 70 instead of 50.  Even if you really suck and get killed all the time (like me), it’s still fun to rank up and collect all the weapon unlocks.  It’s sort of like playing an MMO.  All the maps are new and interesting and bewildering in their complexity, and unlike CoD4, sized properly.

One massive improvement from CoD4 is that you only get one frag grenade instead of three, which cuts down considerably on the grenade spam.

Maybe I’ve just been lucky but there doesn’t seem to be very many snipers on the Playstation Network.  In CoD4 on the PC, you could usually count on roughly half the players to be snipers hiding in the bushes somewhere, but in MW2 I typically only see one or two on a team.

Cons

One thing that’s not an improvement in multi-player is the addition of the AC-130 killstreak reward.  There is nowhere to hide from it – it shoots through buildings and walls and kills you instantly.  I think it’s theoretically possible to shoot down the AC-130 with a rocket launcher, but staying alive long enough to do so is rather difficult.

I don’t know if this is specific to the PS3 and PSN or not, but the multiplayer “matchmaking” leaves a little bit to be desired.  Sometimes it bombs out because it can’t find players for a match and sometimes it bombs out with mysterious “server timed out” errors.  Every now and then (presumably when it detects that lag is really bad for everyone) the game stops to change hosts, which pauses the action while it “migrates” to a new host.  Sometimes it doesn’t work and everyone gets booted out.

Pet Peeves

One of my favorite features from CoD4 remains in MW2:  The feature where you empty a clip of bullets into your enemy and yet somehow he still survives and kills you.  Then when you review the KillCam to see how he did it, you see that from the server’s perspective you didn’t fire at all.  Getting shot to death even after running behind an impenetrable wall is fun, too.  Hurray for client-side prediction code.  So yeah, there are still quite a few jaw-dropping “WTF” moments.

And of course my other favorite feature from CoD4 is still there:  Insta-kills.  If someone gets the drop on you (or not, see first pet peeve), you can pretty much count on dying.  It’s very rare that you can survive getting hit and live to fight another day, especially since most everyone uses the Stopping Power perk.

Also, I have to mention that the emphasis on getting kills is very annoying.  My playing style has always been more about surviving for long periods of time than running around killing everyone in sight.  So the result is that I get a lot of “longest time alive” and “fewest deaths” accolades at the end of games, but of course that doesn’t help with standings one bit.

Despite the flaws I still enjoy playing MW2 multiplayer a lot, even in public games.  However I will probably discover, as I did with CoD4, that after I reach rank 70, there won’t be any more reason to play.