CoD: Modern Warfare 2 - midnight launch first impressions

Matthew Lentini
Tuesday, 10 November 2009 00:19

Your IT - Entertainment

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 has been scooped up before the rest of the world by Australian gamers and jaws are already dropping.

Infinity Ward’s much anticipated sequel to their magnum opus, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, has hit shelves today at the stroke of midnight, awaited by packed queues at EB Games stores across Australia.

The game has seen waves of support from gamers expecting the pinnacle offirst person shooting cinematic excess and at the same time stiff opposition from lobbyists who take the game as morally obtuse. After road testing the game in the wee hours of the morning, it seems both audiences are in for one hell of a ride.

Modern Warfare 2, in expected fashion, takes on the cinematic scope of asimulated Black Hawk Down, but exceeds its similar predecessor in many ways in this regard and also in gameplay. Whether you’re traversing icy slopes over precarious looming pitfalls or desperately dashing over rooftops in the slums of South America to a hail of gunfire ricocheting off tin rooves, the action will keep you constantly on your toes and play out more like an action flick than just a game.

And onto its cinematic allure, the hotly debated ‘terrorist scene’ leaked onto the web only days before release portraying a player gunningdown unarmed civilians is presented as horrifically as it sounds – but this isn’t a bad thing.

The mission is a precursor to an all-out bout of destruction between theUS and Russia that the game follows. As an American soldier infiltrating a Russian terrorist group, players are set loose on an airport full of civilians and ordered to follow their leader’s actions after being asked the question of moral debate: are the lives of few worth saving the lives of many?

Players are forced to unleash on innocent civilians to gain the terrorists’ confidence in a tragic scene and are only able to walk at a slow pace which, when juxtaposed with the civilians’ chaos and harrowingsoundtrack, is able to conjure a hesitation from shooting and a rare sensation in typical video games: remorse.

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