First of all, the Online was absolutely broken out of the box for 3 days. As in it didnt function at all. Nada. Zip! Me and a mate finally got co-op up and running after a night spent on forums and logging onto and off of PSN. It was great. For a night. Then its gets boring, with most of the co-op missions boiling down to one of three or so mission types.

The main online component I played once. After waiting for what seemed like millenia to be put into rooms that then got disconnected I was finally able to get into a game in some snowed out industrial/villiage setting. I died once, then proceeded to walk around and around looking for someone to kill. After 10 minutes without seeing a sole, I ejected the game in disgust, returned it to its case and took a nice drive down to EB and returned it.

But I had, whilst I was waiting for the online to do something vaguely resembling FUNCTION, had time to complete the Single Player portion of the game. Beautifully paced. Sublime. Engaging. Thought provoking. Well structured. Deep. The Single player is non of these. Hell it doesnt even get close to being remotely coherant. I mean apart from the obvious problem of “Yeah, Russia launches a full-scale air, land and see invasion of the continental United States over a supposed Terrorist activity perpetrated by a Rogue American” plot. It’s like IW felt the need to one up Naughty Dog so they smooshed as many over-the-top set pieces into one 5 hour sitting. The result ends up not even being interesting because the whole time you’re sitting there scratching your head wondering what the hell is going on. There are various voice parts that I know indicate the main flow of the story, but they are so poorly mixed, and always delivered in the middle of loud fire fights, and therefor may as well not be in the game because you cant bloody well hear them. This is coming from someone with a full 5.1 Surround sound system, and YES, it IS properly set up. The audio mixing is just bad.

Basically MW2 felt cheap and rushed. IW, you should have taken that huge budget Acti supposedly offered you because this game was nothing better than disappointing.