call of duty modernwarfare II

Each autumn I look forward to crisp cool mornings, vibrant foliage, the return of pumpkin spice, and the chance to experience a new year of Call of Duty multiplayer. With Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, Infinity Ward has brought back a familiar and cozy style of combat with more than enough variety to make it feel like more than a simple reskin of last year’s Vanguard. I'm enjoying it quite a bit, at least in between some annoyingly frequent performance problems on PC. The amazingly flexible weapon progression and tuning system, rock-solid gunplay, and some really awesome and inventive new modes on huge maps have me enjoying this iteration of the CoD formula more than I can remember in a long time. It’s still exactly the kind of Call of Duty experience you expect, but it shifts its focus enough to where it feels distinct and different, and it's easily my favorite Call of Duty multiplayer game of the last few years.

First off, the gunplay in Modern Warfare 2's multiplayer is rock solid. The teams behind Call of Duty have had decades to hone it to a razor's edge, and this year is yet another series of subtle improvements. Each gun feels meaningfully different, with an illusion of weight and handling that's unique not only from class to class, but from gun to gun within each class.

The weapon progression and attachment system should feel familiar to anyone who's played Call of Duty in the last few years, but I like to highlight it because it’s one of my personal favorite features. You have a maximum of five attachments on your weapons, even though there are more than just five categories of available attachments. It's up to you to decide which is more important: Do you value hip-fire accuracy? Well, maybe you should attach that laser sight. Do you prefer recoil control instead? Well, perhaps you'd be better off with an underbarrel grip. Its massively varied options encourage experimentation, and fine-tuning a gun to fit my playstyle is almost as satisfying as shooting someone with it.

You’re always unlocking new weapons through leveling up the appropriate gun on the progression tree. If you're lusting after a certain sniper rifle, for example, you might need to reach a certain level on your profile, or you might need to level up a marksman rifle to unlock it. I love this because it not only pushes you to try out guns you might otherwise pass over, but it rewards you for doing it in the long run by giving you cool guns you might not otherwise get.

The gun-specific challenges that unlock different skins have returned, which I'm always a fan of. Those nudge you to try for achievements you might not otherwise do, like hip-fire or mounted kills .Shout out to the guy on my team who, on day two of CoD being out, already had a gold skin on his rifle – I’ll be obsessing over those and chasing them for a good while, even if I ultimately fall short of glory.