Modern Warfare II’s greatest strength is that it doesn’t have a gimmick. And that it doesn’t need one to stand out. All Modern Warfare II needs to be is a great shooter, and here it delivers. It is the Call of Duty experience, deconstructed, reconsidered and obsessively optimized over 15 uninterrupted years of iteration.
I know when I’m playing a Black Ops game because it has offbeat arcade modes and the latest iteration of Nuketown. I know I’m playing a Modern Warfare game because the shooting is so finely tuned that I want to take my Gunsmith build out to dinner. Infinity Ward has officially mastered the instant gratification of aiming down sights and deleting targets.
That goes a long way, though some of ’s biggest swings like revamped progression and a genre-bending campaign are less elegant. It also suffers from an obtuse UI, fits of crashes, weird bugs and the unexplained absence of basic.
