Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 Multiplayer Review: Refined Yet Mindless Fun

For our Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 Campaign review, click here.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2‘s multiplayer is a natural extension of its predecessor, for better or worse. It’s a mostly safe multiplayer experience that sprinkles in quality-of=life changes, a couple of new modes like Prisoner Rescue that put spins on existing game types, and builds out some of the features. This is a refined sequel rather than a big overhaul, and the fact of the matter is, whether that appeals to you or not will depend on your taste in Call of Duty games.

There are some elements that will be extremely subjective. For example, the time to kill is wickedly fast, and the movement has been toned down a bit to make it so you can’t aggressively slide and jump around like you’re playing Titanfall. You can still bounce around a bit, but it won’t feel as extreme as it has in some previous games. Infinity Ward is once again leaning in to creating a more tactical and “realistic” shooter while retaining a sense of high octane action. It’s not slow and strategic like Rainbow Six, but it also doesn’t feel like an explosive fever dream fueled by Mountain Dew IV drips and Michael Bay movie marathons like the original Modern Warfare trilogy. It’s kind of somewhere in the middle.

You can drop someone with a few bullets from an AR or SMG, basic handguns can take someone down in one to two bullets, and select rifles can effortlessly kill someone at range in just a single shot if you hit them in the chest or above. It’s very easy to die, but not easy to kill. It’s one of the true-to-form reflex shooters in quite some time because if you’re not quick on the trigger like a cowboy in a Clint Eastwood movie, you’re probably going to lose most gunfights. Your weapon’s power and stats can certainly help you, but the player’s reaction times and skills will determine the outcome more often than not. Either way, every kill and earned kill streak is rewarding as a result. Every time you lay someone out, it has heft and the various sounds and animations offer your brain a healthy jolt of dopamine.

With that said, guns are still massively important in this year’s entry and no stone has been left unturned in regards to them. Infinity Ward has really fleshed out its “Gunsmith” feature that was introduced in its previous game. For decades at this point, players earn guns and attachments almost exclusively through leveling up in a linear fashion. It’s not very complicated: you just play, and you unlock more things that go boom as time goes on. While that is still somewhat true in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, the progression is far more layered now. Every gun has a base “platform,” but they can be expanded upon with different receivers. For instance, the Kastov 762 (AK-47, basically) has six different receivers which can turn it into different kinds of ARs, SMGs, and even an LMG. It’s like every gun has a family of other guns, all of which have to be individually unlocked by leveling up one after another. This also means that certain attachments for the Kastov 762 may not unlock until you’ve unlocked them for the Kastov-74U. 

This does seem to complicate things and makes progression feel like a larger process. However, it also encourages players to use many different kinds of guns and switch things up on a regular basis. Both myself and the couple dozen friends I have played with have all been cycling through weapons over the last few days to unlock everything. There is intent behind everything you’re doing and that can make it a bit more interesting as opposed to just mindlessly shooting and watching XP bars increase for doing the bare minimum. With that said, it can also feel like a lot of hurdles just to get a specific gun after both leveling up your account a ton and then grinding for weapon XP.

There is also a new feature called “tuning” for weapon attachments, which was disabled for the first week of launch. It’s back now, but it’s a pretty confusing system that over complicates attachments with sliders and will likely be most beneficial when YouTubers start releasing the best builds with tuning tutorials. It mostly allows you to focus on tweaking stats of your weapon by being able to move sliders that increase/decrease weight and length of attachments and the weapon. It can impact ADS speed, recoil, bullet velocity, and more. It’s optional so if it feels like you’re not exactly jiving with it, you don’t have to bother with it.

Infinity Ward initially disabled the tuning along with other key features such as pinging, which still hasn’t been brought back. For whatever reason, a lot of vital mechanics are getting taken out of the game because they’re causing larger issues. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 is also missing basic features that are a staple of the series such as the barracks, a menu that lets you check every possible stat one could have. At the time of writing, it’s not possible to check your KD ratio or any other stats in any way. It seems like this shooter could’ve used a tad bit more time in the oven to ensure these basic and essential features are in the game or don’t have to be temporarily removed, but that seems to be the nature of live service games in 2022.

Some missing features aren’t the only blemishes on this otherwise very premium product. There are some painful issues that have plagued Call of Duty for a while and they may be at their worst here. Footsteps are completely inconsistent and will often result in you dying due to being unable to tell where they’re actually coming from. They’re quite loud, even after tweaks, which makes it very easy for you to get detected by enemies. While this makes sense when you’re zooming around at full speed, it’s annoying to sound like the character is wearing boots of steel while walking at a normal speed and trying to be cautious. 

The sound of footsteps also sometimes inverts. It may sound like someone is coming from your left, but they’re actually on your right. Enemies sound like they’re on your floor, but they’re actually right above you. Sometimes the sound of footsteps doesn’t play at all, regardless of if someone has the Dead Silence perk equipped. It’s puzzling that this continues to be an issue, especially given the rest of the sound design is really stellar and immersive. 

Finally, the maps in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 range from some of the worst in the franchise to “Hey, this isn’t too bad!” So, it’s not exactly consistent, and it’s telling that I am actually surprised when I am enjoying a map. However, out of the 10 multiplayer maps, none of them are terribly memorable and I can’t tell you the names of any of them without looking it up after achieving max rank in the game in the span of three days. They will wash away from the collective consciousness after the next game in the series releases and they will never be featured in some “remastered classics” DLC pack in a future game.

One map, Santa Sena Border Crossing, places you on a big road filled with cars that can explode. We’re not talking about like 5-10 cars; the whole map is basically vehicles that obscure your vision and make it hard to see enemies, especially when they’re constantly blowing up and causing chain reactions. It’s total chaos and is a sniper’s haven since they can sit on one side and basically look straight down and get a good view of most of the map. It’s exhausting to play and is made worse by the fact it’s incredibly long, meaning if you die, you have to run for a while before inevitably getting shot again and repeating the process. 

Another map known as Taraq is just a bunch of blown out buildings in a large, open desert landscape with no real flow. You can wander it pretty aimlessly without feeling like there’s a central point of conflict where everyone crosses paths. When you’re not playing something like Hardpoint that directs players to one location to battle over, this can make matches drag out until the timer runs out as opposed to hitting the score limit. This isn’t an issue limited to Taraq either; it’s an incredibly common problem in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 and is a result of many maps being too big with no sense of direction for the players.

It doesn’t help that the spawns in the game are also terrible, often spawning you behind the person who just killed you or vice versa. There were even videos at launch of people spawning with the wrong team at the start of matches and getting shot down by a firing squad. It’s pretty baffling that a game with maps that are quite wide and open frequently spawns players in the vicinity of someone else, just so they can die again.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2‘s multiplayer is filled with mindless fun and lots of ways to grind, and it serves as a solid evolution and refinement of its predecessor. Although it’s fun, the tried and true PvP is bogged down by some confounding design choices, lackluster maps with zero staying power, and missing features. It’s a fine game. I’ve enjoyed my time with it, and it’s a game I will continue to play which is something that couldn’t be said about last year’s game. However, just fine probably isn’t what you want when invoking the name of one of the most iconic and defining modern military shooters of all time.

Rating: 3.5/5

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 is out now on Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, PS4, PS5, and PC. An Xbox Series X|S review copy was provided by the publisher.