The best extraction shooter out there on the market!

This is a review that covers MW2, MW3, and Warzone. As of the time of me writing this review, Cod Black Ops 6 has not yet released, so keep this in mind with this review. In this review, I will be covering the good, the bad, and the ugly of all 3 games. Shall we begin?


Cod MW2 was very promising. I played the beta, and even pre-ordered the game. During the beta, I saw some very promising features. Features, you may have forgotten about, as the game updated and removed these things in an effort to make you forget. Lets dig in.

• Before I cover the beta, I want to preface things that were introduced and offered in advertisements for this game prior to launch, and even the beta. For instance, remember the idea of "Weapon Families"? Well, IW doesn't want you to remember either. They seemingly removed this feature for no reason after MW3 launched. It was supposed to be a way to transfer (most) attachments between weapons of the same families, that were in differing weapon categories. Take for instance the M4 family of weapons. You have (of course) the M4 assault rifle. Then you had things like the FSS Hurricane SMG which was a part of the M4 family, and so on, so forth. This feature was supposed to show you which weapons were a part of the same family (which was cool, and would still be useful with some of the current weapons they have been adding to MW3 and Warzone as of 2024), and on top of that, was supposed to allow you to then go "Okay, I like the attatchments I have on my M4. I wanna see how they feel on the FSS Hurricane", and rather than build the gun from scratch, you were allowed to go the the weapon's family tree, select the weapon, and boom! All applicable attachments and customizations were automatically added to the gun! No having to rebuild the gun from scratch or anything! On top of that, it also allowed a much easier time trying to figure out which guns unlocked which attachments for your guns.
  
  
• They also introduced "Weapon Vaults", which they advertised as "A whole new way of customizing your loadouts." In reality, all it really was is a bunch attachments are automatically unlocked for your gun (mostly scopes), and they were all given a red paint job. The only way you could get a weapon vault was to have purchased the $100 vault edition of MW2.
  
  
• Anyways, lets step away from the features, and on to the gameplay of MW2 during the beta. How did it feel in comparison to MW 2019? Was it better? What did they improve on? Unfortunately, they seemingly took a step backwards it felt. The game's movement was much slower compared to MW 2019 and Warzone, and the game seemingly encouraged camping much more than ever (which is funny to me, because during MW2's lifetime, the dev's defended the campers and said things like "Camping is offensive. Call them "Sentinels" instead" for example. But then in MW3, they made it so you can get temp banned for camping??? I don't know what they are thinking honestly lmao.)
  
  
• Aside from the movement downgrade, weapons customization got a MAJOR buff. No longer did you need to grind weapons 60-70 levels to unlock all scopes on a gun, only to need to do it again to another gun just to unlock the same scope! Now, each gun could be leveled up roughly 20 times or less. After you unlocked an attachment for that gun, if it was something that could be reused such as a scope, underbarrel, etc., it was now unlocked universally for all guns! Gun sounds weren't great however, and they eventually added more "Oomph" to the gun sounds post-beta.
  
  
• Overall, the beta seemed promising! I really enjoyed it, but I was scared of how it would be if they refused to change things such as the movement, and if they didn't fix a majority of the bugs people encountered in the beta.

Because I was one of the dumb schmucks who pre-ordered the game, I got early access to the campaign. Because I haven't played the campaign since launch and after updates, I am not certain of any changes that may have been made prior to my playthrough (I will also not be including any spoilers, so worry not!) However, during my playthrough I didn't encounter any bugs that stick out to me. I remember enjoying the campaign and story for the most part as it was a decent continuation of MW 2019's story. In fact, my 2 favorite missions was the ghile suit stealth mission, and the guerrilla warfare mission. Those two missions stick out to me the most, however there are other missions that were great fun, like infiltrating the cartel safehouse. Suffice to say, I actually enjoyed the campaign and felt it expanded on the story of the previous cod well, and the missions were a lot of fun for the most part!

• Unfortunately, the issues and concerns I had with the beta were mostly unchanged. Bugs present from the beta were still present all through launch day, and even several seasons after! The maps were okay, however each new season was a remake map of some kind, or a port of a location in the Warzone map at the time, Al Mazrah. Dome, and Showdown were directly ripped out of Warzone for example!
  
  
• The only weapon vault we ever saw in MW2 was the one you got for buying the vault edition. They never introduced another weapon vault for MW2 in any shape or form. They also never fixed the weapon family tree bugs I had encountered during the beta, making the menu for it extremely buggy and difficult to use as a result.
  
  
• IW was firm on their decision to keep the movement slow. They had of course offered the drill charges, but eventually those got nerfed as well, making camping the ultimate move for playing.
  
  
• Camo grinding was better as it was similar to the attachment system; unlock it on one gun, unlock if for all guns after (with the exception of mastery camos of course.) They also removed the feature to change your weapon reticle normally, and forced you to buy bundles to change your reticle for a singular weapon scope instead of being universal. Not only that, but any kind of grind (with the exception of camos) was removed, making playing even more brainless than before!
  
  
• And of course, it would be a shame not to mention the start of CoD copying the Fortnite style; Throw random wacky character and weapon skins into the game in hopes of getting people to buy more cosmetics. Unfortunately, it worked. I remember the day after the Nicki Minaj skin dropped, EVERYONE was running it. At least it felt that way for a while. It was (and still is) jarring to see how far Cod had gone to remove any semblance of cohesive identity they had left.

Ah, I remember how excited I was for spec ops to be returning. And the idea of the raids being longer missions with a focus on teamwork and puzzle solving? As a zombies easter egg hunter and solver, I was so excited. Unfortunately, Spec ops was (like MW 2019) a disappointment. It was plain as day to me, that all attention had been focused in the multiplayer, and WZ, as unlike those modes, this mode was RIDDLED with bugs! It was an accomplishment to play spec ops and encounter no bugs! On top of this, the raid mode was very disappointing. The puzzle solving was easy, but tedious. Tedious because they throw SOOOOO many enemies at you, it becomes incredibly difficult to survive alone, even though at multiple parts the game FORCED you to split from your teammates. After the second raid, I lost all hope for the raids and didn't bother finishing the raid series. On top of how annoying the raids were, you had a special character ability you had to level up through spec ops missions which put you at a significant disadvantage if you didn't grind these levels. All around, spec ops makes me sad to this day, as it is not the spec ops from years past, though it so desperately- (Check comments for continuation)

MONKEE

They actually fixed tf2!

I miss CSGO