Brain Assassin

Last week I was on sick leave and I spent quite a few hours play­ing the lat­est install­ment of the Call of Duty fran­chise: Mod­ern War­fare 2. It’s the first title of the fran­chise that I own and inter­est­ingly enough, I bought it for the PlaySta­tion 3 rather than for the PC. Any­way, I love the sin­gle player mode even if it is annoy­ingly short. An expe­ri­enced player will defeat the game in only a few hours. Apart from the length, CoD: MW2 really does fine.

It’s the multi-​​player mode that tends to suck from time to time. The devel­op­ers – the guys from Infin­ity Ward – imple­mented a fea­ture called host migra­tion. This fea­tures pre­vents the game from end­ing if a match host leaves the game early. Instead, a host migra­tion delay allows a new host to be selected and the game to con­tinue on. Out of 50 times it worked three times for me. To be hon­est, it worked more often but in these instances the game became unplayable because of the sud­den lags and stut­ter­ing. All these count­less times when I saw

In addi­tion, the game has some seri­ous bal­anc­ing issues. Every time I’m on a team with two or three other peo­ple and we’re play­ing against a team con­sist­ing of eight play­ers, I’d like to stran­gle the devel­op­ers respon­si­ble for this screw-​​up. There’s no fun in that, espe­cially if you’d pre­fer Mouse and Key­board to a Gamepad any­way. So, you’re not the best player, you’re low-​​level, and your team mates are roughly your equal and you’re play­ing against eight high-​​level char­ac­ters who have access to bet­ter weapons and perks. That sucks.

Last but not least, have you ever seen the “Game lobby closed” error mes­sage? No? You’re one of the luck­i­est guys to ever play this game. The sys­tem looks for other player, waits for more peo­ple, joins another lobby, spends more time wait­ing, pre­tends to launch the game – and then it screws you over by dis­play­ing a notice with the infor­ma­tive text “Game lobby closed”. There are times where I def­i­nitely spend more time wait­ing for a game to be set up rather than play­ing it.

I seri­ously hope they fix these issues very soon. Nonethe­less, I have to applaud them for their update strat­egy. They have a very small foot­print of only a few megabytes and they down­load quite fast. Keep up the good work and fix these issues!