Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. Activision. PC/Xbox 360/PlayStation 3. Infinity Ward. $59.99

Passed Inspection: Excellent multiplayer. Great score, select scenes are wonderfully done.

Failed Basic: Humiliating campaign and story, embarrassingly short.

Without spoiling the plot, every twist and turn in the story is as ill-fated as the last.

It’s not often a game I like so much is also one I bitterly despise. What publisher Activision and developer Infinity Ward have done with their latest and historically selling Call of Duty title is inexcusable. Some players may not take offense to the story and the characters, but those elements are apparently only there to gain media attention, and I find that to be low.

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The Call of Duty franchise is a first-person-shooter where players take on the persona(s) of soldiers. The original and several supplements were set in World War II, but the Modern Warfare sub-franchise, created by Infinity Ward two years ago, takes place in the current day. While the first Modern Warfare was stunning in its single- and multiplayer aspects, Infinity Ward seems more interested in shock value than good content in this latest addition.

The first mission puts players in Afghanistan when the character, a private in the army, is plucked from his unit to join a special-operations team led by General Shepherd. The player-character, working under cover for Shepherd and pretending to work for a Russian terrorist, enters an airport where players are effectively told to murder hundreds of unarmed civilians with four other terrorists. This alone is disturbing, though an option to skip this level because of its content is given at the beginning of the game, as “objectionable content.” I didn’t skip it, and I don’t expect anyone else to.

After killing all of the civilians, including wounded and bleeding ones on the ground, players must then make their way through police officers and swat teams. Without spoiling the plot, the player is killed more than once within the game and effectively switches to another character; every twist and turn in the story is as ill-fated as the last. Very little makes sense on a practical level, and it’s quite clear most of it is done purely for shock value. Only the subplot of defending Washington, D.C., is wonderfully done. Players must defend or fortify urban areas; one level has a team of U.S. soldiers defending a shopping center, while another has players push the Russians out of a suburban neighborhood.

With only four-five hours for the single player campaign, I had tremendous difficulty with it. On the one hand, several scenes are incredible, most notably the first sight of our capital burning. The score, done by renowned composer Hans Zimmer, is brilliantly done in these scenes, and they are heart wrenching in the most realistic way. Other scenes have incredible events happen, such as snowmobiling across a giant gap and barely making it, all in-game. Yet these amazing scenes are toned down by the imagery in others, where treachery and backstabbing is more commonplace than gunfire. I honestly can’t decide whether the short campaign is a good or bad thing, considering these points.

Like Modern Warfare before it, Modern Warfare 2 has a large number of weapons, including at least five types of the following: assault rifles, pistols, shotguns, sub-machine guns, machine guns and sniper rifles. Additional weaponry includes frag and flash grenades, rocket launchers, a knife, riot shields, control of a missile-wielding Predator drone, and more. Many have interesting secondary functions, one such function being the heartbeat radar, which pinpoints live enemies in the nearby vicinity.

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