Various comments, after spending a few weeks playing. This is 360.
First, this game is stupendously badass. I hate tactical shooters, hate modern shooters, hate and hated anything WW2 related, hate CS - I love this game. Great, solid feel, (mostly) great maps, and with a few exceptions (tardyrdom), a great class system. The leveling is fun too, and done in an intelligent manner.
Weaponry:
M16 is overpowered - or to be more precise, too accurate over the full burst at long range, and too lethal with Stopping Power. The thing is a goddamned lazer death ray - the fact that you can snipe someone on the opposite side of several maps without much difficulty is just retarded. Snipers have a harder time making those shots. The fact that one trigger pull frequently kills your target at mid range, and usually two suffice at long range if your aim is on is just ridiculous. Its only real weakness is close range, but its absurd power at mid and long range is crazy in comparison to the effort you need to expend to get similar killshots with any other AR or sniper rifle.
The P90 is a tard cannon bullet hose. Get P90, hold fire, rack up kills, hurrrrrrrr. I have to work way harder with any other SMG to fight effectively, the P90s huge clip, relatively quick reload, solid effectiveness at medium range, and lethality at close range makes it stupidly superior to the other SMGs.
The knife, does, unfortunately, suffer badly from prediction lag. In Team Tactical, it's great, but any of the larger games and it starts to suffer, especially if anyone has a bad connection. I've seen and experienced some very frustrating knife misses, some of which even look moronic from killcams. This happens with bullets too, it's just more noticable by far when you sneak up on someone, lunge, somehow miss their back, and they turn and shoot you.
Other than those few standouts, to my considerable amazement, I don't really have any other significant complaints - I cycle through various weapons, sometimes based on map or gametype, sometimes based on personal preference. If you take a look at the weapon stats from the data files in the PC version, you can see that most weapons within a given class actually have similar damage characteristics, the differences tend to be fairly subtle, everything from muzzle flash and sound to slight rate of fire or recoil differences.
Perks:
Tardyrdom is the worst idea in the history of fps gaming. Let's reward people for sucking! Let's weaken knifing and close range combat! Both dangerous, and both, in theory, rewarding you for flanking or outsmarting your target. Not so in COD's world of explosive corpses.
Whatever they do, I hope it gets nerfed. No trigger on knife, headshot, or explosion, and possibly requiring a frag grenade to actually activate would help. It is the worst damn perk in the game, and it makes HQ nearly unbearable. Few things are more frustrating than guarding an HQ or cap point in Domination, killing someone who runs in like an idiot, and dying to their grenade because you're parked in a corner or you hitch up on a piece of geometry trying to dodge it/step on it to toss it away. Or the always popular teammate-kills-martyr-you-run-around-corner-into-exploding-body gimmick. That one's a real crowd pleaser. Or the extra fun run-from-tard-grenade-into-certain-death. Or the super extra fun run-from-tard-grenade-into-second-tard-grenade.
I swear they put Martyrdom in solely to break up peoples kill streaks. I've learned to cope with it, but it has pushed me away from SMG/shotgun/flanking/close range combat, which sucks ass, because that's my preferred combat style. It's harder and more rewarding than fighting at a distance with the various ARs (though they're still fun of course), but the omnipresence of matyrdom makes it even more difficult and dangerous than it already is.
Last stand is a joke. In comparison to Martyrdom it's just embarassing. One slight fix would be to give the +10 (or whatevr player kill score is in the current gametype) immediately on killing a Last Stand player - otherwise, nearly all players will either keep shooting, or duck out of sight, then back in to finish you, because they're tuned to the +10 and know when you actually died, or dropped into Last Stand, even if they didn't see you actually fall to the ground into the shooting pose.
Eavesdrop is a worse joke, completely pointless, unless you want to occasionally, once in awhile, listen to the enemy team cuss and swear.
Maps and game modes:
Wetworks is awful. It's vaguely tolerable in TDM, barely in Sabotage, godawful in Dom and HQ.
Showdown is pretty dreadful. Horrid connectivity, and downright annoying in HQ or Dom.
Shipment ('box'
) grew on me. It's a hilarious, stupid map, but it's fun to blow off some steam, and it doesn't show up in any rotation very often.
The rest are generally great throughout, though some of them do have some placement issues with bomb targets in S&D or Sabotage. I've played some horrid, grinding games of Sabotage due to the bomb placement and spawn location, similarly, some S&D map layouts seem to greatly favor offense or defense. I generally avoid the CS crap mode though, so that's not much of a bother, and Sabotage is fun otherwise
Speaking of HQ, there's something whack with the positioning of the HQ. While I'm guessing it's either completely random, or attempts to spawn with some intelligence (either close or far from the winning team, near or away from players, etc), I've seen some horrendously stupid spawns that often reward a team for dying completely, as they spawn atop its next position, or in some cases, continually spawn by the winning team, resulting in the super fun 250-0 shutout games.
OMG SHUT UP, and other random complaints
Can we please get an option to mute the other team/mute players not on your friend list? sometimes its tolerable, rarely its good, most of the time the chatter is completely godawful.
Stats are stupid. One blanket accuracy figure? How useless is that? Should be done per weapon, if anything. Similarly, k/d ratio is a pointless epeen measure. It's going to be dictated largely by what game modes you play.
Grenade spam is horrible in certain modes. 3x Frag is an awful perk when half the enemy team is using it to fling an unending stream of grenades at an HQ spawn :/ Bonus points for Sonic Boom and Tardyrdom tacked up for maximum retardation.
The uav/airstrike/heli behavior is sort of... dumb. There's no reason whatsoever to trigger a heli when you earn it. My first action upon acquiring a heli (unless I'm in a critical position) is to rush the nearest enemy cluster and get myself killed. Respawn, trigger heli -> UAV -> airstrike -> repeat. Not uncommon to get at least 2 and often 3x helis per round once you get into a rhythm, and far, far more devastating to the enemy team than simply triggering it immediately and going for a pointless kill streak (I'd do so if I could get map length carpet bombing or artillery bombardment at ~15 kills
)
That's all off the top of my head. I really do love this game, and combined with the ease of matchmaking and playing with my friends, it has anchored itself as one of my favorites. I expect I'll be playing this for quite some time.
