They looked like scarecrow people. I know "Tom" was supposed to be staring longingly into the distance about how much he likes killing Arabs, but goddamn. He stared longingly into everything. Awful modeling. Can't believe EA paid to have those scenes created; they are so uncanny valley that they actively dilute the drama of the narrative.
And goddamn Mother's wife is fug.
Yours was one of the opinions I was waiting on since we had very similar opinions of 2010. Welp, guess I should see if I can find Spec Ops for cheap.
They basically don't do any of the things I liked in the first game well. The campaign is mostly lacking in variety with simplistic and uninteresting level designs. The game takes place mostly at night, which is frustrating because it made it very challenging to see anything. Each encounter became an exercise in frustration as bad guys would pour in from every ledge or crevice; monster closets in a faux realistic setting are annoying and should have been ditched after CoD4. The globe trotting manages to make the settings less interesting than the routinely gray and yellow mountains and caves that made up the first.
The game has no signature moment. There is no Last Stand equivalent. Which might be good since the checkpointing in the game is terrible.
Some of the systems amount to nothing. The Breach and Clear system allows you to choose how you'd like to breach a room, but as far as I can tell, there's no difference between them. I don't understand what this was for in the game. Seemed like it might have been something that got yanked.
The shooting does not feel satisfying and the AI is awful and behaves confusingly. All I wanted in this game was a gun that felt somewhat accurate. I never got one until the very end when I just started using the pistol. Your partners are useless and at times actually somewhat destructive, pushing you out of cover and allowing enemies to run straight at you while you are reloading.
The game looks quite good (when you can see what you're doing). One mid-game mission in the Philippines is one big soggy mess visually. The music is understated...if it is even there. Hard to tell at times as the game is way too quiet. The story is confusing and the family stuff feels forced at best (sometimes it just feels like pandering). The game just doesn't feel reverent of the soldier in the way the first one tried to be. Sure, it was over the top, but this one makes them out to be action heroes. There's a scene mimicking the end of Modern Warfare 2 exactly, with the raft and everything.
The Osama Bin Laden mission is weak. How you take a super stealthy, dangerous op like that and turn it into a big bad bombastic assault on 900 billion Muslins in a Hut takes a lot of guts.
The screen turns green when you are shot for absolutely no discernible reason. I feel like you take very little damage before going down. It's very frustrating.
It's buggy and glitchy.
On the plus side, the driving is actually great. I kind of want Need for Speed now.
