I've said a lot of times elsewhere that this is pretty much the Bad Boys II of games, but that's not exactly true. For one it's not even close to as good as Bad Boys II, nor does it have the same degree of genuine nihilism for people in completely muted and brutal discontent. And honestly I tend to steer clear of nihilistic works so what would I really be saying there? But the big modicum of truth there is that MW2, for all its ills it brought to the rest of the CoD franchise as the biggest tone turning point in the series after WaW, is the strongest encapsulation of Michael Bay in the medium.

On a surface level that's clearly true, with just every mission working at a breakneck pace between explosion-laid action sequences with a whole cast of bro-team unlikeable jerks peaking at the end in a suicide mission with a captain of war crimes and a cleaning tool. It's almost completely rancid, having its infamous massacre be a gratuitous controversy generator as well as a main strike for its core conflict. In these ways it fully emulates that violent and heavy narrative scape Michael Bay's movies constantly demonstrate, with the real lack of love for anything humanity included. I don't say this as a bad thing either, and I do mean to say that MW2 is fully genuine in a lot of parts too. Probably the most memorable and visually striking part of the game is when the EMP blows, and you're simply forced to move through a completely quiet destroyed area of all the Washington DC iconography, with only the gunfire and debris muting your footsteps.

It's wildly memorable from start to finish, with nary a mission I can't completely walk through fully in my mind, and honestly I don't have one I really dislike much either. The gameplay beneath the stuff I praise here though is nothing special. I'm pushing that MW2 punches above its weight somewhat by accident but I'm not going to throw my body to the fire that is general stop and pop. I think in a few missions it gets some matching hype mileage out of particular gimmicks, especially the snowmobile section, but it's fairly malaise. The developers are somewhat knowledgeable of this to where most of the ops missions you get afterward are more gimmicky but they're not that interesting I'd argue either, and generally the most forgettable part of the whole experience.

But the multiplayer lives on another plane of reality altogether. It's pure condensed fucking mayhem. It's extremely unbalanced complete trash with extraordinarily busted options and hilariously uneven map design. And it's my favorite multiplayer of all of the series entirely for that reason. When everyone else is using disgusting trash the pretense of seriousness is fully gone, the assumptions of what a shooter or multiplayer should be are gone, and instead everyone devolves into that mayhem. The era of MW2 dominating machinima and elsewhere was a real wonderful moment of complete monkey craziness, culminating in MOM GET THE CAMERA.

Ok I've waxed enough prose on MW2 I just think that the period of calling it when COD went to shit or an extremely inferior work to MW1 gets on my nerves. Weird reason to write this I suppose but I think MW2's accidents are the most interesting thing about it, and also why it's so timeless.