Review:
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare: Reflex Edition

Let’s get one thing out of the way first: this game is ugly. As ugly as America’s foreign policy, retro fashions and Sarah Jessica Parker. The opening drive through a war-torn nondescript Middle Eastern city – a fantastic display of the power of the 360 and PS3 engines – is here rendered so hideous that your eyeballs may turn themselves inside out just to stop looking at the screen. The textures are plain, the environments are detail-free and the pixels are so sharp and jagged it’s like wiping your face on a cheese grater.

With that sad truth behind us, let’s now celebrate the fact that one of the best FPSes of all time has finally made its way onto the Wii, warts and all. This is a perfect port of a very good game and remarkably little has been lost in the translation.

The game is split into several diverting chunks. One half of the single player campaign sees you guiding a hatefully obnoxious and bombastic Marine through a pseudo-Iraq as you gleefully destroy lives, homes and families in the name of truth, justice and the American way. The other half is far more interesting, putting you behind the grizzled mug of a propa’ ‘ard SAS team member as they sneak through the Russian wilderness. The levels themselves are well-designed enough to be just about memorable, flitting between FPS gunishment action and the sporadic, fairly boring vehicle sections.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with the vehicle levels, they’re just not that interesting. Firing an infinite ammo mounted cannon from the side of a helicopter gun ship is not as much fun as it should be, and the less said about that excruciatingly dull monochrome AC130 level, the better.

The game’s real selling point is its much-praised multiplayer mode, which returns here in all its glory. While on the surface appearing to be a normal online murder sim, Infinity Ward have brilliantly combined the best parts of killing anonymous strangers with an incredibly complex RPG system.