Modern Warfare 2 Preview

With only several months left until its November 10 release, Modern Warfare 2, the next installment in Activision’s Call of Duty franchise and developer Infinity Ward’s long-awaited follow-up to their 2007 FPS mega hit, just got hipper after an exclusive Prestige Edition of the game was announced in a Youtube video posted by the publisher. While Collector’s Editions are nothing new when it comes to games these days, Modern Warfare 2 is expected to arrive in not 2 but 3 different flavors – a Basic Edition that should retail for the usual $60, a Hardened Edition selling for $80, and a Prestige Edition that will include – get this – a pair of real, fully functioning night-vision goggles and set you back a whooping $150 bucks! So if you’re keen to optimize your gaming experience when you play this baby while also pulling a Disturbia-type move on your neighbors for the same price, you’d better start putting some serious money aside.

Modern Warfare 2, however, certainly does look spectacular and will most likely be worth every penny. Visually the game is essentially unsurpassed, featuring a brand new graphics engine with ridiculous amounts of texture detail and superb special effects. One look at the in-game footage from the trailer or the flurries of screen shots floating around the web should suffice to convince even the most demanding aesthete that this game is the real deal, destined it seems to set a new benchmark for the FPS genre.

Story-wise we’ll be getting what you’d expect – more of the same adrenaline-pumping action that made the first Call of Duty: Modern Warfare so addictive and realistic. The bad guys you defeated earlier, with Zakaev in charge, are back in full force and your quest to hunt them down and prevent nuclear armageddon will again take you around the globe, from the snows of Kazakhstan to the slums of Rio. This time around there will also be more vehicles for you to use, including some rather exotic ones like the snowmobile.

Interestingly, the developers at Infinity Ward insist they have engineered a brand new AI system that will make gameplay much less predictable than it has been so far in most previous first person shooters as enemies will not pop up in the same locations and react the same way each time you play a level. As a result, you won’t see hordes of zombie-like adversaries bluntly charging at you in wave after wave or frantically trying to run through a wall as you stand back and take aim, but the bad guys that do show up should be much more lethal than usual, and – due to their smarter AI – considerably tougher to dispatch.

With its addictive special ops campaign mode, high-tech weaponry and improved enemy AI, Modern Warfare 2 looks set to offer FPS gamers many hours of engaging gameplay and, for aficionados of the series, a welcome break from crappy World War II era guns and floods of brainless adversaries so prevalent in Activision’s most recent Call of Duty outing, World at War.

Modern Warfare 2 is set to hit the PS3, Xbox 360 and PC platforms on November 10, just in time for the holidays.