Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare Review - 6 Ups & 5 Downs

3. It's Full Of Bizarre Design Decisions

Despite the many things Modern Warfare gets right, it's also full of strange design decisions which often seem nonsensical and downright antithetical to the experience that most players want.

For starters, PC players will be irked to learn that their version of the game is online-only, and even if you're playing the single-player campaign, you need to be connected to the game's servers.

That these servers crashed on release day, and millions of players were locked out of the campaign for several hours, is proof perfect of why DRM restrictions such as this are pathetic and unacceptable. Bizarrely, though, the restriction wasn't implemented on consoles.

But in terms of actual gameplay, there are so many missing and needlessly altered features: the typical map vote system is gone, the minimap no longer displays gunfire sounds, sprint movement has been slowed compared to the beta, matchmaking resets after every match, and double XP tokens continue to count down even while you're in menus.

Perhaps the biggest overall design flaw is how actively the game promotes camping: between the low TTK, lack of gunfire indicators on the map, loud footsteps and unconventional map layout, most maps reward camping while punishing a run-and-gun style, which feels rather unfair.

While some of these issues could be remedied in a patch, others are so inherently part of the game's design that they can't much be altered, and so players will either have to try and acclimate themselves or simply move on.