[MattyDienhoff]

I can respect that, even though I dislike MW2 in a major way. I look for different things in a war FPS than most people.

My favourite FPS of all time is Operation Flashpoint: Cold War Crisis (in case you don't know it, it's the predecessor to ArmA 2, you've probably heard of that). By my measure, that's just as thrilling as an action-packed blockbuster like the Call of Duty games, but in a fundamentally different way. You can and sometimes do go for ten minutes or more without even being shot at. If you're careful (and lucky), it's possible to complete many combat missions without even being hit... but every time you are shot at, it comes with that holy shit feeling, because you know that it only takes one bullet in the right place to kill you instantly. That fear, that strong sense of mortality... war games just don't feel complete to me without it.

In Call of Duty, you're almost always being shot at so you kind of get used to it. You expect an ambush around every corner, and being shot is inevitable. I somehow doubt that anyone has ever completed a Call of Duty game without their character having been shot at least a few dozen times. For me, it loses much of its spark because of that, and turning the difficulty up doesn't help because as we all know Call of Duty on Veteran is just a meatgrinder in which the only way to succeed is to push push push through droves of baddies and hope you're lucky enough to survive their grenade spamming and "aim only for you and ignore all of your teammates"'ing. It's so linear that there's rarely any way to intelligently circumvent enemies.

Admittedly, it's entirely possible to get into jams like that in Operation Flashpoint, but if you do it's usually because you made some kind of bad decision, and there are almost always at least a few other ways you can go about it next time. Call of Duty's gameplay usually involves being shepherded down a completely linear path to the objective (or, if you're lucky, two different linear paths that lead to the same place and are equally infested with hostiles, big whoop), where you're told exactly what to do by superiors and have to wait until they open doors for you to proceed. Cinematic window-dressing aside, that's Call of Duty gameplay.