Unplayable due to cheaters crashing servers across the entire game. Can't play most matches to the end.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ FINALLY, A SHOOTER FOR GROWN-UPS.
Requires a functioning brain to play.

Why the "Slide-Cancel" Kids are Crying:
This is the perfect mix of high speed Run-and-Gun and calculated Tactical Play. It’s so well-optimized that Battlefield 6 used it as the development benchmark. There’s a reason the upcoming Modern Warfare 4 (2026) is stripping back to this engine, as the Peak Gold standard for immersion on grounded FPS combat.

REALITY > FANTASY: Zero wall-jumping. Zero magical power-ups. Zero immersion-breaking garbage. This is grounded in reality, immersive experience. You get total immersion without the "suspension of disbelief" required by the arcade trash being pumped out lately.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐A REAL COMMUNITY: This isn't a lobby full of screaming children. It’s the most mature player base in the franchise. People actually use their microphones for coordination and strategy, not just background noise.
If you don't have a squad giving call-outs and covering your six, don't complain when you get stomped by players with a superior strategy.

COMMUNICATION IS KEY:
Why the "Solo-Queuers" are getting wrecked: If you’re playing solo and muted, you’re playing it wrong. Modern Warfare 2 (2022) is built for squads who actually know how to communicate. Captain Price quote: "The ultimate weapon is TEAM."
This game isn't just about twitch reflexes; it’s about tactical coordination. This isn't a game for the silent and clueless. Grab a mic and get a squad.

ELITE GAME MODES: If you want to see where this game shines, get out of the basic TDM lobbies. JUMP INTO Knock Out, Prisoner Rescue, and Cyber Attack, That's where the Pro players play. It requires positioning, timing, and a brain. And when we demote ourselves we jump into Classic Shipment for the love of chaos. I never recommend S&D due to toxicity and cheating players like fly's on a ♥♥♥♥.

TECHNICAL INTEGRITY SUPERIORITY:
In my experience, there are significantly fewer cheaters and game-breaking weapon glitches here than in any other COD. It’s stable, competitive, and it rewards the better team every single time. With the newest update, it's finally stable, fair, and it’s GOOD.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐THE BOTTOM LINE: 5/5 Stars:
This isn't just another yearly release; it's the community favorite for a reason.
If you can’t handle a game that requires positioning, timing, and a brain, go away. This is for the veterans who remember what a real FPS feels like.
From 27 years of boots-on-the-ground experience in the FPS genre since 1998 *Nintendo64 ( Goldeneye 007) I can tell you the "lone wolf" era is dead. Grab a mic, get a squad if you want a game that rewards strategy and positioning, this is it.

Call of Duty has predicted the future so many times. Many people scoffed at the original Modern Warfare, featuring a mission in Pripyat, Ukraine - where organizations of pan-slavic, post-Soviet Russians were doing an arms deal to fund an imperial campaign to restore the Russian empire. All of this complete with generic, Soviet iconography being their calling card. I mean really, Russian Ultranationalists in Pripyat? How could that ever come to pass?

And then, of course, MW2022 predicted renewed American-Iranian hostilities, playing heavily off of the very strong real life collaboration between Russia, Russian mercenary proxies and Iran. Not only that, but they also predicted further reactionary military operations from America and even outright militarized operations against drug cartels. I remember mentioning a lot of how realistic this was to a friend, who immediately discounted it. More or less, almost everything 2022 had predicted had come to pass. Down even to Iranian using American weapons against Americans.

Just for fun, let's also mention that MW2022 further showed the consequences of having a parallel mercenary army, running adjacent to a country's main forces and make them hardline war criminals. Bonus points, those mercs aren't even the Wagner PMC stand-ins, but don't worry, Not-Wagner is a central aspect of the plot near the end and of course, are very prevalent in the multiplayer.

MW2022 originally was packaged into the ever cancerous Call of Duty mega client app, thus all my achievements and multiplayer progress actually carried on from there. So I thought this was an opportune moment to give the game a proper individual review. So note, even though I played on a lower difficulty setting this time around, I have beaten the game prior on the highest and have seen practically all the co op and MP content.

The game's story missed for a lot of people, but it is actually my personal favourite in the reboot trilogy so far. I think a lot of people will be surprised at that, since many consider this campaign a huge step down from MW2019. Personally, as much as I greatly regard MW2019 as one of the most grounded and realistic campaigns of all time, MW2022 has one of my favourite stories in any Call of Duty game. It is fairly grounded, which is ironic when people call the Iranian-Cartel connection nonsense, however, Islamists utilizing cartel smugglers has happened in real life before. They even made a fairly poor movie about it.

All in all, I think its also a somewhat flawed campaign despite everything it does right. Its a very risk-taking one, but it has some great innovations to the formula at the cost of some less than stellar missions. I think one of the biggest downsides to the campaign is that it is certainly, somehow, a graphic step down and no matter what hardware or how high I crank the settings up, the shadows always have some weird rendering glitch which significantly holds back the graphic fidelity, where as MW2019 genuinely looked superior in most fundamentals. The pre-rendered cutscenes, however, are really fantastic, where as the in-game graphic transitions are far less smooth and their slight abundance can be kind of jarring.

Other than that, you move a lot better than MW2019 by a long shot and the pacing of fire fights is superior, but the pace of the game itself is slow in sometimes the wrong ways. My biggest gripe with the campaign is that it has some of the absolute best missions in the series and the absolute worst at the same time. Let's get the bad out of the way. The truck chase is absolutely infamous and while it has grown on me over the years, it really is a mission that would have been better being maybe three minutes max. It quickly turns into a Mad Max movie and then it vastly overstays its welcome. Also, playing it on resolutions higher than 1080p breaks the scripting.

In general, playing the game above 1080p not only makes it harder as for some reason, it grants enemies X-ray vision, but you can also see the artificial speed boosts some of the AI gets and it explains why they sometimes can unrealistically get the jump on you in a far from organic way.

The game itself is by far the most frustrating campaign regardless of difficulty. Many armoured, bullet sponge enemies, relentless and hyper aggressive enemy AI, generally hyper accurate laser-weapons, combined with a distinct lack of health and the plate system is not utilized until way later in the campaign. Rather than making some fire fights more intense, it makes the firefights very boring or needlessly difficult. On veteran, the game is basically unplayable. As someone with chronic bruxism and TMD as it is, this game is definitely one of the ones that made me grind some of my teeth into paste and still does.

The tank mission near the end is poorly designed, poorly thought out and has absolutely zero reward and no reason to ever be in this game. A complete slop-bomb in a slopgem otherwise. Now, the sniping mission in this game is one of the best and most satisfying in the series. But once again, it quickly degrades into fighting over armoured, bullet sponge enemies.

The guerilla warfare mission as Soap, with radio guidance from Ghost, against some conventional military assets that are near-peers, meanwhile, is one of the best missions in the entire genre and not just Call of Duty. It is intense, feeling at times a better Resident Evil than Resident Evil. It is an example of challenging a very talented and skilled character by first, handicapping him and putting him at a perpetual disadvantage, as a character developing moment and every bit of dialogue in the mission is gold. It really made these incarnations of Ghost and Soap so likable and the absolute pinnacle of their characterizations. That, and the satisfaction of fighting for every inch of your life and then later being able to partake in the schadenfreude of burning some murderous merc with a molotov and watching as his burning body grimly paints the wet, damp, rainy scene in somber amber flickering.

The game does have some odd lapses in logic. A terrorist is let go at one point on some legality discourse and the game punishes you for even accidentally killing civilians, but the same forces completely devastate civilian infrastructure with billion dollar ordinance delivery and a lot of civilians are literally executed gestapo style regardless.

All in all, its not always the most fun, but its one of the best character-driven campaigns I've played and I really enjoy most of the scenarios and environments they put us through, despite some really lackluster missions in between legendary ones. If anything, it felt like one of the more inspired and original takes on modern conflicts and asymmetrical warfare's numerous definitions and applications.

Ghost still certainly looks like someone's deviantart OC hanging out with the main cast, but his design overhaul, as silly as it is, really grows on you.

The multiplayer was one of my best premiers in years when it first came out, I had a lot of fun. That being said, the demon of skill based matchmaking killed COD for me starting here, with the later Black Ops 7 fully finishing me off.

I understand that everyone wants to get a fair chance at playing consistently decent, but SBMM truly just punishes 90% of players by putting them as the victims of consecutive squash matches against the top 1%. I briefly managed to be in the 9% of being able to play consistently good in terms of k/d and score, regardless of winning or losing... until my last 10 hours of the game back when it was leached onto the Call of Duty primary client.

I went from a 2.33 k/d to a 0.97 in a single week, because after having one insanely high performing streak of... two games, SBMM decided to permanently punish me forever and I lost an astounding 27 matches afterwards.