Tag: multiplayer
Modern Warfare 2 is the best Call of Duty multiplayer in years – and a great indication of things to come
Call of Duty has a lot of problems. Even in the last seven days, documents have been published that show the close link the series has with the US armed forces, suggesting the game is a big, military-industrial psyop designed to rescue the image of the US war machine and drive recruitment to its ranks. As if that’s not bad enough, the single-player portions of the games often whitewash US war crimes and paint other nation states as the aggressors in order to make the yoke of American imperial oppression look… well, less oppressive.
So, to say I’m a ‘guilty CoD player’ is putting it mildly. Working this job means that I feel obliged to play the new games in the series every year – how else are we supposed to capitalise on all those lovely clicks? – and the older I get, the keener an eye I have for the incongruencies between what’s been shoved into my eyeballs and what’s actually happening. I won’t go into the nitty-gritty here, but when engaged with critically and as a piece of propaganda, Call of Duty is fascinating.
But that discussion is for another time. We’re here to talk multiplayer; boots-on-the-ground gunplay, instant-respawn twitch shooting, killstreaks, and chaos. That’s the Call of Duty formula, and Modern Warfare 2 does it with aplomb. After lining up over 50 hours in the multiplayer alone, I feel confident in saying this: Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 is the best multiplayer the series has seen since the Xbox 360 days.
Xbox Game Pass has a multiplayer gem that is much better than you think it is
Xbox Game Pass regularly gets new games, but its catalogue of titles is now so large that it’s easy to miss or forget about games that have been on the service for a long time. If you’re like me, you’ll put games onto your ‘play later’ list, a digital pile of shame that you know full-well will see titles leave before you get the chance to sample them. That’s fine. It’s what Game Pass is: an ever-changing all-you-can eat buffet. You know the pizza is always going to be there, but the Moroccan spiced lamb might need to be gobbled up before it’s replaced.
One such game is Human Fall Flat from Curve Games and No Brakes Games. Thankfully it’s pizza in this contrived analogy, and it’s being served in more than one place – it’s on Xbox Game Pass (console, PC, and cloud) as well as PS Plus Extra tier for PS4 and PS5. Hooray for subscription services!
Early moments with Human Fall Flat introduce the slightly unusual controls, which focus on the use of your featureless character’s arms to grapple with the game world – itself a rather bland environment, the kind of area you’d feel happy letting a toddler explore, crayons in slobber-soaked hand. Human Fall Flat is often labelled as “for kids,” and there’s no denying that it’s brilliant for younger players, but it’s fun for everyone if you give it a chance.
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Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (multiplayer) review: slick shooting that rarely misfires
Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 2‘s multiplayer – not including Warzone 2.0 – brings out the best of COD’s excellent gunplay on an array of colourful maps that largely deliver. And it tones down the pace of movement too, making for a measured experience that certainly rewards speed, but doesn’t make it an athletics competition.
And while the game’s multiplayer is a slick refinement of what’s come before, its gun unlock process is messy and excessive, even if it offers plenty of options for all types of player. Oh, and make sure you’ve got the game installed on an SSD…
Halo Infinite multiplayer ‘stumbled at the finish line’ says Microsoft
We’ve almost had the Halo Infinite multiplayer for a full year and now an Xbox boss has commented on the launch state of the FPS game, talking about how Microsoft and 343 Industries essentially fell at the last hurdle when they didn’t keep up the needed support or release the multiplayer game in the best way possible.
RELATED LINKS: Halo Infinite system requirements, Halo Infinite Bosses, Halo Infinite ranks
Warren Spector is making a multiplayer immersive sim
Warren Spector has been talking about his studio’s next game, Argos: Riders On The Storm. In the broadest possible terms, at least. In a brief interview with IGN, Spector says that Argos is multiplayer and “the next step in immersive sims.”
Multiplayer Co-Op Saves Get A Brilliant Reimagining With Grounded’s Shared Worlds System
Playing online games with friends can be a frustrating experience. If the game is hosted on a server, you have to depend on that server being up and stable. If the game is hosted peer-to-peer, the host might have to be actively playing the game, or have a machine in their home they can use to host a server. Obsidian’s Grounded, however, has found a genius way around all of this–and it’s something other developers should look to replicate where possible.
WARNING: There is a close-up picture of one of the insects from Grounded, but we’ve left out any pictures of spiders.
Grounded recently hit 1.0 after spending a good amount of time in early access, and what Obsidian gave us is one of its most polished games ever. The core conceit is simple: Take the movie Honey I Shrunk the Kids and make it a survival game. You drop as one of four kids into a world where the grass is as big as trees, and the trees as big as skyscrapers. This game can be played with up to four players, and it’s meant to be a persistent world that anyone can log into at any time. Grounded is on Game Pass, so there’s no extra buy-in to get started, and no servers for the developer or publisher to eventually shut down since it’s peer-to-peer.