Call of Duty Modern Warfare II is the best game in the long-running Activision series for many shooting enthusiasts. So it’s no surprise that many fans were initially positive when Activision announced that it would be bringing Modern Warfare games back to life. Call of Duty Modern Warfare came out in 2019 and that was definitely without success. We liked the stern edge of the campaign and also appreciated the many innovations in the multiplayer mode, such as Gunsmith for weapon customization and Gunfight mode. Overall, the game didn’t achieve the same status as the original Modern Warfare, but it certainly was a good try.

In just over a month, Modern Warfare II will be the successor to that game. The story takes place a few years after the events of the first part, and well-known Modern Warfare names such as Price, Soap and Ghost will play major roles in this story. We don’t know much about this story yet, but we already know a lot about the multiplayer game. Last weekend, PlayStation players could already begin testing the open beta that was organized by Activision and Infinity Ward and will also be taking place this weekend. However, this weekend, not only PlayStation players but also players on Xbox or PC will be able to start the new Call of Duty game. You can try everything you read in this preview in the coming days, maybe even now.

The beta test includes several game modes, three maps and of course the opportunity to try out new weapons and gear that you can collect with them. Pay attention too Kill line bonuses, as I am used to the game Call of Duty. For us, there was a pitfall: we quickly noticed that it was very easy to get familiar with the load bundling process, picking kill periods, and then the flow of the game. This is not surprising: Call of Duty is Call of Duty. It would be strange if Infinity Ward suddenly took a completely different approach. It’s more than that, personally, I’ve never felt like playing a completely new game. This is of course an exaggeration, because there is a lot of news to experience in Modern Warfare II. But the gameplay flow feels very familiar and there is a positive and negative feature to it. It’s nice to pick a game and be able to play well in no time, but it’s also a shame that this game also looks like many others you’ve played before.

However, Modern Warfare II deserves a fair chance to show if it can indeed follow in the footsteps of its namesake. So it’s time to pick a trigger, select a gear and get started. As usual, you start with a standard armor set: the ability to select gear is unlocked once you level up some of them. In the beta we were initially able to unlock and use that custom gear, but that was later closed and all players had to play with the standard gear. We don’t know how that will work in the beta next weekend, but keep in mind that custom gear can be locked down.

That would be a shame, because you can’t play with the gunsmith and that means you can’t see the new way to unlock the gun on the screen. Modern Warfare II brings a new system with it. If you use a weapon a lot, this weapon will level up and you can put other accessories on it. This is not new. The cool thing is that some attachments open a new branch. The M4 base version lets you unlock a receiver at level 13, which mods the weapon to convert into an FTAC Recon assault rifle. If you keep playing with this specific weapon, you can get an FSS Hurricane machine gun with it. So you don’t even have one anymore Gun, but a weapon of a completely different class, created the way I developed it. This build didn’t work well in the beta, as all branches seem to open faster than intended, but it may also be true to allow players to quickly try out multiple weapons.