Disaster Year 2009: Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 boasts an utterly bombastic single player that trades its previous installment's creeping wetwork for high octane air punching. Levels are not simply passed, you're blasted through them at hundreds of miles an hour, leaping and grasping at dangling salvation. Action is split between two fronts, an all-out invasion of the United States and a spy game super-narrative that eventually mutates into a disavowed sneaking mission. Infinity Ward pic n' mixes beats and flourishes from the last few decades worth of action cinema, weaving them seamlessly into the mongrel whole. Finish that and you unlock Special Ops, an off-shot dedicated to brief, cooperative remixes of core gameplay. It's a ruthlessly arranged highlights mode, consisting of 23 bulletin length epilogues. Missions consist of snowmobile races, million dollar sieges, and aggravated auto-destruction.

The real juice in Modern Warfare 2 though is the multiplayer mode, an unending avalanche of feedback and positive reinforcement. Guns and loadout perks are rationed on a keen trickle, meaning there's always an interesting piece of kit to chase. Every conceivable action tallies towards some form of reward, from customisable handle titles to simple XP currency. There's an exhaustive list of conditions to be met, congratulating players for both the mundane and the superlative. In-game kills grant access to air support that runs the gamut from an air-dropped resupply to a match shredding Apache helicopter. Land a 25 streak and you can call in a tactical nuke, killing everyone. Even the teething problems have been entertaining: players have occasionally found themselves dumped into bugged infinite ammo matches, maps groaning under a relentless grenade spam. Others shored up in eighteen man games on six man maps, post-death respawns becoming harassed opportunities to pick off other recent casualties. Rumours have flown around about private match invites that lead you to games that grant millions and millions of points for the most simplistic of actions. There will be more. Since release, Modern Warfare 2 has gobbled time. There's always something new to learn, or something old to modify.