The good news is the maps are well designed. Everything looks realistic, and the attention to detail is great, down to the bullet holes in walls and flaming wrecks. Bailout is a scene from Washington D.C., where you fight it out in a suburban apartment complex with an empty swimming pool and lots of indoor and outdoor action. Storm has lots of rain pouring down over an industrial complex. Salvage is a snowy junkyard setting that is more like a maze for close combat. I found it exceedingly hard to stay alive for a long time on that map. Overgrown is a battlefield with a combination of buildings and fences with lots of growth as well as long vistas where you can get a clear shot at someone far away.

That was one of my favorites, because I liked going to the top of the tall building to play sniper. Crash is the scene of a helicopter crash in the middle of a city with multi-story buildings. Crash and Overgrown were fan favorites from the original Modern Warfare. (They’re pictured in order, from top to bottom). The new maps are called Crash, Overgrown, Bailout, Salvage and Storm. When I walked onto the battlefield, my reactions were pretty dull, and I got my head handed to me a lot. That’s what a month of inactivity will do to your record. When I logged back in last night, I found I was ranked around 5.3 million. When I played my last multiplayer match more than a month ago, I was ranked at 3.6 million. One of the cool things about Modern Warfare 2 multiplayer is that you can always look at your statistics.

But I had to take time off to finish other excellent games such as Mass Effect 2, BioShock 2 and Battlefield Bad Company 2. I played multiplayer up until level 51 out of 70 and became intimately familiar with the best places to fight it out and survive inside 16 multiplayer maps. I waited until Activision Blizzard and Microsoft fixed the initial glitch that prevented gamers from playing the map pack. I tried the new maps out last night on Xbox Live. They’ve now been retooled for the new version. I paid for those maps in 2007 when I played the game back then. Two of the five maps are reruns from the previous game, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare game. But this Stimulus Pack with five new multiplayer maps isn’t necessarily a bargain.

Call of duty modern warfare 2 maps