When you picture Call of Duty multiplayer, what do you see? People sprint-diving, kill streaks gone wild, and brutal rounds of Deathmatch after Deathmatch, most probably. Yet when I first hit Quick Play in Modern Warfare 2, I was guided to something different: a vision of Call of Duty that isn’t trying to be another game, but instead innovates in a way I’ve never seen done better. Modern Warfare 2 actually found a way to perfectly mix survival horde modes with competitive play, and it’s hard to switch over to anything else now that I’ve played it.
On paper, the mode is little more than a twist on King of the Hill. Each team tries to hold a point until the 30-second timer runs out, and a new point spawns in a different area of the map to be claimed. The longer you hold it, the more points your team earns.
What sets Headquarters apart is that earning those points comes at a precious cost: no respawns for your team until either the timer runs out, or you get kicked off the point by the enemy team. Obviously you want to be in the lead, but every time you start scoring, the entire flow of combat changes. Taking risks just isn’t viable anymore because one shotgun unloaded into you can put you out of the game for a significant amount of time.
Suddenly so many pieces of equipment in Modern Warfare II take on renewed, meaningful roles; Semtex and personal deployable shields are now your first line of defense, and you have to hold on the objective if you want to be sure the enemy doesn’t sabotage your Headquarters to explode, costing you more points.
Leaning around corners to better hide your profile is as important here as it is in the campaign. Being a defender in Headquarters is like every traditional horde mode turned up to eleven, rewarding line of sight control and defensive reflexes over how good you are at quickscoping.
Yet if by misfortune you’re on the attacking side, it’s a completely different experience. Instead, you feel like Raul Menendez in Black Ops II, ready to tear into the enemy by any means necessary. Death doesn’t matter to you. Every opponent you take down is one less bastard in the way of cutting off the opposing force from winning.
You know your foes will be playing cautious, so you get to be reckless, diving in from above, pulling off trick grenade bounces, ambushing with silenced weapons, and hitting them through walls with breach charges. Despite everyone having access to the same equipment and controls, Headquarters nails the asymmetric vibe of Splinter Cell’s Spies vs. Mercenaries perfectly while standing on its own in a distinctly Call of Duty fashion.
That’s one of the key aspects that most matters to me, because my word, Modern Warfare 2 is just full of other games inside its modes. You can have CS:GO in Call of Duty. Tarkov in Call of Duty. Fortnite (but less colorful) in Call of Duty. With the return of third-person mode, you even arguably have Rogue Company in Call of Duty. It’s not bad to learn from the competition, but Call of Duty used to set the standard for multiplayer, not just offer a grab bag of other people’s titles.
Headquarters is a healthy step in the direction of having a mode that Call of Duty can call its own, offering an objective based mode that still emphasizes the rapid pace of Deathmatch and the tactfulness of the modes that limit all respawns. While Kill Confirmed and Domination are still on my search filter, it’s hard to compete with the thrill of Headquarters. Win or lose, I’ve never played anything quite like this, and that’s the sort of thrill that keeps you coming back to a great multiplayer mode.
