Overall, the amount of kills required to call in the heavy artillery feels balanced. Chances are, if a player is capable of doing that, that player's team is probably going to win anyway. they'd have to go kill 25 players without dying. Even though you'll be able to unlock all of the killstreaks, you can still only select three at any given time. First of all, a player would have to sacrifice a potentially more useful but lower quality killstreak to make room for the nuke.
While it's certainly attainable by the most dedicated and savage players, it seems unlikely that a nuke will be deployed. By comparison, a UAV is still three kills and a supply drop is just four. To get that tactical nuke, you'll need to kill 25 people in a row. Sure, the world might be close to ending, but there's always time for a swim. That might sound like a nuisance that greatly unbalances the game, but it puts a strong highlight onto the risk versus reward system that comes into play with these killstreaks. It's a tactical nuke that, when deployed, destroys the arena, kills all the players, and ends the game, regardless of score. At the outer edges of the killstreak lies a bonus that pretty much levels the playing field. But you can also call in supply drops, send up counter-UAVs that block enemy radar, send in a harrier jet that hovers above the battle and guns down the opposition, or even call in a Predator missile strike, which lets you quickly control a missile as it drops from the sky, hopefully onto a cluster of enemies. You can also still call in airstrikes and helicopters. Like before, you can call in UAV drones to give yourself a better sense of where the enemies are currently located if you can get three kills in a row. The concept of selectable killstreak bonuses is probably the most interesting change. But everything that surrounds these basic concepts has been expanded and modified in a lot of interesting ways. The little clicks that let you know that you've hit your target, or the way grenades clink around on the ground, regardless of surface, haven't changed at all, either. It's still about putting the sights of your gun on the enemy and carefully pulling the trigger. The core activity in the multiplayer hasn't changed a bit. If you're like me, and don't like getting shot at by snipers from large distances, you'd do well to stay low on Wasteland.
Urban areas dominate the map list, but you'll also find large, mostly flat areas like Wasteland. You'll fight across the rooftop of a large office building in Highrise, while Rust is a very small area designed for hectic free-for-alls, sort of like Shipment was in Call of Duty 4, but with a bit more verticality.
The action takes place across 16 different maps that offer a variety of shapes, sizes, and styles. Online, up to 18 players can meet up in several different types of matches, which cover the standard bases, like deathmatch and team deathmatch, as well as capture the flag and several other objective-style matches. The big draw in Modern Warfare 2 is its competitive multiplayer. Instead, the risky stuff is saved for the single-player campaign, which offers tightly packed thrills and rock-solid gameplay, though the narrative is so wild it can get exhausting.
But rather than taking a ton of huge big-budget risks, Modern Warfare 2's multiplayer carefully builds upon the developer's previous success in ways that will astound people who have spent the last two years learning every corner of every map in the previous game. Modern Warfare 2 represents Infinity Ward's first work since Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare raised the developer's profile (and increased the bulge in its wallet) several orders of magnitude.