I picked up this game a couple days ago, and will be writing a full review of it sometime this weekend, but I wanted to read what's been said here about it because for the most part I find this group more mature than the standard gamer type person. So, frankly I am a bit surprised about your attitudes on the No Russian mission, and the implications on the game as a whole.
This is the first time I have ever been disgusted by the path a game took to the point where I may stop playing it permanently. When I played MW1 I was bothered that here I was, making a game out of something that a couple of my friends, who were at the time soldiers in Iraq, went through on a semi regular basis. I was finding enjoyment in something so emotionally traumatising that people often come back from it and aren't able to reintegrate with society.
This issue is something that any war game based on a real war will have to deal with. A friend of mine was playing the Omaha beach scene of a WW2 game and his Grandfather, a veteran who was on one of the beaches was watching him play it. My buddy had a moment of epiphany of what he was doing, enjoying a recreation of his grandfathers worst nightmare, and shut off the game, never played it again.
For WW2 games, and even Vietnam games this issue is less severe, however, as its so far in the past for most of us that we can't really empathize. MW1/2, on the other hand, are set in current times. The reason I finally let myself feel more ok about MW1 was that the combat and action were treated seriously and actually made me empathize with how terrible an experience that would be in real life. It was kind of like watching Black Hawk Down (or for WW2 Band of Brothers).
MW2, on the other hand, feels more like Rambo/Delta Force/Red Dawn/James Bond. There's poorly constructed plot, there's massive holes in the military strategy (eg why would the navy be bombing the gulag that was only a target because of the extraction, that makes no sense as a strategic target), there are fucking SNOW MOBILE CHASES. So Infinity Ward decided to do a lazy execution of this game because all that matters is the action.
The action was intense, no doubt, but it was immature. It was popcorn action, not action with a deep emotional impact, and to make popcorn action that so closely uses real horrors that exist in this world right NOW, deeply disturbs me. Moreover, the general reaction of the gaming media that "our medium can address such weighty issues" (Adam Biessener, game informer), only proves to me the exact opposite, that the level of emotional maturity that exists in our medium is so low that we clearly have no place attempting to address any serious issue.
Of course, many people may respond with "christ dude, its just a game", but you don't get to have it both ways. Its either a piss poor and highly exploitative attempt at a serious message, or its "just a game" that only wants to use these horrors as a form of entertainment for a culture so disconnected from reality that we may be as bad as people in the main stream media often want to say we are.
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What kills me most of all, though, is that for as much as I find the game distasteful, I fucking loved playing most of it. The firefights are great, the action sequences are incredible, I have never played something that was so breakneck all the way through. Frankly its a good thing the game was as short as it was, because if it wasn't I probably would have had an adrenaline overload and would have been found dead at my desk with my hands fiercely locked onto my mouse and gamepad.
