Image: Activision
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 is an unfortunate low point for the franchise as a whole.
When Activision hit the reset button on its Modern Warfare franchise, we were told that this new era would be a soft reboot only loosely based on the original. The idea was not to retell a story we've heard before, but to revive a classic era of gritty boots-on-the-ground combat for the modern day. Well, four years have passed and we’re doing ‘No Russian’ again. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 is a low point for the annual shooter franchise, squandering the strong foundation of 2019’s soft reboot built with a glaringly short story campaign that lacks the memorable action setpieces and sense of drama this series is known for.
While the campaign disappoints, however, Modern Warfare 3’s multiplayer modes largely provide more of the same. If you’re looking to sign up for another year of new Call of Duty, there’s plenty to like here - from tight 6v6 modes to open-world Zombies - though the core PvP modes very clearly carry this entry.
Somehow, Makarov returned
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3’s plot picks up right after the events of Modern Warfare 2, which saw Task Force 141 expose a plot to illegally transport missiles hatched by Commander Shepherd and Phillip Graves. The game also teased the arrival of Vladimir Makarov, the main antagonist of the original Modern Warfare series, who leads a group of Russian Ultranationalists.
I won’t spoil much of this campaign here, seeing as it’s so short (around three hours of playtime) that a single paragraph might qualify as a thoroughly detailed summary. The core premise here revolves around a Russian military company called Konni Group freeing Makarov from imprisonment, before attempting to incite a war by framing the United States over a series of bombings. Task Force 141 - comprising of series regulars Captain Price, Soap, Ghost, and Gaz - attempts to recapture Makarov and end his evil schemes for good.
The core ingredients of a bombastic Call of Duty campaign are here, but to say that this one fumbles the ball would be the understatement of the century. For one thing, Modern Warfare 3 is hilariously short for a $70 game, especially since half of it is made up of what Activision calls ‘Open Combat Missions’. These levels recycle a format introduced in Soap’s ‘Alone’ mission from the previous game, giving the player a large open area with no weapons and several objectives to tick off across the map. ‘Alone’ worked well thanks to its back-and-forth banter between Soap, who meticulously makes his way through enemy territory, and an uncharacteristically vulnerable Ghost on the radio, who opens up while guiding Soap towards freedom.
That's the kind of emotional drama Call of Duty is known for, repeatedly getting players invested in the lives of soldiers before they get killed or injured, or worse in action. None of that is present in Modern Warfare 3’s nigh-listless campaign, which plods its way through major character deaths and shocking events with all the enthusiasm of a weather reporter on a sunny day. As trifling as most of it seems to be, the events of this game really do matter and should heavily impact Task Force 141 in future sequels. Yet, all of it pales in comparison to the storytelling highs of this series reboot alone. Modern Warfare (2019) directly addressed the topic of child soldiers with Farah, while the second dug into government espionage. Modern Warfare 3 has nothing meaningful to say at all, nothing new to bring to the table, and no additional creativity in its mission design besides giving you bigger spaces to stealth or shoot your way through.
Modern Warfare 2 might have taken the franchise on a controversially James Bond-like globetrotting detour, but at least that game offered spectacle and enough mission variety to keep you engaged from one level to the next. Going through several Open Combat Missions in a row is tedious and exhausting. The visuals are fantastic and the guns continue to feel and look amazing in combat, sure, but that doesn’t save the campaign from being one of the most unmemorable of its kind in the franchise.
At least Multiplayer is worth a shot
Modern Warfare 3 might be disappointing to a Call of Duty campaign enjoyer such as myself, but I’d wager most players get new Call of Duty games more for their multiplayer offerings than anything else. To that end, this year’s instalment of the franchise certainly has more to offer. More of the same, that is.
Modern Warfare 3’s bevy of new maps is not all that new: the sequel brings a whopping 16 maps to its various multiplayer modes, all of which are remade versions of old Modern Warfare 2 (2009) maps. It’s sort of like jumping into Counter-Strike 2, where there’s a heavy nostalgia factor involved in how much you can enjoy all this returning content. Still, it’s hard to deny the production value put into these reproductions. Much like the campaign, these maps boast some of the most beautiful visuals in modern multiplayer gaming, and most of them are iconic enough to have stood the test of time design-wise. There are even a few tweaks here, like water areas that you can actually swim in now.
Adjustments to Multiplayer gameplay feel equally small but meaningful. Slide-cancelling returns after a lengthy leave of absence, encouraging players to start running and sliding in tandem Apex Legends-style to move and shoot as quickly as possible. This is bound to be a controversial opinion given how beloved the mechanic is, but: I don’t love that! To me, Modern Warfare (2019) felt like a return to grounded tactical gameplay where maps weren’t bouncy houses and soldiers weren’t sentient jetpacks with guns, so this does feel like a slight shift in the wrong direction. If you’re looking for more fast-paced gameplay though, you’re getting it.
Besides the new arsenal of weapons and operators to choose from, there really isn’t a whole lot of innovation here. Swimming wasn’t a game-changing addition to Modern Warfare 2, but Activision at least built a few maps around the mechanic and let players have fun with it. Besides slide-cancelling - which is hardly new to the franchise - it doesn’t feel like Activision had a lot of new ideas left in the tank for this year’s entry. If you wanted to keep playing Modern Warfare 2 with 16 new maps, this is pretty much where you’d go - but is that worth shelling out $70 for alone?
Even Zombies takes a hit this year
PvP modes aren’t the only multiplayer modes available in Modern Warfare 3. Zombies return this year, and it's gone open-world in the vein of last year’s DMZ mode. Sadly, that means DMZ has been rotated out - a shame, considering just how much fun it was as an alternative to Warzone - but this delivers the same thrills in a different package.
‘DMZ Zombies’ would be a better moniker for this year’s iteration of the monster-infested mode. The mode takes place in an apocalyptic version of the Warzone map Urzikstan, where you dive into different parts of the map with a 45-minute timer to look for resources and weapons before extraction via a helicopter, while zombies lurk around every corner. The classic zombie gameplay loop of surviving waves of zombies, upgrading weapons and setting up defences has been thrown out of the window entirely. The sense of tension you feel while getting swarmed by zombies in claustrophobic environments is arguably what defines this mode, but all that is gone when you're on a large map filled with vehicles. Why not just run away?
At the very least, the DMZ-ness of it all lends this year’s Zombies mode a sense of identity. The map is filled with Contracts to complete to earn resources, strongholds to take overfilled with human enemies and various points of interest that you can choose to investigate in any order. The linearity of Zombies is gone, replaced by the freedom of choice of DMZ, where you keep ticking off objectives to become stronger and pursue more difficult zones within the map. The story also takes place through a similarly scattered set of objectives sometimes randomly placed around the map, forcing you to explore if you want to figure out what happens next. Personally, that isn’t nearly as fun as simply progressing from one major set piece to another.
To balance out all this negativity with just the littlest bit of positivity: I do really like that players can now carry over cosmetics from one Call of Duty game to the next. Spending so much time grinding out cosmetics for a game that gets replaced every year takes the fun out of the whole thing. Modern Warfare 3 lets you carry forward cosmetics from Modern Warfare 2, which is a clear step in the right direction for this franchise. It’s great that I can step into Multiplayer with all my old Operators and guns intact, even if a few of these weapons might be irrelevant to the meta now.
Verdict
Whether or not you enjoy Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 won't boil down to your tolerance of incessant monetisation, lack of innovation and poor storytelling. These are all pressing issues that weigh the game down, certainly, but what sinks it entirely is an over-reliance on its battle royale sibling Warzone. Zombies repurpose Warzone’s upcoming map Urzikstan before it’s even released next month, while the main campaign resorts to slapdash open-world missions to bulk up its thin-as-paper plot. Gone is the handcrafted feel of classic Zombies gameplay, gone are the iconic blockbuster Modern Warfare setpieces, all replaced by large empty sandboxes filled with a repetitive checklist of tasks to tick off. Putting aside its many longstanding issues for a moment, Call of Duty is absolutely better than this. It has never had to stoop this low to sell its games year after year.
I won't be a doomsayer here and call Modern Warfare 3 the end of this franchise, because the blatant truth is that it will likely go on to outsell many other games released this year and thus fully justify many more sequels to come. One bad annual release is not nearly enough to kill Call of Duty, but a few more like this might actually do the trick.