After four years of content that spans three campaigns, 12 seasons, seven Warzone maps, and a raid, the culmination of Infinity Ward’s Modern Warfare trilogy is finally here. With Sledgehammer Games moving in to take the reins following the disappointment of last year’s Modern Warfare 2, longtime fans were hopeful that Call of Duty’s first back-to-back sequel would bring the series back to its former glory. Unfortunately, Modern Warfare 3 goes out not with a bang, but a fizzle, thanks to a middling campaign and a too-little-too-late feeling to the improvements made in the multiplayer side. A unique take on zombies does a little to bring something fresh to the game, but it’s not enough to drag the series back to the heights it hit in 2019.

Weapons Free

The campaign of Modern Warfare 3 wastes no time in following through on the tease of Makarov left at the end of Modern Warfare 2’s story. After an admittedly impressive first mission that involves breaking the Russian Ultranationalist out of Verdansk’s gulag, Task Force 141 takes the reins in a series of missions that has you globetrotting and blowing stuff up in typical COD fashion to stop Makarov and his Konni group operatives from starting a war. There are 14 missions all-in-all, six of which are part of a series first: Open Combat Missions.

These open-ended missions are designed to give the player a degree of freedom not previously attainable in Call of Duty campaigns. Built around large, non-linear levels, these missions attempt to sprinkle some Warzone into the single-player experience. You’re encouraged to explore the map for caches that contain weapons and pieces of kit that make navigating the level easier. While these levels are a cool concept, they don’t really stick the landing. Once you find a weapon you enjoy using, there’s no real incentive to exploring to find the rest. Additionally, while the game tries to make stealth an option, the enemy detection mechanics are far too unforgiving, and there are often so many of them surrounding the objectives that it’s impossible to take them all out without an alarm being raised.

The best thing that these Open Combat Missions do is give us a glimpse at larger maps. One even takes place in Verdansk, allowing us to see what the very first Warzone map might look like if it returned to the modern rotation. The IW 9.0 engine lends itself very well to impressive vistas and lighting, and with solid upscaling options on PC, it’s easy for the game to look good even when your graphics settings aren’t cranked too high. If Call of Duty were a walking simulator, it would be spectacular, but unfortunately, the mission structure of these levels just doesn’t do enough to make the gameplay new or interesting.

Meanwhile, the more linear campaign missions do a decent job of capturing what makes the series great. These levels have solid scripted moments, interesting set pieces, and carefully crafted shooting arenas. They feel good to play in, though most of them don’t innovate or turn the franchise on its head in any way. Personally, I don’t think this is necessary this far into a franchise—if you’re buying a Call of Duty campaign 25 years into the series, you know what you’re getting. That being said, the missions lack some of the highs of both Modern Warfare 2019 and Modern Warfare 2’s campaigns.

There’s also a strange lack of grounded-ness in most of this game’s missions. Both of the previous entries put an emphasis on slow, methodical missions and bringing the pace of the gameplay way down from the multiplayer. While you can still do that in these missions, it feels much less imperative than in the first two games. Running and gunning in classic COD fashion is absolutely viable in Modern Warfare 3, even on Hardened difficulty. I was able to blow through several of the game’s missions without having to slow down for a second. Whether this is a positive or a negative comes down to personal preference, but there’s a certain degree of tonal dissonance that permeates this game as a result.

Perhaps the worst part of Modern Warfare 3’s campaign is the story itself. While it’s great to have the whole cast together (even Alex returns from Modern Warfare 2019), the entire thing feels rushed and ultimately unfinished. Task Force 141 just seems to do exactly what they’ve been doing for three games now: reach a location, stop a missile or capture a target, go somewhere else, and do it all over again. It feels like you’re running in circles the entire time just to stop Makarov, and some of the locations and story beats feel like they only exist to pull a Leo-esque point at the monitor from the player when they recognize a familiar face. Despite the game’s impressive cinematics and quality acting, these “look who it is!” moments didn’t do enough to make me feel like I was experiencing a well-crafted narrative.

Oddly enough, the campaign hits a wall right when it feels like it’s starting to ramp up. Clocking in at about four hours, it’s one of the shortest single-player modes that Call of Duty has ever had, and it’s cut short at the very end with a moment manufactured for shock factor and a couple of abrupt cutscenes. Clearly, the campaign was intended to be part of a DLC for Modern Warfare 2 before the company decided it was big enough to make into its own game. There are also numerous threads left unresolved, presumably so that Sledgehammer can either tie them into the lore for the upcoming seasons of multiplayer content or build another raid. Regardless, it left a bad taste in my mouth, and I watched the credits feeling like I’d just seen a movie that ends after the second act.

A Return to Form

Over on the multiplayer side, things look a little brighter. Gone are the days of sluggish movement, forced reloads, and a stilted mini map. Movement feels like it’s meant to in Call of Duty: fast and tight. Slide cancelling and reload cancelling make a return in Modern Warfare 3, giving players more control over their second-to-second positioning and decision-making. That being said, certain exploits like the infinite tac-sprint glitch have been handled, so those of us who are less mechanically gifted can still have a fighting chance without forcing movement-heavy players to slow way down. Sledgehammer has also removed the controversial feature of weapon tuning and reintroduced a more traditional perk system, both of which are welcome changes.

The 12 maps available at launch are all maps from 2009’s original MW2, brought back to life with modern graphics and some minor adjustments to account for the series’ innovations in movement in the last 14 years. It’s great to see classics like Rust, Terminal, and Scrapyard return. The other side of this coin, however, is that we also get maps like Derail and Wasteland, which are notorious among Call of Duty fans for being terrible maps with far too much open space. Overall, while the original MW2 roster still holds up in the modern day, the nostalgia factor wears off pretty quickly and leaves me itching for some new maps to enter the rotation. Sledgehammer has confirmed that some of last year’s maps will make an appearance in Modern Warfare 3, which is promising, but I can’t wait to see the brand-new entries as well.

In terms of content, Modern Warfare 3 benefits greatly from Carry Forward, a feature which enables the use of most, if not all, weapons and operators from last year’s Modern Warfare 2 on top of all the brand-new ones. This means that at launch, the game features 114 weapons and over 90 operators. As if that weren’t enough, the game also features every single camo from Modern Warfare 2 as well as an entire slew of new camos for every weapon in Modern Warfare Zombies, bringing the camo total to a whopping 1746 camos. The vast majority of them look great, and while not every player is going to spend hundreds of hours unlocking every single one, it’s nice to see that there’s always something to work towards.

The issues begin to arise once we turn our attention to the game’s progression. While the team has done away with the obtuse and overly obnoxious weapon unlock system of the previous title, they’ve built the new Armory Unlock system on its grave. This system relies on the completion of daily challenges to unlock pieces of your loadout like grenades, perks, and even certain weapons. What this means is that in order to unlock certain equipment, players might be forced to use a weapon or piece of gear they don’t want to, recreating the issues of Modern Warfare 2’s frustrating weapon platform system.

The one upside of this feature is that once you’ve completed your three daily challenges for the day, these Armory Unlocks then become based on wins. Motivating players to win means that they’re much more likely to play the objectives in any given match, reducing the likelihood of running into opponents who camp near a hardpoint or control point to farm kills instead of helping their team secure the victory. Of course, nothing will ever entirely eradicate this issue, but the push to unlock these items helps to ameliorate it a little.

The multiplayer also continues to suffer from the same issues that COD has suffered from for years: clunky menus, absurd spawns, latency issues, and especially skill-based matchmaking (SBMM). It can be really frustrating to rubber-band between absolutely steamrolling a lobby and getting steamrolled yourself from game-to-game. If you pay any attention at all, it can also be extremely easy to manipulate the spawns on these older maps to force the enemy team to spawn in the same place over and over for easy kills. These sorts of problems can stop an enjoyable session dead in its tracks and leave you feeling like you’ve just wasted the last 30 minutes of your life. This far into Call of Duty’s life cycle, there’s no excuse for these. It simply needs to change.

A Zombies Mode with Brains

Modern Warfare Zombies actually breathes some new life into a series staple, ironically enough. Before I go any further, I do need to make something abundantly clear: this mode is NOT like traditional Call of Duty zombies. Instead of tightly curated, hallway-based levels, this zombies mode takes place in the wide-open Urzikstan map planned for the game’s upcoming Warzone mode. It’s a marriage of last year’s DMZ mode with Treyarch’s unique zombie spin, creating something that’s altogether unfamiliar. With that being said, I believe it actually does a lot to make zombies more interesting than the usual gameplay loop of running zombies in circles until you inevitably die.

Modern Warfare Zombies takes DMZ’s mission-based structure and applies it to the zombies formula. Players drop into Urzikstan either alone or with a squad, and from there are given 45 minutes to kill, complete missions, and explore to their heart’s content. Scattered around the map are points of interest like exfil points, contracts, Pack-a-Punch machines, Perk-a-Cola dispensers, and more. Outside of deployment itself, players are given tiers of missions across three acts, with each mission gradually turning up the difficulty. The earlier missions mostly revolve around killing zombies with certain weapon types or completing specific contracts, but they also aim to introduce the player to each of the mode’s core mechanics.

From run-to-run, players can bring back perks and upgrade tools to add to their stash for future runs, as well as any weapons and gear they find. The idea is to gradually build up to exploring the map’s higher danger level areas near the center. These areas contain stronger zombies and dangerous mini bosses. In order to tackle them properly, players will have to be kitted correctly, and one wrong move can mean dying and losing everything you just spent an hour collecting. It’s a nice high-stakes mechanic we’ve seen in all sorts of extraction shooters, and it brings a special flavor to zombies that gives you something to push towards.

I’ve yet to get too far into the Zombies mode, but from what I’ve seen, it’s a really solid evolution of the DMZ idea that fell pretty flat a couple seasons into Modern Warfare 2. Giving zombies players objectives and structure creates a much more engaging and fulfilling experience. Not that any of it is a requirement—if mindless slaughter is more your speed, it’s totally viable to drop in, hunt zombies for 45 minutes, and leave without accomplishing a thing. You’re much less likely to enjoy the mode if you go in expecting a smaller, tighter experience like we’ve come to expect, but if you have an open mind, you might find it fun to spend some time in.

Verdict

Modern Warfare 3 is a solid, albeit underwhelming entry in the Call of Duty franchise. The core gameplay is tight as ever, but a lack of thrilling new content, a mediocre campaign, and some questionable progression mechanics prevent it from reaching the same highs that games before it have. If you played a lot of Modern Warfare 2, you might enjoy the numerous improvements on display, but you won’t find too much new to sink your teeth into. Call of Duty found its niche a long time ago, and while some ideas like an open-world zombies mode can do their best to make the game feel fresh again, it ultimately retreads much of the same ground of the games whose shoulders it stands upon. It’s funny to think about, but the shake-up that 2019’s Modern Warfare brought to the franchise seems to be in desperate need of a shake-up of its own.

Score: 6/10

Pros:

• Near-flawless gunplay, as always
• Movement and mini map improvements
• Classic maps brought up to modern standards
• Impressive cutscenes and performances
• A zombies mode that changes things up

Cons:

• A short and seemingly unfinished campaign
• A bizarre Armory Unlock progression system
• A general lack of new content and reliance on Carry Forward
• Skill-based Matchmaking is back and worse than ever
• Clunky Hulu-esque UI
• Broken spawns on most maps

A review code for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III was provided by the publisher. Played on the PC. You can read MP1st’s review and scoring policy right here.