Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III Review (2/5) (Patreon)

Call of Duty is off the rails again. I was hoping that we wouldn’t end up back in this spot so quickly, but right now this game feels more like a flashback to 2018 than 2009.

Back in 2018, my general feeling was that Call of Duty had definitely peaked and it was all downhill from here. Maybe it’d take a decade or more, but the game felt like it was in a serious decline and, well, that was that. Black Ops 4, a game that shipped without a campaign and also tried to bring “hero shooter” mechanics into the proceedings, was and is a bad game. At the time, most of the interest was around what went wrong with it. There was talk about a highly ambitious campaign that just didn’t pan out, leading to a scramble just to get enough stuff in the game to get it out the door. A new battle royale mode (called “Blackout”) gave them something new and shiny to point at, but the core game felt unloved, left to die, and so on. I sorta shrugged and thought “well, I guess that’s that.” It’s not like the last few games were amazing, so it wasn’t exactly a shock. The shock would come next year.

The reboot of Modern Warfare was everything the franchise needed. It felt like the team at Infinity Ward had something to prove and was given the opportunity to prove it. The game got a nice graphical bump. Audio, something that EA’s Battlefield games had been kicking their ass on for years, was finally overhauled and much, much improved. Despite the old name, the game felt new and fresh in a way that it probably hadn’t since… I don’t know, Black Ops 2? The multiplayer experience was back to basics in a lot of ways, but it felt outstanding. The campaign focused on putting the names of the characters players remembered from the initial MW games in a mostly new scenario, bringing in the broad strokes of the old story when appropriate. It also… shipped in a pretty rough state, especially the game’s new co-op mode, which was more or less broken. But even with that, it felt like a new lease on life. What seemed like a doomed game just a year ago was suddenly very, very much alive.

But the wheel turns slowly over at Call of Duty Corp., and on the back of Modern Warfare we got two years of relative duds. Black Ops Cold War felt flat and derivative when compared to the other, better Black Ops games. The sub-franchise that dealt in subterfuge, weird mind control mumbo-jumbo, and operations just barely on the other side of believable had done it better before, making Cold War feel like a squandered opportunity to tell a smoother, more compelling story. The 80s vibes of the multiplayer had its moments, but they also made the game feel dated, like its designers were still into the Outrun/Synthwave/Vaporwave vibes that, by the time the game shipped in 2020, had been played out for years.

2021’s Vanguard, a return to World War II, had a campaign so dull that I bailed on it completely. And the multiplayer was just a little too basic for its own good. Turns out having the options of modern weapons and attachments makes for, well, it just gives you more to do. Eventually they added fantastical things to the game, like laser guns and Snoop Dogg.

And so, after righting the ship back in 2019, the next two games threw Call of Duty right back in a trench. Last year’s game, Modern Warfare II, was again put into place to get things back on track. And, hey, it did! But you can’t really pull that trick over and over again. MW2 was a great game, but it definitely didn’t hit as hard as the previous entry. And the yo-yo effect that the game was showing year-over-year was getting tiresome. Maybe that’s why Activision decided to rush right into Modern Warfare III. The catch, of course, is that this year’s game isn’t led by the same team that made last year’s game. And it shows. Modern Warfare III is, like I said up top, the worst one of these in a pretty long time.

The campaign feels like something that got slapped together out of spare parts. It tries to mesh standard Call of Duty levels with new “open combat missions.” These levels are patterned more after the mechanics and abilities of the game’s battle royale mode, or perhaps last year’s DMZ mode. You have a parachute at all times. You have an armor meter on screen and you can find and equip new armor plates as yours get shot away—something that isn’t an option in the “normal” levels. The back and forth between the two styles feels disjointed and there’s no explanation as to why you, ya know, don’t take armor into the other missions, too.

The open combat missions rely on you to get to a place and do a thing, like finding missiles or taking down a high-value target on a rooftop. For whatever reason, the game doesn’t trust players to remember their objective at all, so voices constantly bark at you to remind you that you’re supposed to be doing something. It’s incessant in spots and totally ridiculous.

While the missions themselves are underwhelming, the disjointed and meaningless story is what really ruins things. As a “direct sequel” to the previous game, it sets itself up quick and tries to keep moving. Makarov, the guy who did that whole “No Russian” thing in the original Modern Warfare II, gets broken out of prison and he gets right back to being an ultranationalist who seemingly wants to bring about war between Russia and the West. The game tries to push some similar buttons with terrorist attacks, though their attempts to freshen up the murderin’ fall flat. They manage to feel forced and phony while also trying to touch on hot-button real-world issues around misinformation and the control of “the narrative” in a way that I just found a little exhausting. Either way, Task Force 141 is on the case and they chase Makarov around the world for three or four hours and then credits roll. Nothing of note is really resolved in this story. Some of Makarov’s operations succeed, some fail due to the interference of you and your team. Either way, the whole thing feels overly cartoonish, like GI Joe stopped the dam from getting blown up, but Cobra lives to fight another day. It’s a bunch of lifeless, low-stakes cutscenes intercut with underwhelming, messy levels. Maybe Black Ops 4 was right to just ship without a campaign in the first place…

Competitively, the developers decided to pull a big nostalgia ripcord by making the entirety of the game’s core multiplayer maps reworked areas from the original Modern Warfare II. On paper, this sounds outstanding, that game was phenomenal. Also, players have been given sometimes-subtle new movement abilities that make movement and stance changes feel more fluid. Going from running to a knee slide and back up again feels cool. You clamber over walls and hop up onto rooftops with comparative ease. You feel more connected to the movement of the player and, again, it’s not the most dramatic thing in the world, but the whole thing just feels a bit more limber than last year’s game. However, these two things just don’t mesh very well, which left me really puzzled.

Not to dip back into history lesson mode, but the Call of Duty of 2009 or so was actually quite different than the one we’ve been getting for the past few years. Encounter range, to me, feels like the biggest difference. Modern Call of Duty is like a bunch of big, war-torn laser tag arenas. You run around, hey, there’s a guy, bop, shoot him. You walk around a corner into an enemy doing the same and do your best to put him down. While you do get some longer sightlines, they’re usually limited to a few parts of the map and they’re not so long as to require a scoped, sniper-friendly weapon.

Modern Warfare II (2009)’s maps come from the era when people complained about “fuckin’ campers” all the time. Maps like Derail have a large, mostly empty field full of snow and you can bet that someone is staring at that field with an appropriate long-range weapon. Rooftops are easier than ever to climb, so parts of Estate are usually well-covered by a few guys prone on key rooftops. This takes matches from the more freeform “I’m going to run around and shoot people” to “I’m going to spend this entire round flanking snipers and shooting them because they just keep running back to these rooftops.” While I’m not opposed to the idea of a big shift in Call of Duty after all these years, shifting back to these longer encounter ranges and more sniper- (”camper” if you’re feeling saucy) friendly vistas is straight-up not what I’m looking for anymore. It feels like they came up with some fun movement ideas and then said “but don’t bother using any of it, you’ll just die tired.” My session times went from playing MW2 for an hour or so to loading up MW3, getting in one match, trying to decide if I want to play another one, staring at the gun unlocks for awhile, and closing the game. The multiplayer just feels bad. Hey, at least it looks nice?

I’ve never been a fan of Treyarch’s zombie stuff. Between its arcane rules and goals and, well, I just think zombies are stupid, it’s just never been my thing. So I’m hesitant to judge this year’s zombie mode, but it essentially takes last year’s DMZ mode and adds zombies to it. It’s still an extraction-style gametype, where you and a squad get into a large, open zone to complete missions, find gear, and get out. If you don’t get out, you lose everything you were carrying, giving it some stakes. I liked DMZ and was hoping to see it expanded upon, but… not like this. Given that fans of the zombies modes really liked that round-based stuff, I’m a little curious to know if any of them are actually enjoying this variant, since it’s a pretty different thing than zombie players would be used to.

There are a ton of other, smaller and often logistical issues that I could spend another 500 words going on about. The decision to let players bring last year’s skins and guns into this year’s game, for example, feels like a quagmire. Yes, players should be able to use their purchased skins and unlocks for as long as it makes sense for them to do so. I paid money for Nicki Minaj and I want her to be relevant for more games. That said, seeing matches filled with the same characters, with the same voice lines, and the same gun skins makes the game feel like… well, the same thing. Yes, there are some new characters to use in this year’s game. But if you paid money for Lara Croft or Skeletor or whatever are you really going to go use some regular-looking bearded guy who doesn’t even appear in the campaign? I didn’t think so. It’s a weird problem.

While a lot of reports of shortened development timelines and the constant specter of reports claiming that this product was originally concieved as an add-on to MW2, rather than a separate, full-priced game, none of that is all that relevant here. The game is bad on its own merits. So now, even the one sub-franchise that managed to make a new name for itself is tainted. Now what? A Black Ops reboot, probably. I’m so tired.

Actually, you know what? One last thing here: the somewhat ironic/tragic thing is that if this content was purely additive and was laid on top of all the maps and modes from Modern Warfare II, rather than casting all of those levels aside, this would be a much better product, overall. Because then you’d have a mix of last year’s maps and new-old maps, giving you a wider variety of playstyles to try out from map to map. OK, just had to get that off my chest.

2/5