Okay Geek Farm
Xbox 360 - Modern Warfare 3 review
Alex Tretrop
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3. Everyone knows it and just about everyone’s played at least one game in the series. Coming off the smash hits of just about every other Call of Duty game is the apparent finale to the Modern Warfare franchise. It’s interesting to see how little fanfare the game has released to, regardless of the fact that its still broke records on it’s release day. Oh no, wait… I know why no one’s talking about it… It’s because it’s story, competitive multiplayer and overall gameplay just isn’t very good at all.
Story
Before we even get to talking about the story, I just felt the need to say that it really does absolutely nothing to catch you up with the previous installments whatsoever. There isn’t even an attempt to explain what is going on in this installment, which can absolutely lead to some confusion if you haven’t finished the previous game in the Modern Warfare franchise. Anyways, from what I understand anyway, the game starts just a few moments after Modern Warfare 2’s ending as Soap and Price are on the run from uh, everyone I guess? Makarov is still on the loose and blowing up the vast majority of America because, you know, that’s what terrorists do I suppose. I’m sitting here thinking about what I remember about Modern Warfare 3’s story and I legitimately cannot remember anything that felt important. To be honest it’s extremely worrying. Um. There are characters that you switch between throughout the vast majority of the game? Tons of people die? Things explode? Nukes?
The majority of the first half of the game essentially reintroduces you to Price and Soap as well as the new, extremely unmemorable characters like Sandman, Yuri and Frost whom you’ll switch perspectives throughout the game. Modern Warfare has always had this strange perception that the characters that you play as suddenly lose their ability to speak in missions. It’s amplified here when they realize they have mouths in cutscenes but are mysteriously glued shut with some form of extremely effective glue during missions. What? Is there some sort of problem with them not responding to characters while your playing? I don’t even know…
Either way, a ton of things explode as you make your way through the extremely short campaign desperately hoping for something memorable to happen. And closer to the end of the game, the story remembers it exists and creates a few contrivances to attempt to tie together all the events together from the whole Modern Warfare series. It really, really doesn’t work as it seems like one whole contrived and stupid coincidence that a specific character who is only introduced in this game ends up as a central plot point of the whole series. It’s an extremely dumb scene closer to the end of the game but regardless, at least something happened.
Gameplay
The gameplay really doesn’t fare much better than the story I’m afraid. Modern Warfare has always suffered from being an overly linear corridor shooter that wasn’t that great at what it did. Black Ops did remedy this somewhat by breaking up the amount of shooting with some decent characters and a story that had some structure to it but Modern Warfare 3 takes all the worst aspects of Call of Duty and makes it a center point for the whole single player experience.
Now the entirety of the Modern Warfare fanbase comes to the series for its first person shooter aspects. Modern Warfare 3, however, has so many different, recurring forms of turret sequences I could almost call it an on rails shooter with first person shooter aspects and that would be totally accurate in my eyes. Apparently moving in shooters is overrated or something because a majority of the story beats are delivered when you aren’t in control of your character.
When you do get out of your on rails, the shooter aspect still feels tightly made. The most positive thing to say about Modern Warfare 3 is that it does make you feel powerful during it’s heavily scripted areas, be it through the use of AC130, powerful airstrikes or things just toppling over, everything is made to feel like your one powerful badass who can do anything. Except open doors. Because here’s the main problem, for every time it makes you feel like Superman, it always finds some way to hold your hand. While linearity isn’t a bad thing in a shooter as long as you give small freedoms within the context of each situations. If we take Crysis 2, we had different armor modes and multiple ways of approach for each combat scenario, which let you change up your tactics and kept the game from being boring by giving you that variety. For Modern Warfare 3, the game punishes you for even attempting to move forward by the use of doors that can only be opened by your allies or other such contrivances. Say you get spotted during a stealth segment by a few lowly guards, not only is it impossible to survive since all the enemies will be alerted to your presence, your allies seem to forget they have guns and just stand there blindly looking at butterflies off in the distance. Brilliant. Black Ops stealth segments were effectively non-existent because Treyarch at least seems to understand that in Call of Duty they feel so out of place it’s ridiculous. The few times they did appear in Black Ops, there was at least the illusion that there were multiple ways of succeeding at them, even if they weren’t all that much better.
But regardless, there are tons of releases this time of year and if your bothering with Modern Warfare 3 at this point it’s all because of the multiplayer. And guess what? For every step forward it takes the series it takes two giant step backwards for the whole experience playing online. When you first jump in, you’ve got everything you’d expect from a COD title at this point, the same custom class system they brought to the forefront in COD4 which still works well here. You’ve got your weapons, guns, perks and killsteaks to customise but the first giant problem rears it’s big fat head and ensures that I won’t be playing MW3’s multiplayer all that often. Remember back to Black Ops’ excellent idea that everything should be currency based? You want to unlock some weapons, perks, scopes, whatever, they’re all available to you from the start, ensuring that you as a player get what you want and spicing up the multiplayer matches with a guaranteed diversity in weapons from day one.
Well, Modern Warfare 3 gets rid of all that and goes right back to the old leveling style from MW2 and back. Namely, you’ll get seemingly random assortments of unlocks as you level up every few levels. This presents a number of problems: your preferred gun or perk might be right at the bottom of the leveling tree so I hope your willing to put a nice amount of hours into the multiplayer to get it. Let’s use a specific example, shall we? The Dead Silence perk, which muffles your sound completely, a useful trait to have if you enjoy playing Search and Destroy isn’t unlocked until somewhere in the 40s level range whereas you could pick it up in Black Ops for a measly 2000 points at level 29, almost twenty levels sooner. Its unacceptable that this system was used when Treyarch put more thought into where their unlocks were placed, which accommodated much more playstyles and diversity in their games.
What has changed, however, is the addition of weapon proficiency and it really isn’t for the better either. Now as you use a weapon more often, that particular weapon will gain in levels unlocking the ability to add on a small “perk” to it’s attributes. There are things like reduced kickback, double attachments and faster melee. However it really feels almost like a redundant addition as they could have easily just left these as perks, because the system as it stands now rewards people for sticking with the same weapon as opposed to experimenting with new ones. If you’re a Call of Duty player who likes to change it up every few games, the proficiency bonuses actually hinder you from bothering to do that, since you have to restart at level 1 for each new weapon you try.
Probably the best part of Modern Warfare 3 however, is the return of the excellent spec ops mode, giving you a bunch of fun, self contained missions to experience that you get to have wih friends. The newest addition to this, Survival, is a Nazi-Zombies style gametype that adds some interesting variations on the usual enemies that make the game mode fun to jump into with friends every once and a while.
Anyways, moving on to the game modes, Modern Warfare 3 offers it’s regular slew of gametypes like the standard team deathmatch and domination but also offers some surprisingly good new additions that do improve the core game. Kill Confirmed, in particular, is probably the best mode to come out of Call of Duty in quite some time as it has you collecting the dog tags of fallen enemies and allies as they are killed. Collect one from an enemy and your score counter moves up while grabbing an allies denies the point to the enemy team. It’s brilliant because it forces Call of Duty players to stay on the move at all times, effectively eliminating any form of camping. As such it also reduces the amount you’ll see the higher, more unbalanced killstreaks being called in like Ospreys and Stealth Bombers, which complements the extremely rapid pace of Kill Confirmed generally with everyone being on the ground at all times.
This kind of gameplay compliments the new focus on smaller, more confined maps which both help and hinder MW3 in a variety of ways. Probably the most positive aspect of this is the increased clutter and smaller spaces means that not many people will be sitting around doing nothing but it encourages more movement and action. The downside here is that the killstreaks don’t work well with this and more often then not, there’s usually a larger concentration of people in one area, making those irritating predator missiles and helicopters get a lot more kills then they really should be getting.
Visuals/Audio
Visually, Modern Warfare 3 is pretty incredible for what it tries to accomplish. Infinity Ward likes to blow a lot of stuff up and boy do they do it here too. They take world monuments, submarines, buildings etc and blow them to kingdom before you can blink. And it’s remarkable just the sheer volume of stuff they take apart and how good they look as they fall apart. It’s offset by the fact that the game itself has poor textures and some bad looking character models but to be really honest, the frame rate stays rock solid all the way through and there are so many explosions that you won’t really notice many of the game’s technical problems
Audio is serviceable for the most part with some decent performances given by the voice actors. While the story is some of the worst that Call of Duty’s had in a while, the actors do about just as good of a job as was possible with the convoluted plot, there’s the usual large amount of yelling and anger throughout the adventure. Guns themselves sound good for the most part, with only the occasionally weapon sounding a little silly.
Nothing really stands out to me as something fantastic to talk about for both of these aspects. That being said, both visuals and audio are good enough to get you through the game without any complaints and for the most part work extremely well.
Final Thoughts
Modern Warfare 3 feels like a bit of a travesty. The majority of the story lacks any character or substance, never really finding its stride or accomplishing anything until closer to the end where the game ties up it’s loose ends with knots that look like they’re falling apart at the seams. The gameplay feels exactly the same as Modern Warfare 2 but with the addition of a whole heaping ton of on rails sequences in which you hold the fire button in one direction and twiddle your thumbs until you can start playing again. And while the voice acting and visuals do good jobs at blowing things up and conveying the silly story, you can’t help but think how much better quite a bit of the game could have been.
Multiplayer wise, Spec Ops returns as probably the most fun you’ll have in Modern Warfare 3, with survival being a smart addition to the franchise. Competitively, a few interesting new modes don’t save the game from it’s usual problems with overpowered killstreaks or the return of the old style of leveling progression.
Pro’s
- Spec Ops is still lots of fun
- Lots of stuff blows up
- Frame Rate is rock solid throughout
Con’s
- Story is agonizingly terrible
- The return of MW’s old weapon progression system
- The ridiculous amount of stationary turret sections makes the campaign boring to play.
It’s a disappointing end to a franchise that started with COD4, a game that wasn’t all that bad in the long run. Modern Warfare 3 tries to bring out the big guns throughout the majority of the experience but the same game with incremental additions really bring the series to the lowest it’s been in a fairly long time.
