Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III campaign review

This Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III campaign review contains minor spoilers.

I would love to sit here and write that Modern Warfare III had a lot of potential. But that would be disingenuous. According to reports, the latest Call of Duty began life as a stopgap expansion for last year’s Modern Warfare II. It was supposed to tide players over during the franchise’s first annual break since 2004. Alas, Activision decided to turn it into a full release – and the finished product barely qualifies as such.

MW3‘s campaign is arguably the most lacklustre in series history. It is underbaked and formulaic and made up of repurposed pieces of Warzone maps and mechanics. The end result is a single-player experience that lacks the breakneck Call of Duty excitement we’ve come to expect and lands with about as much impact as a wet fart.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III campaign review – Story

Modern Warfare III‘s campaign isn’t even a complete story. It lacks a third act and feels incomplete.

Picking up where Modern Warfare II left off, this year’s game begins with a team of elite soldiers breaking Vladimir Makarov, a Russian ultranationalist and infamous terrorist, out of Verdansk’s prison. This all happens in the first 20-or-so minutes of MW3 and is about as exciting as it gets for the campaign.

From there, we bounce around the globe across 14 short and uninspired missions. As you’d expect, players once again step into the combat boots of Task Force 141 as they work to prevent Makarov’s deadly plots and false flag operations from coming to fruition.

Phillip Graves and General Shepherd return as unlikely allies in a bewildering and, frankly, laughable narrative choice that only mildly addresses their villainous actions in the previous game. Meanwhile, Makarov sets about committing “No Russian” 2.0.

This brief segment of Modern Warfare III was teased at the end of Modern Warfare II. However, it pales in comparison to the original level from 2009 which made headlines all those years ago. Sledgehammer played it incredibly safe this time round, opting for a short and overly-sanitised interactive cutscene that was over almost as soon as it began.

As the four-hour mark approaches, the story just about reaches an inflection point and seems to be picking up pace. Then it comes to a screeching halt. After an unearned and emotionless twist, we are left with an unsatisfying cliffhanger that sets up yet another entry in the sub-series. At least that will be the first Modern Warfare 4, I guess?

Gameplay

This is Call of Duty at its most generic. Packed full of dull “open combat” missions that promise freedom and exploration and deliver none of it, most FPS fans will find themselves bored.

In most of Modern Warfare III‘s missions, you deploy into a semi-sandbox scenario where you can scavenge your own equipment and approach missions however you like. While this sounds enticing on paper, what it amounts to is creeping around an area and collecting a few bits of somewhat useful (but totally non-essential) equipment.

These missions are also incredibly short, rendering any weapons or gear you pick up as nigh-on pointless. Warzone elements have been integrated to the Nth degree, complete with armour plates, loadouts, killstreaks, and field upgrades. Again, this could have been something fresh for the series. But this is Call of Duty, and any innovation is squandered by the game’s sprint to the finish line.

Naturally, we get our obligatory AC130 air-support mission and “All Ghillied Up” knock off. These are now so commonplace in CoD that they barely help keep things interesting.

This campaign simply lacks the fun of previous outings and does little to justify its existence as a standalone title. If I wanted to play brief and inconsequential missions like this, I’d stick to Spec Ops.

Performance and graphics

Playing on PS5, I experienced very few performance issues in MW3. It ran smoothly throughout and looked fantastic. Despite all the valid criticisms of CoD, poor visuals isn’t one of them.

There were numerous points I simply had to stop and take a moment to admire the awe-inspiring views in Modern Warfare 3, complete with stunning lighting and texture details. If one thing is for certain, these games always look great and their beautifully rendered CGI cutscenes do, too. In fact, if it weren’t for these cutscenes, the campaign would be entirely absent of momentum.

As far as bugs and glitches were concerned, I only saw two of note. During one cutscene, I had no audio whatsoever. Quite why this happened was unclear as the issue corrected itself as soon as the next level began.

Similarly, I noticed that subtitles were out of sync at various points. This inadvertently spoiled key plot moments before they actually happened.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III campaign review – Verdict

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III‘s campaign might be the most uninspired four hours the series has ever delivered. Absent of innovation, full of unrealised ideas, and desperate to tell its story as quickly as possible, this is the bottom of the barrel.

While the full MW3 release will contain multiplayer and Zombies, it’s becoming increasingly apparent year-after-year that something needs to change with Call of Duty. Sure, it continues to sell and make millions. But a franchise with the prestige and budget of CoD shouldn’t be putting out campaigns like this. The people that buy these games every year deserve better.

If the original Modern Warfare 3 represented the culmination of a genre-defining FPS trilogy, then Modern Warfare III encapsulates everything wrong with contemporary Call of Duty. Afraid to do something different, desperate to maximise profits, and too comfortable for its own good.

Overall Rating: 4/10

Version played: PS5

A code was provided by the publisher for the purpose of this review.

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