By Daniel Rutledge
Call of Duty has done it again.
The most popular game in the world has raised the bar once more, pleasing fans with more of what they want while welcoming newcomers to a truly epic gaming experience that nothing beats.
As far as the single-player campaign goes, this is very much Part III in the story, picking up right where MW2 left off. Very little has been done to improve or innovate the single-player mode, but they simply don't need to, it's still absolutely fantastic.
From the dramatic opening of the first Modern Warfare, during which you were executed live on television in an unnamed Middle Eastern country, the trilogy has been packed with truly memorable sequences that have frequently blown my mind. The storyline is at times hard to follow as it's kind of rushed through and jumps from character to character. The basis of it is that there's a dude called Makarov going around mass murdering and starting wars. You've got to kill hundreds of dudes in order to kill him. That's all you need to know, and the epicness of the set-pieces more than make up for the weaknesses of the story.
The single-player campaign can be completed in less than 10 hours and for fans of the franchise, lessons will be learnt about key characters that will please in addition to the amazing set-pieces. It's fantastic.
This year COD has (finally) had some fantastic competition in the form of Battlefield 3, which also has an incredible single-player campaign. I enjoyed both a great deal and don't subscribe to the baffling idea that you must like one and not the other. Hey BF3 fanboys, I dig Megadeth as well as Metallica, and I enjoy watching Rambo as well as Commando. It's closed-minded and frankly stupid to say that enjoying one of these titles more than the other means you can't play both of them.
I will say that as much as I enjoyed the campaign in BF3, I loved MW3 more. BF3 is dead keen on super-realism; which I can respect and appreciate. But MW3, like the last two Modern Warfare titles, simply cannot be topped for thrilling, epic first-person action. While based in the real world, the World War III scenario and over-the-top Michael Bay-esque set-pieces in MW3 are unrealistic to an almost cartoonish level when compared to BF3. But that realism is toned down only to turn the fun levels up to maximum, which MW3 does extremely well.
Fortunately it's pretty easy for most of us to play both games, whether we hire them, borrow from a mate or buy from a shop. If you're reading this far into the review I'd highly recommend you play both BF3 and MW3 as the titles actually complement each other very nicely and have provided me with huge amounts of joy.
In addition to the single-player campaign, Spec Ops is back again, replacing the zombies mode from Black Ops. I love a lot of old zombie movies, they were a big part of my movie watching life as a teen. I also sank a kazillion hours into playing the first few Resident Evil games. But these days there's too much bloody zombie pop culture everywhere and as much as COD zombies are fun, I much prefer Spec Ops.
That being said, zombie nutters are pretty much catered for anyway, with the addition of Spec Ops horde mode. This is very similar to the zombie modes where waves of enemies attack with increasing ferocity. You cannot defeat them all, but the more waves you survive, the higher your score. If you want to you can just imagine these are zombies attacking you, rather than soldiers. And here's the best news: you don't just have guns & grenades to take them out.
In one of the greatest improvements to the game, you can now level up in Spec Ops mode and unlock killstreak rewards to unleash upon your enemies. The lag that sometimes affects multiplayer games is obviously not an issue when you're playing with a mate either on the same machine or in the same city as you and it's so great to be able to rain down death from above.
Then there's the multiplayer - the mode of Call of Duty that attracts by far the largest amount of players. MW3 broke Xbox Live and PlayStation Online records when it launched, as has become the franchise's annual tradition. It also hauled in more cash in its first five days than any other entertainment product ever, breaking the record set by last year's Black Ops. It's this popular for a reason - it's very, very fun.
The money system Black Ops brought in has been tossed in favour of the earlier unlock / upgrade system Infinity Ward started with MW1. It has been polished up and refined and added to immensely for MW3 and is now far superior.
In order to improve each weapon, you need to become proficient with it. What this means is that if you want to unlock a special scope or attachment such as an M203 grenade launcher for a particular assault rifle, you need to put in the hard yards with that assault rifle in order to unlock it. You can also unlock the gold coating of weapons by mastering those weapons, which makes more sense than system in the previous games.
Like a lot of people, my favourite thing is the killstreak rewards. They're now called pointstreak rewards and you can rack them up not just with kills but with flag captures, destroying a UAV, defusing a bomb and so on. There's a whole range of new rewards, of course, and they're now divided into 'Assault' and 'Support' trees. There's also 'Specialist', which means instead of unlocking the usual rewards of air support and so on, you unlock more perks than the standard three. This is a very interesting development and is great for turning yourself into an incredibly strong super soldier, but for me it's just not as fun as wasting the opposing team with something like the new Osprey Gunner.
The Osprey is the mightiest of the pointstreak rewards, replacing the gunship pilot reward from Black Ops. It's super cool as it's not only an airship with ferocious firepower, it also drops care packages off for the boys. This is fantastic and it's not over-powerful, as it may sound. A couple of rockets will easily take it down and if they're fired very quickly, they'll take it down before it's dropped a single care package or fired a single rocket of its own.
One new reward that can't be felled so quickly is the juggernaut. In previous games we've seen the juggernauts as fearsome NPC enemies, but in MW3 we can now don the full body armour suits ourselves and advance on the other team like Arnie the T-1000. It's brilliant.
Basically, I'm a big fan of the new pointstreak systems. They've been improved dramatically and the options in MW3 include the coolest yet. I'm a huge fan of the assault drone, an unmanned little gun robot on tracks you control remotely. Another great addition is the recon drone, a little helicopter you fly around to track enemies. You can't kill the enemies with it, but you rack up lots of assist points as your teammates do.
Each MW3 map is memorable for its own reason. Looking back at MW1, most of the multiplayer maps were in areas that weren't that badly messed up. As the trilogy has progressed, so has the damage to the maps we play in and in MW3 they're all pretty smashed. Ash floats through the air, structures lie in ruin, there's a real sense that World War III has kicked off.
Visually, my favourite map is easily Bootleg, a Bangkok-set zone with neon city lights shining through pouring rain. As for playing, Arkaden, Resistance and Fallen are all particularly good, with Dome being the only one I don't like.
Another upgrade to the Call of Duty multiplayer mode is the Prestige Shop. If you've not played COD before, basically once you've ranked up as high as you can and unlocked all the weapons etc, you can start again from scratch in 'Prestige Mode'. In previous games, doing so only won you cosmetic benefits. In MW3 you get to choose a gameplay benefit in addition to the aesthetic upgrades. These include things like double XP points for two hours of gameplay and so on. Very cool.
One thing I don't like is the overuse of the upgrade sound - a short blast of electric guitaring. This was great in the previous MW titles, but in MW3 it's used for all sorts of upgrades, not just your rank. So every time you advance your weapon proficiency, for example, that noise kicks in. It was cool as it was rare to hear the cue, now you hear it at least once a match when you're first starting out and it's kind of lost its coolness.
There also seems to be a few issues with spawn points in the game that I hope get sorted out with patches. Call of Duty has long been accused by the haters of having maps that are too small and hence is marred with spawn points that are too close to the action. I've generally read those comments and thought the writers of them should go back to their cot and cry for mummy for a while. But in MW3 it seems to be a genuine problem, and is hugely annoying when an enemy appears out of thin air behind you and kills you, especially when you're just one kill away from getting the assault drone!
The combat training mode from Black Ops has been removed from the game which is a shame, but totally acceptable for what we get in instead - the better Spec Ops modes for example. Theater Mode from Black Ops is back and upgraded too. You can do more with it and the Elite service even runs competitions on cool screenshots and videos for it.
I should talk a little more about Elite, the new premium service for Call of Duty fans. It was offline for much of its first week due to millions of people signing up to it, which is unfortunate. Obviously a service of this magnitude is going to have teething problems, but for a company the size of Activision, with the beta period they had and all the money they had to throw at this thing, it's disappointing they didn't hit the ground running. To their credit, they have offered people some pretty great benefits for as consolation.
All the controversy around the Elite service was kind of misguided, as it turns out. Most of the service is free, and it's a really great way to get more from your game. There is a paid service you can get with it for a few extra treats, but you're not missing out on much with the free service, and you're certainly not going to be punished with gameplay handicaps if you don't cough up the cash. If you buy MW3 and play online, it would be madness not to sign up for Elite's free service. It makes it way easier to play with other Kiwis or Aussies, review how you're playing, what's working for you and what isn't and so on. The biggest selling-point for the premium service is you get all the downloadable map packs included for the price, which is cheaper than what we've had to pay over the last few years for all the map packs. Sweet deal.
A lot of the benefits of Elite haven’t come to light yet, I reckon. The game has only been out for a few weeks and I’ve been too focussed on ranking up and unlocking weapons etc to really get into Elite properly. But it’s great that Activision want to improve and add to ways that Call of Duty fans play the game. A lot of the benefits will only become apparent after the service has been running full tilt for quite some time – but my guess is that in six to eight months, Elite is going to be brilliant in ways we can’t even conceive of just yet.
Some people complain about how not much is different in each new Call of Duty and that it's tight and cheap of Activision to churn out essentially the same game each year asking for your hard earned cash. I disagree. Firstly, I think each game is really quite different and improved, as I've hopefully explained is the case with MW3 above. Secondly, even if it was just a slightly updated version of the game before, most COD fans I know play the same game at least until the next one comes out a year later. That's about 10 months more gameplay than you get with most of the games released each year.
For me, that's totally worth the price. If I was going to buy one game a year, it would be Call of Duty. There's no other franchise that has me this addicted and willing to spend this many hours on it, all-year round. It's the biggest game in the world because it's the best and it's showing no signs of stepping down from the throne any time soon.
Five stars.
3 News
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3
:: Publisher: Activision
:: Developer: Infinity Ward / Sledgehammer Games
:: Format: PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, PC
:: Rating: R16