I’ve shared my reservations and concerns about the game as a whole as part of some of my impressions after checking out the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III beta. This is a game, at least in multiplayer, that relies on nostalgia unlike anything we’ve seen in the series. It only consists of remastered maps from the glorious 2009 Modern Warfare 2, and most importantly, since it’s on par with 2022’s Modern Warfare II, it doesn’t seem to bring as many new weapons as most are from last year’s installment. Needless to say, countless rumors and reports have suggested that this year’s Call of Duty is supposed to be a premium expansion pack for last year’s game, and it seems even more obvious now than when Modern Warfare III was revealed to the world in late summer.
This design style also means that zombies and the campaign are under a lot of pressure. As with multiplayer, we’ll have more thoughts on Zombies when it arrives as part of full launch next week, but Activision has once again decided to get the campaign into the hands of fans early, generously offering eight days before full launch carried out before. That’s a pretty good time span for a full campaign, but in Modern Warfare III, frankly, Activision could have given us three days of early access because the story is the shortest yet One, can be said to be the lowest point in the entire Call of Duty series narrative. As a nearly 20-year veteran of the series, this leaves me incredibly disappointed and frustrated.
Overshadowing the fact that Call of Duty itself has developed into a UI and accessibility nightmare, with a release sequence that would have even Makarov begging for mercy, this campaign is one of the series’ biggest setbacks. The action-packed scenes and heavy narrative that always made Call of Duty’s story feel like an action movie you were playing in were instead replaced by what can best be described as Warzone Zombies. The high-profile open combat mission was a farce. This is a fancy way of saying that the mission takes place in a small sandbox, usually a location in Warzone or a multiplayer map. Here, you have fixed goals, but now have the opportunity to explore and complete them as you see fit. When I heard about this plan, I expected it to be similar to the opening locations Rebellion used in the Sniper Elite games, but it’s far from the truth.
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The goals are mostly “destroy this thing” or “interact with this thing,” and there are barely any significant set-piece moments that would make Michael Bay’s jaw drop, unless you have the creativity and interest to create them yourself. Beyond that, unless you’re eager to explore each of these mini-sandboxes to find new weapon blueprints for use in the campaign, the actual objectives of the mission can take up to 10 minutes to complete. Those rumors that you can complete the story in four hours are absolutely correct, and considering the frankly miserable state of the looting options (which have no place in the Call of Duty campaign anyway) makes me want to go faster Exit a mission instead of continuing to explore it.
Then there’s the enemy AI. I’ve played a lot of Call of Duty, and it’s a ritual for me to play each new story on the hardest difficulty from the very beginning. Normally, this would mean a slightly challenging experience at times, but in Modern Warfare III, it feels like the enemies don’t know what they’re doing. They stand in the open and shoot at you like gargoyles, they’re inaccurate and stupid, and even if you do something crazy and attract the attention of the entire sandbox level, they do nothing but rush at you like zombies , did almost nothing in response. Again, this doesn’t feel like a Call of Duty campaign, it feels like a Warzone campaign, so you don’t get the brutal enemy AI we’ve seen in the past, you get stupid and frankly inconvenient enemy AI.
Frankly, it doesn’t help that the miserable stealth missions, which basically have an automatic glitch system if you’re spotted by an enemy, don’t help. Unlike other missions, in these missions, if you’re spotted, enemies will shoot you down with an accuracy and a bias that would make Verdansk’s cheating community jealous.
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But at least the narrative makes you want to keep going, right? Sort of. The storyline isn’t terrible, but it’s so severely hampered by every other part of this campaign experience that it’s impossible for me to talk about it as a highlight. The story only seems to advance at the beginning and end of a level, and then during the cutscenes in between. Everything you do in open combat missions feels more like a means to an end than a narrative driving point, and Activision doesn’t seem to care about that. Additionally, since Call of Duty’s storyline has been years in the making at this point, and narrative beats have been explored in previous seasons of past games, there are elements of the story that won’t make sense to anyone but the most avid Call of Duty fans. This must be what it’s like to be a partial Marvel fan.
Speaking of open combat missions, in one of the earliest missions, you are tasked with destroying three helicopters spread across the map. Within five minutes of exploring, I discovered a hidden stealth bomber killstreak, then began targeting high-impact killstreaks throughout the level, destroying two of the helicopters in one fell swoop. It worked. To me, that says absolutely everything that needs to be said about how Activision built and designed this campaign and these open combat missions.
If all of that wasn’t enough, the game even has a number of performance and bug issues. I’ve seen numerous visual bugs that greatly affected immersion, crashed a few different times for some reason, and even sat through entire cutscenes where the audio wouldn’t play. It’s worth noting that a brand with financial backing from Call of Duty can’t even provide us with a fundamentally effective experience.
To me, this isn’t a new addition to the Call of Duty series, but more of an afterthought. At best it should be premium DLC for last year’s game, due to the poor implementation of PlayStation Trophes, the way achievements are listed on Xbox, and the fact that you need about 250GB of empty space on your device to download this year’s game and still retain last year’s title (but Not 2019’s Modern Warfare) Also downloaded, everything about this game feels wrong to me.
The power of nostalgia can’t save this game’s £60 value, and Activision should be ashamed of itself for selling it at this price. If Ubisoft doesn’t think Assassin’s Creed Mirage deserves its full £60 price tag, despite bringing a whole new open world with an interesting story and fresh gameplay elements, then Activision thinks the game is worth your hard money The fact that the money is coming is ridiculous. Maybe Zombies will be a huge surprise for me, or maybe the multiplayer will immerse me in memories of the late 2000s to the point where I want to revoke that statement. But I highly doubt it.
