Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 Review

thesixthaxis.com:

Another year, another Call of Duty. When a series releases annually, you generally get a good idea of what to expect, with some small variations and improvements along the way. Modern Warfare 3, on the other hand, feels like the result of a mad rush to release a full game and needing to cut corners because of it. All three modes are bound together by a common thread, and that thread has become worn and frayed.

The reimagining of the original Modern Warfare trilogy’s story continues in the campaign, as we’re now back to fighting Makarov and his army of ultranationalists as they try to trigger a war between the West and Russia. There’s some of what you’d expect here, with heavily scripted mission, great-looking cutscenes, bombastic set pieces and all that. These are mostly great, but they’re not the whole story.

You can read more about the campaign here, but the main issue is that most missions this time are “open combat missions,” giving you have a chunk of the Warzone map with a few objectives on it and letting you loose to do things however you like. Initially, it seems like a nice change, but thanks to poor checkpointing, AI issues, and a strange equipment system, they quickly become frustrating.

Worse is that they’re the antithesis of what Call of Duty has been for the last 20 years. The campaign is meant to be military operations with a squad, with scripted cinematic moments and a legion of enemies to take down as you progress through a series of objectives. An open combat mission is the opposite of that. It’s like a lesser imitation of Far Cry and the over reliance on them feels more like a cost cutting measure than it does an attempt to create something new and different, especially since it is neither of these