Yeah man, this sucks.
Congratulations soldier, you have graduated suma cum update and are at the top of your class at Activision. As part of your duties, we will now implore you to launch the current iteration of Call of Duty. You have clicked "Call of Duty" in your steam launcher, now that you have loaded the game, please restart so you can install another update. After this you must navigate through a menu filled with more tiles than a Home Depot. Congratulations soldier, you have located Modern Warfare III, please wait as we restart the game once more so you can magically be teleported a la horadric cube into what we hope is the right game. Now, in your best David Byrne impression please jest aloud "that is not my beautiful wife" as you gaze at the familiarly unfamiliar menus. Surely you have loaded into the same game right, everything looks similar but... it feels a little off? You look more and let out a "this is not my beautiful house" as you open up the weapons loadout menu for multiplayer. It's okay though, the game may require jumping through more hoops than a dog agility course, but at least you got to something worthwhile right? Oh no you gaze up at the product you have purchased with seventy hard earned United States Dollars and relent "where is that large automobile?"
This game sucks man.
Let's start with the campaign, or rather the first red flag of many that draped the release line of Modern Warfare III. Gaming journalism in the tail-end of 2023 is effectively meaningless, trusted content creators are really the only place I'll look for reviews in, and even then I take my own favorites with a grain of salt. I know why SkillUp doesn't like something, and at this point after however many years of experience in the field he has, I know why Jeff Gerstmann may not like a title. It's with following creators like this that you can form a benchmark in gauging new releases. Publications like IGN, Gamespot, and even my former flame in Gameinformer have greatly lost any credibility that they had in a reduction towards meaningless clickbait laden SEO borne ad revenue vulturing. This isn't a joker moment essay on the industry, it's just an introduction to the doom and gloom that surrounded the singleplayer content of MW3 before it came out... again. Just about every media outlet and individual that had an advance copy seemed to approach the campaign with a heightened degree of malaise that was greatly foreign to the the series thus far.
It's short, like real short. I beat it in two days as I had obligations going on but it could easily be done in one sitting. At the end of the day, this isn't a big issue as first person shooters ultimately run a serious risk of monotony (see my recent review of Nightdive's Quake II,) and all things considered short games when paced well can out perform some of my favorite longer titles (Looking at you Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance.) The problem is that MW3's singleplayer is like a McDonald's McBurger order that they somehow managed to completely destroy. A McBurger doesn't have the best ingredients and it surely doesn't have to last, but man at least fucking do it right. This campaign jumps more sharks than Will Smith did in 2004 with next to zero exposition as to the legitimate motives of the antagonists, reasonable efforts by the "good guys" or a fitting ending. That McBurger you want has mayo on it, they forgot the cheese, and they didn't even include the fries in the order. You're so sad you don't even go back, you're out of money because you don't have your card on you and the fourteen cents in the cupholder won't get you another McBurger. Gas is running low and you just have to get home. That's how MW3 felt like with Like a Dragon: Gaiden on the horizon. The campaign was so extremely sad as a user experience that I wanted it to be over with almost as fast as it started.
Careful Snake, this is a sneaking mission!
Why was every level a sneaking mission in MW3? Why was I as the player so greatly enabled to sneak and silent kill my way through the entire game? I didn't see Hideo Kojima in the staff credits. Each level design felt like an afterthought, almost as if Activision was trying to resurrect a playable singleplayer experience like it was a Beatles song written over fifty years ago. Wait... that happened? And it was kinda okay? Oh. Seriously though, sneaking my way through some poorly designed open-zone maps that had a hard focus on not engaging in an all-out firefight against your enemy felt like a massive antithesis to the Call of Duty I grew up on, and even experienced last year with the re?release of MW2. You could tell some guy in the board room in the fourteenth hour of crunch was implored by upper management to add some variety to the environmental experiences of MW3. "HEY HOW ABOUT A WATER LEVEL, HOW ABOUT A SNOW LEVEL, HOW ABOUT... MAKAROV RUNNIN' AROUND" he frantically says as bits of hair fall from his scalp. He spins around in his Steelcase Series 2 3D Airback Chair beating his chest and slamming his eighth cup of coffee within the hour. Did I mention this man is a literal chimpanzee? It was nice seeing the familiar faces from the franchise heretoforth in Ghost, Soap, and Price, but its clear they just needed the guys to do a few more things for a few hours with no real end point for some campaign content. I am not joking with you when I say that the entirety of this game could not have happened and I believe the geopolitical state of the world within Call of Duty would have remained the exact same. You know it's bad when the McGuffin's in the story don't even lead anywhere with any legitimate credence or point.
I spent seventy hours last year playing Soul Hackers 2 in a mostly lukewarm experience and I legitimately think it was a better use of time than the two half afternoons I spent on the MW3 campaign. It's not just bad, it's aggressively uninteresting and that is one of the larger indictments you can have on a game with a budget of this caliber.
You decide the campaign wasn't for you, so you load up the mulitplayer, which is more or less the only reason you bought the game. Excited you are to play the old Modern Warfare II maps that you played in 2009 when you were much younger and the world was much more innocent. I'm kidding by the way, as a Metro Detroiter at the time the world was decidedly not better, but whatever. You remember all those broken lobbies on Rust that you got north of 100 kills on because some guy who had computer skills seemingly more insidious than Mr. Robot and wanted to level up quick? Yeah, Rust is back baby and it... sucks! I love going back and playing some Shipment on MW2 (2022) because the gameplay loop fits, its quick and really doesn't overstay its welcome. Everyone has the same sightlines and there are legitimate places to hide if you need a breath. It's such a tight experience because it has been optimized to be so, and even then its only really fun in bursts. Well, Rust is back and it sucks.
The immersion you have in breaking the "Wow Modern Warfare 2 (2009)'s maps kinda suck" was a moment I had way too quickly in MW3 to enjoy the rest of the game. They're unfair a lot of the time, boring, and you'll play them NONSTOP because there were 0 (Zero, nil, nada) new maps in the release of MW3. How lazy can you be to cook up a bad at best singleplayer with zero new content in the environmental design of the multiplayer? Sure it felt cool to quickscope some dudes on Highrise for a few minutes, but then I realized that you could and would be killed from everywhere just like you were back in the day. I'm not old, but I'm not a spry slide canceller either. I can hold my own in most FPS' quite well, but it was clear I hadn't studied the blade as well as the other folks loading in to this game with the optimal builds to abuse some genuinely miserable design on these maps. Rust gives you no moment of reprieve or a place to even think of setting up, Invasion takes approximately forty years to travel from one point to the end (that is if you are going mach 3.2 in a Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird,) Afghan rewards camping more than an REI, and Terminal has spawns that could have been better created by a Hainan black crested gibbon (yes I did have to give "species of gibbon" a google") given fifteen minutes in a world editor. The bottom line here is that the maps are nostalgic and varied, sure, but they don't feel good to play in the modern gamesphere. The temporal shift I feel in jumping from MW3 back to MW2 in regards to map design is colossal.
And then you load into the map.
I'm convinced you could watch the entirety of One Piece's 1075 current episodes in the time it takes to kill someone in MW3. I don't even know who this rewards? Getting the drop on one person or a group should be a vindicating experience to the predator stalking their prey, and in most games it is. In Modern Shitshow 3 you could read every accepted book within the expanded Warhammer universe before an assault rifle mag could take down two to three enemies. This was the most immediate shellshock to me coming from MW2 the day before, even moreso than the poor design of the retro maps. I kept shooting, I aimed well, I checked the time and four hours had passed, the same guy was still in front of me. I can't conceive of a reason to bump this up from where it was at in MW2 and even MW1 (2019.) I don't know who this benefits, because it surely isn't those who have the skill. Gunfights in MW3 feel more like they do in an Apex Legends or something where it's not necessarily the drop you get, but how you engage after the drop, which was never Call of Duty to me. Several times in my few days of playing have I been shot and had a full opportunity to disengage prone and run to cover because the enemy didn't account for the four hundred and fifty years that were required to kill me. With the first bullet of your magazine, a nineteen year old Lebron James is the first pick to the Cleveland Cavaliers in the 2003 NBA Draft. By the time you've killed the guy, he's now thirty eight and in his sixth season with the Los Angeles Lakers. I streamed this to friends and family alike in discord calls to confirm whether or not my suspicions about how poorly tuned this felt was just on me or not, and the resounding takeaway was Time to Kill (TTK) was simply way too long. In the time it took to write this review I have listened to aespa's 4th Mini album "Drama" twice through, this is not enough time to have killed someone in MW3.
I have three hundred something hours in MW2 over the last two-ish years and I unlocked just about everything I needed to outside of battle pass added content. The big billing was that I didn't have to unlock the guns that I had unlocked in MW2 once more in MW3, which is... good. But why do I have to unlock perks again? More on that in a second. Why do I have to unlock the same exact killstreaks (by grinding levels) once more? Did my operator (of whom I play the same exact one) forget the phone number to his VTOL guy? Does it really require fifty more levels or however much it actually is to relearn this all? It's stuff like this that clearly indicates to me that MW3 is the money hungry cash grab it appears to be, dangling enough in front of the player to make it seem familiar, but taking enough away that they feel the need to get it all back. Oh even more fun, all those guns you still have, remember that? None of your loadouts carry over so I hope you either took screencaps of your ten classes from MW2 or remember every single change you made to tune and augment your weapons, because haha pranked! Tee hee! Silly you!!! Those didn't carry over! After attempting to re-create my go to classes from MW2 I gave up and realize my enjoyment of the game shouldn't rely on living in the past (ironic ain't it,) and that I should give the new guns a try. Same as it ever was.
I'd just like to make fun of this game's "perk" system real quick before I close out. Instead of having perks like you've had since the original CoD: Modern Warfare back in 2007, you have... equipment! It all does the same shit, but check this out... it's gear! Because "Scavenger" was too familiar with the player, you now have twinkles space dust rubs fingers in the air does a mystifying spin in my pointed cap and robes "Scavenger gloves!" Thats right perks were too reasonable so we've subbed them out for gloves, boots, vests, and headsets? I couldn't tell you what does what (outside of boots) because I don't care anymore. I am completely indifferent to this experience. As soon as I unlocked the Gunner Vest I put it on, because it is Overkill from the last few games, allowing you as the player to carry two primary weapons. This was a non negotiable for me in MW2 because I like to have both my close and long range options offered. I mistakenly thought this might resuscitate my enjoyment of MW3 from its Mariana-Trench level grave but it didn't, because it turns out a dilapidated McBurger is still a dilapidated McBurger. In equipping my vest, just like real life, I couldn't wear boots anymore. My #xXxT4CSPRINTxXx wasn't as long as it used to be pre-vest, but that was a sacrifice I was willing to make. At Max Boot level, again because perks are too hard to use and make no sense, you gain the ability to SILENTLY MOVE WHEREVER YOU WANT. Because that's fair! Level to win! Max level you become Psycho Mantis!
I have zero willingness to max out my rank in this game or really dedicate any more time to the multiplayer experience of MW3 because just about every element of it is somehow more magnificently frustrating that I could imagine. I would sooner pay someone an exorbitant fee to slap me as hard as they can when I wake up every morning then spend another hour playing on the same exact maps I spent hundreds of hours on fourteen years ago with a shooter experience this poor.
Dobby can't be hurt anymore, Dobby is a free elf. I am Dobby.
This game sucks man.
Congratulations soldier, you have graduated suma cum update and are at the top of your class at Activision. As part of your duties, we will now implore you to launch the current iteration of Call of Duty. You have clicked "Call of Duty" in your steam launcher, now that you have loaded the game, please restart so you can install another update. After this you must navigate through a menu filled with more tiles than a Home Depot. Congratulations soldier, you have located Modern Warfare III, please wait as we restart the game once more so you can magically be teleported a la horadric cube into what we hope is the right game. Now, in your best David Byrne impression please jest aloud "that is not my beautiful wife" as you gaze at the familiarly unfamiliar menus. Surely you have loaded into the same game right, everything looks similar but... it feels a little off? You look more and let out a "this is not my beautiful house" as you open up the weapons loadout menu for multiplayer. It's okay though, the game may require jumping through more hoops than a dog agility course, but at least you got to something worthwhile right? Oh no you gaze up at the product you have purchased with seventy hard earned United States Dollars and relent "where is that large automobile?"
This game sucks man.
Let's start with the campaign, or rather the first red flag of many that draped the release line of Modern Warfare III. Gaming journalism in the tail-end of 2023 is effectively meaningless, trusted content creators are really the only place I'll look for reviews in, and even then I take my own favorites with a grain of salt. I know why SkillUp doesn't like something, and at this point after however many years of experience in the field he has, I know why Jeff Gerstmann may not like a title. It's with following creators like this that you can form a benchmark in gauging new releases. Publications like IGN, Gamespot, and even my former flame in Gameinformer have greatly lost any credibility that they had in a reduction towards meaningless clickbait laden SEO borne ad revenue vulturing. This isn't a joker moment essay on the industry, it's just an introduction to the doom and gloom that surrounded the singleplayer content of MW3 before it came out... again. Just about every media outlet and individual that had an advance copy seemed to approach the campaign with a heightened degree of malaise that was greatly foreign to the the series thus far.
It's short, like real short. I beat it in two days as I had obligations going on but it could easily be done in one sitting. At the end of the day, this isn't a big issue as first person shooters ultimately run a serious risk of monotony (see my recent review of Nightdive's Quake II,) and all things considered short games when paced well can out perform some of my favorite longer titles (Looking at you Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance.) The problem is that MW3's singleplayer is like a McDonald's McBurger order that they somehow managed to completely destroy. A McBurger doesn't have the best ingredients and it surely doesn't have to last, but man at least fucking do it right. This campaign jumps more sharks than Will Smith did in 2004 with next to zero exposition as to the legitimate motives of the antagonists, reasonable efforts by the "good guys" or a fitting ending. That McBurger you want has mayo on it, they forgot the cheese, and they didn't even include the fries in the order. You're so sad you don't even go back, you're out of money because you don't have your card on you and the fourteen cents in the cupholder won't get you another McBurger. Gas is running low and you just have to get home. That's how MW3 felt like with Like a Dragon: Gaiden on the horizon. The campaign was so extremely sad as a user experience that I wanted it to be over with almost as fast as it started.
Careful Snake, this is a sneaking mission!
Why was every level a sneaking mission in MW3? Why was I as the player so greatly enabled to sneak and silent kill my way through the entire game? I didn't see Hideo Kojima in the staff credits. Each level design felt like an afterthought, almost as if Activision was trying to resurrect a playable singleplayer experience like it was a Beatles song written over fifty years ago. Wait... that happened? And it was kinda okay? Oh. Seriously though, sneaking my way through some poorly designed open-zone maps that had a hard focus on not engaging in an all-out firefight against your enemy felt like a massive antithesis to the Call of Duty I grew up on, and even experienced last year with the re?release of MW2. You could tell some guy in the board room in the fourteenth hour of crunch was implored by upper management to add some variety to the environmental experiences of MW3. "HEY HOW ABOUT A WATER LEVEL, HOW ABOUT A SNOW LEVEL, HOW ABOUT... MAKAROV RUNNIN' AROUND" he frantically says as bits of hair fall from his scalp. He spins around in his Steelcase Series 2 3D Airback Chair beating his chest and slamming his eighth cup of coffee within the hour. Did I mention this man is a literal chimpanzee? It was nice seeing the familiar faces from the franchise heretoforth in Ghost, Soap, and Price, but its clear they just needed the guys to do a few more things for a few hours with no real end point for some campaign content. I am not joking with you when I say that the entirety of this game could not have happened and I believe the geopolitical state of the world within Call of Duty would have remained the exact same. You know it's bad when the McGuffin's in the story don't even lead anywhere with any legitimate credence or point.
I spent seventy hours last year playing Soul Hackers 2 in a mostly lukewarm experience and I legitimately think it was a better use of time than the two half afternoons I spent on the MW3 campaign. It's not just bad, it's aggressively uninteresting and that is one of the larger indictments you can have on a game with a budget of this caliber.
You decide the campaign wasn't for you, so you load up the mulitplayer, which is more or less the only reason you bought the game. Excited you are to play the old Modern Warfare II maps that you played in 2009 when you were much younger and the world was much more innocent. I'm kidding by the way, as a Metro Detroiter at the time the world was decidedly not better, but whatever. You remember all those broken lobbies on Rust that you got north of 100 kills on because some guy who had computer skills seemingly more insidious than Mr. Robot and wanted to level up quick? Yeah, Rust is back baby and it... sucks! I love going back and playing some Shipment on MW2 (2022) because the gameplay loop fits, its quick and really doesn't overstay its welcome. Everyone has the same sightlines and there are legitimate places to hide if you need a breath. It's such a tight experience because it has been optimized to be so, and even then its only really fun in bursts. Well, Rust is back and it sucks.
The immersion you have in breaking the "Wow Modern Warfare 2 (2009)'s maps kinda suck" was a moment I had way too quickly in MW3 to enjoy the rest of the game. They're unfair a lot of the time, boring, and you'll play them NONSTOP because there were 0 (Zero, nil, nada) new maps in the release of MW3. How lazy can you be to cook up a bad at best singleplayer with zero new content in the environmental design of the multiplayer? Sure it felt cool to quickscope some dudes on Highrise for a few minutes, but then I realized that you could and would be killed from everywhere just like you were back in the day. I'm not old, but I'm not a spry slide canceller either. I can hold my own in most FPS' quite well, but it was clear I hadn't studied the blade as well as the other folks loading in to this game with the optimal builds to abuse some genuinely miserable design on these maps. Rust gives you no moment of reprieve or a place to even think of setting up, Invasion takes approximately forty years to travel from one point to the end (that is if you are going mach 3.2 in a Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird,) Afghan rewards camping more than an REI, and Terminal has spawns that could have been better created by a Hainan black crested gibbon (yes I did have to give "species of gibbon" a google") given fifteen minutes in a world editor. The bottom line here is that the maps are nostalgic and varied, sure, but they don't feel good to play in the modern gamesphere. The temporal shift I feel in jumping from MW3 back to MW2 in regards to map design is colossal.
And then you load into the map.
I'm convinced you could watch the entirety of One Piece's 1075 current episodes in the time it takes to kill someone in MW3. I don't even know who this rewards? Getting the drop on one person or a group should be a vindicating experience to the predator stalking their prey, and in most games it is. In Modern Shitshow 3 you could read every accepted book within the expanded Warhammer universe before an assault rifle mag could take down two to three enemies. This was the most immediate shellshock to me coming from MW2 the day before, even moreso than the poor design of the retro maps. I kept shooting, I aimed well, I checked the time and four hours had passed, the same guy was still in front of me. I can't conceive of a reason to bump this up from where it was at in MW2 and even MW1 (2019.) I don't know who this benefits, because it surely isn't those who have the skill. Gunfights in MW3 feel more like they do in an Apex Legends or something where it's not necessarily the drop you get, but how you engage after the drop, which was never Call of Duty to me. Several times in my few days of playing have I been shot and had a full opportunity to disengage prone and run to cover because the enemy didn't account for the four hundred and fifty years that were required to kill me. With the first bullet of your magazine, a nineteen year old Lebron James is the first pick to the Cleveland Cavaliers in the 2003 NBA Draft. By the time you've killed the guy, he's now thirty eight and in his sixth season with the Los Angeles Lakers. I streamed this to friends and family alike in discord calls to confirm whether or not my suspicions about how poorly tuned this felt was just on me or not, and the resounding takeaway was Time to Kill (TTK) was simply way too long. In the time it took to write this review I have listened to aespa's 4th Mini album "Drama" twice through, this is not enough time to have killed someone in MW3.
I have three hundred something hours in MW2 over the last two-ish years and I unlocked just about everything I needed to outside of battle pass added content. The big billing was that I didn't have to unlock the guns that I had unlocked in MW2 once more in MW3, which is... good. But why do I have to unlock perks again? More on that in a second. Why do I have to unlock the same exact killstreaks (by grinding levels) once more? Did my operator (of whom I play the same exact one) forget the phone number to his VTOL guy? Does it really require fifty more levels or however much it actually is to relearn this all? It's stuff like this that clearly indicates to me that MW3 is the money hungry cash grab it appears to be, dangling enough in front of the player to make it seem familiar, but taking enough away that they feel the need to get it all back. Oh even more fun, all those guns you still have, remember that? None of your loadouts carry over so I hope you either took screencaps of your ten classes from MW2 or remember every single change you made to tune and augment your weapons, because haha pranked! Tee hee! Silly you!!! Those didn't carry over! After attempting to re-create my go to classes from MW2 I gave up and realize my enjoyment of the game shouldn't rely on living in the past (ironic ain't it,) and that I should give the new guns a try. Same as it ever was.
I'd just like to make fun of this game's "perk" system real quick before I close out. Instead of having perks like you've had since the original CoD: Modern Warfare back in 2007, you have... equipment! It all does the same shit, but check this out... it's gear! Because "Scavenger" was too familiar with the player, you now have twinkles space dust rubs fingers in the air does a mystifying spin in my pointed cap and robes "Scavenger gloves!" Thats right perks were too reasonable so we've subbed them out for gloves, boots, vests, and headsets? I couldn't tell you what does what (outside of boots) because I don't care anymore. I am completely indifferent to this experience. As soon as I unlocked the Gunner Vest I put it on, because it is Overkill from the last few games, allowing you as the player to carry two primary weapons. This was a non negotiable for me in MW2 because I like to have both my close and long range options offered. I mistakenly thought this might resuscitate my enjoyment of MW3 from its Mariana-Trench level grave but it didn't, because it turns out a dilapidated McBurger is still a dilapidated McBurger. In equipping my vest, just like real life, I couldn't wear boots anymore. My #xXxT4CSPRINTxXx wasn't as long as it used to be pre-vest, but that was a sacrifice I was willing to make. At Max Boot level, again because perks are too hard to use and make no sense, you gain the ability to SILENTLY MOVE WHEREVER YOU WANT. Because that's fair! Level to win! Max level you become Psycho Mantis!
I have zero willingness to max out my rank in this game or really dedicate any more time to the multiplayer experience of MW3 because just about every element of it is somehow more magnificently frustrating that I could imagine. I would sooner pay someone an exorbitant fee to slap me as hard as they can when I wake up every morning then spend another hour playing on the same exact maps I spent hundreds of hours on fourteen years ago with a shooter experience this poor.
Dobby can't be hurt anymore, Dobby is a free elf. I am Dobby.
This game sucks man.
2 Comments
:)
Hologon
5 months ago