Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 Review

Back in 2007, Infinity Ward caught a bolt of lightning called Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare in a bottle. It re-invented the then flagging military shooter genre, combining a new setting with intelligent storytelling and a level of heretofore unmatched level of intensity. But you know what they say about lighting striking twice. Modern Warfare 3 completes the journey its predecessor began into terrible sequel-hood: not only stripping out the craftsman-like story-telling, but also losing faith in the players’ ability to progress through the game without having their hands held. This means that half the game feels like an on-rails shooter. You’re paraded through a giant shooting gallery of targets and exploding set-pieces, until you become so inured to the over-the-top action that everything becomes a dull mélange of explosions and shouty Scottish and Russian men.

But before diving into the terribly misjudged single-player, let’s get the multiplayer offerings out of the way. After all, undoubtedly the vast majority of people who’ve purchased Modern Warfare 3 will be doing so primarily for the multiplayer. As someone who enjoyed Call of Duty 4’s multiplayer for a time, I can reliably inform you that (just like predecessors Modern Warfare 2 and Black Ops) it’s pretty much the same as it’s been for the past 4 years. Fundamental flaws with the whole FPS/RPG mashup have yet to see any resolution. It’s always been glaringly obvious that rewarding those who have more time to put into the game (and thus further develop their skills) with increasingly powerful weapons and perks utterly disincentives anyone new to the game to continue playing after the first few times they finish a round with 2 kills and 12 deaths. Consequentially the player base inevitably suffers from the law of diminishing returns as it contracts in upon itself. The hardcore soon start to find themselves starved of the easy newb-meat on which they grew fat in the first few months of the game’s launch. The way the publisher and developers have sought to get around this is to churn out a new iteration on an annual basis, which solves the mystery of why the multiplayer has barely changed in 5 years.

Actually the new Spec Ops survival mode is pretty fun, even if it is just the Zombies mode from the Treyarch games but with Zombies swapped for guys with guns. On the other hand the Spec Ops missions that were the highlight of Modern Warfare 2 are astonishingly difficult. Unlike Modern Warfare 2, which had a steady difficulty curve that helped prepare you for the increasingly tough challenges ahead, Modern Warfare 3 just starts off ridiculously hard and it only gets worse from there.

With the multiplayer being at best more of the same, let’s turn our gaze towards the single-player. This is where we fall with a vengeance into the realm of the Call of Duty 4 comparisons. In that installment you played the role of two protagonists: a US marine in a generically middle-eastern city (obviously meant to be somewhere in Iraq) fighting insurgents, and a new SAS recruit deployed in Russia who has to track down the leader of powerful Ultranationalist fringe group in the middle of a civil war. There was a real sense of impending doom as national tensions mounted and you realized that failure in your quest to prevent this escalation could have devastating global consequences. This was particularly underlined in an astonishing sequence in which your marine character gets caught up in a disastrously unsuccessful mission with the consequence of a nuclear bomb going off.  You survive crawling out of a crashed helicopter to observe the all-encompassing devastation, just before you die of radiation poisoning. It’s hard not to treat the threat of nuclear war with a greater sense of gravitas after that once you’ve become a victim of it.

When considering the accomplishments of the first entry in the franchise, it becomes clear how far the third game has fallen. The game drops you off in the middle of World War 3 after a quick catch-up of all the idiocy that occurred in Modern Warfare 2. A Russian terrorist frames an American spy for a terrorist attack in a Russian airport, and the Russian President decides that the only sensible way to respond to this is to invade America. The first thing with which the game slaps you in the face is an image of war-torn New York. The allegorical imagery wouldn’t be so problematic if it was actually saying something. Instead Infinity Ward and Sledgehammer decided to have a bunch of 9/11 imagery to ramp up the excitement of the denouement in which you highjack a Russian submarine off the shore of Manhattan. It’s a patently nonsensical masturbatory military fantasy that would by no means look out of place in a Michael Bay film, and on those grounds I would normally cut its idiotic storytelling some slack.

But Modern Warfare 3 is a different and altogether more odious case. It follows in the footsteps of its equally bombastic and mentally-challenged predecessor Modern Warfare 2, which featured an interactive murder-civilians-in-an-airport sequence for absolutely no purpose at all. The game tries to have it both ways, but you just can’t get away with pretending that you’re just a big stupid schlocky war scenario that no-one’s suppose to take too seriously, and yet have a sequence where you play as an American tourist on holiday in London filming his family, who then gets to see his daughter get blown up by a Russian car-bomb. Nor can you get away with a sequence in which, whilst sneaking through Prague, you’re forced to watch Russian soldiers execute prisoners-of-war. If you do this, you lose the right to portray yourself as just a bit of bang-bang-shooty-shooty fun.

If you’re going to show scenes that should horrify and repulse a human being as part of your big entertainment package, then I’m damn well going to call you on it. If anyone from Infinity Ward or Sledgehammer happens to be reading this, then you should be ashamed of yourself. Not for just churning out a series of repetitive games that serve to desensitize us to the horrors of war in favour of just seeing it as some sort of stupid entertainment, but for specifically going out of your way to show us reprehensible acts being committed for absolutely no reason, other than to dehumanise the Russian soldiers you kill and get you pumped up to go and kill some more. Considering Infinity Ward’s pedigree that largely consisted of World War 2 games, it’s understandable why they did this. But that doesn’t make it acceptable.

The fact of the matter is that Modern Warfare 3 has already broken all the previous sales records for the Call of Duty franchise, and I’m sure that whatever comes next will continue the trend. It’s hard not to be disheartened when everything that I consider reprehensible in video-games makes a shed-load of money. I guess I’ll have to comfort myself with the fact that most people play it for the multiplayer, and hope that Activision manages to run this franchise as thoroughly into the ground as they’ve done to Guitar Hero and Tony Hawk.