It’s without a doubt that the biggest selling and most popular franchise of this generation is the Call of Duty franchise, more specifically, the Modern Warfare iterations of it. Now onto the third and final chapter that tells the story of the world’s battle against a psychopathic Russian terrorist named Markov, Modern Warfare 3 is bigger and better than ever.
Like anyone at the top, its easy to try to pick apart Modern Warfare 3’s flaws to try to chisel it down from the throne. The campaign in Modern Warfare 3 is still a mostly linear affair, and you’ll still have to accomplish things by the way the folks at Infinity Ward and Sledgehammer Games designed. Cheap game play mechanics like artificial triggers in a firefight which cause you to fiight off seemingly endless waves of enemies are definitely still here, but it’s also not as apparent. The graphics also begin to show their age, and while the character models look really good, the world is filled with plenty of polygons and poor textures that don’t hide the aging engine. But we’re nitpicking, because when you stand back and look at Modern Warfare 3 it truly does what it knows how to do best - intensity.
From the very first mission on the ground in NYC fighting your way downtown to the New York Stock Exchange to a battle on a bridge in Paris underneath the Eiffel tower, the pure adrenaline rush the game gives never lets up. Modern Warfare 3 has gone from having the battle in your home town to having the battle in every one's favorite town making it decidedly more epic. And while the graphics engine might be showing its age at certain times, several scenes like that from the New York harbor are simply jaw dropping in its scale and beauty. You WILL feel like you are part of a larger war on the ground, despite playing as one of four different, often superhuman, characters.
The Modern Warfare games are known for their slick weapons and Modern Warfare 3 doesn’t disappoint here either - whether it’s a gun that has a variable scope, a remote controlled turret tank, or taking control of the guns of a helicopter from miles away - the game never lets you down with cool toys to play with. When you combine this with all the aforementioned locales and insane scenarios like an assault with an impending sand storm, I can only describe the game as War Porn, if such a thing were to exist.
Of course single player is only a small piece of the puzzle and it ended for me after six and a half hours. As the credits wrap up you are greeted with a new message - “Continue on to Spec-Ops,” the game’s cooperative mode. There’s a renewed focus here on the co-op which features sixteen missions to play with a co-op partner either locally or online. On top of the sixteen missions, half of which need to be unlocked by earning stars in the previous missions, you also have a survival mode which can be played on 16 maps which are based on versus maps.