Alex Wharton turns his steely gaze towards Call of
Duty: Modern Warfare 3 and asks: “Is it all hype?”
T
he biggest selling games
franchise has released another
record breaking title. Once
again it sells faster than the
last one, once again sells more
and, supposedly, once again ups the ante on
spectacularness!
But is the new one actually a good game –
or is it just hype and advertising?
I’m going to start with a confession… I
don’t like Call of Duty. Or more accurately, I
don’t like what it’s become. I still remember
playing the very original all those years ago,
and loving it. I also enjoyed the first Modern
Warfare. The second was mediocre – and
in my opinion the third has continued this
decline.
094
January 2012
The story centres round a terrorist that’s
duped Russia into attacking the rest of the
world. The game follows the (now outlawed)
Task Force 141 and the US Marines in their
fight to stop the terrorists and invading
armies. But there are some strange
moments that are slightly confusing. The
main one that irked me was that Russia
manages to successfully invade the whole
world all at once. Now I know Russia is a big
old place, with plenty of people, but you don’t
get to move troops all over the world without
someone asking some questions!
Playing through the single player campaign
left me feeling I’d done it all before. Sure
the story is going to new locations but the
gameplay is the same and, as it is the third
game in a series, I’ve done it all twice before.
The set-pieces are bigger and more
impressive than ever, but the pace didn’t
ever seem to dip and you can’t have climactic
peaks if there hasn’t been a build-up. If
everything is already blowing up, another
explosion isn’t really a climax!
Attacking a moving submarine was certainly
a memorable experience, but after
forcing it to surface the interior
fight was relatively boring and
the boat chase that followed
felt reminiscent of game I
played 10 years ago – not
what I expect from the
greatest selling series of
games ever.
The plot twists and
tie-ins were certainly
unexpected and did
add some surprise,
but it didn’t take the
story anywhere I
wasn’t expecting it
to go. The enemy
AI still hasn’t
been improved
over older Modern
Warfare games
either – you kill a
soldier and another
runs to where you
killed the first. At times if
you push up too far everyone
will suddenly focus their attacks
on you, quite literally punishing
you for attempting to push the
battle forwards. The game ends up
becoming a trial and error experience about
where you can move and which soldiers
to shoot first. At least it seems to load you
back to an extremely recent checkpoint
pretty quickly!
They have also now included the obligatory
‘shock’ level (and of course upping the ante
from the previous games). But to be perfectly
honest it wasn’t until after I beat the game
that I remembered it asking whether I wanted
to view the ‘disturbing’ level, and had to try
and work out which one it was meant to be. Is
it not shocking enough that I just killed about
4,000 soldiers? Sure, media and games have
desensitised me to these things but Modern
Warfare 2’s airport level made national press
and caused mothers to go on mighty crusades
about video game violence. The supposedly
‘more shocking’ level in Modern Warfare 3
passed without so much as a blink.
The game sounds pretty good most of
the time, except when you start shooting. I
understand that modern rifles make more of
a crack than a boom, yet MW3 seems to have
gone down the Hollywood action movie route
and made the guns go boom. They also sound
really scratchy. The best example of this was
the standard M4 – if I had a rifle that sounds
like it does then I’d have serious reservations
about actually shooting it! The rifle noise also
seems to change as you burn through the
magazine. Now this is pretty handy for telling
when you are going to need to reload, but it’s
massively unrealistic and just pulled me out of
the game.