Is Cod Modern Warfare 3 Good

[Raymond Freedman]

Callof Duty is a known quantity in many ways at this point. The era, specific weapons, and flavor-of-the-year gimmicks might change, but as we round out two decades of annual iterations, it\u2019s not hard to guess what the next one will bring. So it\u2019s no surprise that after playing in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3\u2019s multiplayer open beta on PlayStation 5 for a good chunk of the weekend, the feeling I came away with was largely, \u201coh yeah, this is just more Call of Duty.\u201d That doesn\u2019t mean I didn\u2019t have fun, and I still have a whole lot more left to see in the final version, but so far it feels modern in name alone.\u00a0

The first thing I noticed when booting up Modern Warfare 3\u2019s multiplayer was how washed out everything looked. I thought maybe it was my monitor settings, but the actual game colors are just dull in a way that\u2019s glaring compared to the vibrant styles of so many of its FPS rivals nowadays. Everything seemed to have an extremely soft and grey filter over it, which became a real problem mid-match. I was often unable to spot enemies as well as I normally can since they blend into the environment, at least on the four beta maps (Skidrow, Favela, Estate, and Rust).

Look, I get that these are supposed to be soldiers wearing camo in the middle of a battlefield, but I\u2019m pretty sure my opponents and allies shouldn\u2019t be roughly the same color as the graffitied wall behind them, too. If that contrast between environment and enemy isn\u2019t balanced out, or if players aren\u2019t highlighted or represented through HUD markings in a clearer way, then that\u2019s a problem beyond style alone.

On top of that, with Call of Duty implementing so many different skins now that wildly vary in their colors and designs, Modern Warfare 3 could strangely end up favoring the people in drab, default clothing. Skins weren\u2019t available in the beta, but if someone wants to use their Nicki Minaj skin transferred over from Modern Warfare 2 at launch, it seems like it would be a huge disadvantage since you\u2019d stick out prominently on the maps we\u2019ve seen so far.

The gunplay at least felt good, with an assortment of different guns that were largely fun to use \u2013 though the time-to-kill (TTK) felt a bit off and inconsistent between them, going back and forth from being incredibly fast to a few seconds too long. The SMGs in particular seemed very strong in this first beta round, since my assault rifles could take a few bullets longer to down an enemy, making them my go-to right now.

The TTK definitely rewards the person who shoots first overall, which isn\u2019t a shock given Call of Duty\u2019s traditionally fast action, but I\u2019ve run into situations where I would shoot first while using an assault rifle only to be out damaged by an enemy SMG even though I had put three bullets into them before they even started shooting. That inconsistent TTK wasn\u2019t so terrible that it outright ruined any of the matches I played, but it could sometimes be incredibly frustrating. Sniping, on the other hand, felt great on Estate and Skidrow, but all four of this weekend's maps had such a quick flow to them that I\u2019d often just want an automatic weapon out while running around. Matches seemed to go very fast on the whole, with a classic Call of Duty breakneck pace as you kill, aid the objective, die, respawn, repeat.

It was pretty fun to take on Modern Warfare 3\u2019s objective-based modes with a team, especially when playing Domination on Skidrow or Hardpoint on Favela since those smaller maps would increase the amount of chaos in a given fight. A lot of fights would turn into grenade barrages followed by frantic gunfire around corners, which was really fun to rush into the middle of.

But while I loved the central game modes, the Ground War mode just isn\u2019t doing anything for me so far. Ground War is Call of Duty\u2019s big team mode where two 32-player groups face off against each other on an expansive map. While this mode may be a draw to anyone coming from something like the larger encounters of the Battlefield series, it just felt like too many players on one map for me to enjoy it. And although sniping can be entertaining, it\u2019s often paradoxically hard to find any of those players out in the open because the map is just so big.

Ground War matches can also be particularly frustrating since 32 players are incredibly difficult to try and coordinate, making it extremely hard to focus on one objective over another. The layout of the map operates like Battlefield with different zones to capture and the ability to spawn either on them or fellow teammates. But when you\u2019re on the losing end of a match, you often have no choice but to spawn all the way on your team\u2019s base and run a long distance to any action.

The gunfights you actually have during Ground War feel extremely sparse, too, since a lot of the time you\u2019re trying to run to different points to see if there are even enemies there as you reclaim a zone. Most times you end up running somewhere and getting taken out by enemies simply camping in the zone \u2013 then you have to spawn back and do the whole dance again.\u00a0

While this beta doesn\u2019t give a full picture of what the final game will be like, it has already solidified to me that Modern Warfare 3 is certainly more Call of Duty, with all the good and the bad that entails. I had fun with its multiplayer this weekend, but it seems to lack anything to make this new iteration special or unique. The graphics of the maps and UI seem relatively unchanged from Modern Warfare 2 last year, leaving them fairly unimpressive as a result. And while the gunplay feels as solid as you\u2019d expect from Call of Duty, I\u2019m not finding myself wow-ed by any specific guns or additions this time.

We\u2019ll be back with a full review of Call Duty\u2019s multiplayer closer to launch, but until then I did still enjoy my time with the beta. That said, it also left me curious if there\u2019s anything new hiding in the full version, as well as anxious to see how Modern Warfare 3 feels on PC and if there are any graphical updates there.

One scene near the end of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3's story - no spoilers here, not that there's anything to spoil - features a CIA agent heavily redacting all the key details of what you just played through. I let go of the idea that Call of Duty might do much of interest, or even consequence, with its story some time ago, but that's as on-the-nose an analogy as you could ever ask for with Modern Warfare 3.

Even by its own gradually lowering standards, Modern Warfare 3's retconned, chopped-up, and hastily taped-together reworking of the Shepherd-and-Makarov tale from 2009's original Modern Warfare 2 is a mess. Picking up directly after 2022's Modern Warfare 2, which it turns out just reworked half the story (not that you'd really know from playing it), MW3 finishes the job by cutting out any remaining interesting parts and comprehensively sanitising whatever's left. What was an already barely-there parable about real systems and their related wars has instead been swapped out for a glossy, extraordinarily well-presented, but utterly vapid tale about nothing and nobody. Most disappointingly of all, the typical bombast and relentless forward energy of its linear campaigns, that usually acts as good-enough cover fire for the narrative gaps in Call of Duty, is missing here, too.

Walking it back a bit for one moment though, I should probably start with some sympathy. Reliable reporting suggested this year's Modern Warfare 3 originally started life as a Modern Warfare 2 expansion. Blame, if we're being as blunt as to point fingers here, should really go to whatever circumstances or whichever decision-makers caused those plans to change, as developer Sledgehammer, stepping in for Infinity Ward this time, has clearly had to rush things along. Modern Warfare 3's story is also on the short side, and while that's never been much of a problem for Call of Duties gone by - for a lot of people the promise of a tight eight hours of closely directed action is exactly what they play these games for - it all adds up to a fairly obvious picture of a game rushed out with less time than it really requires.

That's most evident in Modern Warfare 3's new "open combat" missions, roughly a third of those in the game, where you'll find yourself parachuted into a large-ish open space with the illusion of choice for how to complete your objective. Typically, that means several clusters of enemies gathered around three or four sub-objectives marked on your map, and between them various caches of Warzone-style tiered weapons to loot, a range of pickups and perks like UAV scanners, armour plates or proximity mines, the occasional loadout-selector crate and, crucially, Tactical Bottles, for throwing to distract a guard's attention.

It's actually a nice idea. Since the first Modern Warfare - the first first Modern Warfare - Call of Duty's always had a hint of optional stealth about it. For a long time that typically found itself in specifically linear, stealth-only missions, while all the choice came in multiplayer: attaching a silencer to my old MP5 and kitting myself out with UAV scanner-blocking perks for a few sprints around the flanks of maps like Vacant or Backlot is a fond memory of mine, from back in the day. In Warzone meanwhile, the ability to sneak about, climbing from under-equipped underdog to undetectable angel of death is an essential part of the sweaty tension that makes battle royales so compelling. And over the years, Call of Duty's clearly been trying to work that sense of choice into its campaigns, to mixed success - stealth missions in last year's MW2 were some of its very best (Recon by Fire) and very worst (Alone).

But it's also an idea that feels destined to fail. While Call of Duty has the equipment for stealth - silencers, throwing knives, ghillie suits, Tactical Bottles - and the obvious pedigree with open combat, in these "weapons free" missions you'll regularly find things transitioning from one to the other, and the series just doesn't have the chops to back those more systemic ambitions up. Enemy detection for instance is over-simple and illogical: enemies holding radios in their hands will spot you, seemingly call in the observation so an alarm will sound, the entire base will mobilise, only for everyone to reset as if nothing happened if you quickly flee the scene. There's little reactivity to bodies or ability to hide them - stuff I was doing in, say, Splinter Cell, decades ago - and few opportunities for systemic interplay beyond throwing and/or shooting explosive barrels.

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