Call Of Duty Modern Warfare 4 Single Player

[Griselda Humbarger]

Itdoes give you a bit more freedom when it comes to approaching each mission as you scour weapons caches for new tools to do the job with. Choosing whether to go loud or quiet does create a veil of stamping your own style onto things, but no matter how stealthily you approach the situation you're only really delaying the inevitable firefights against seemingly endlessly spawning enemies. And once you are spotted you'll have a near-impossible job trying to lose them.

There's an interesting idea in here somewhere, but it all just feels hastily put together and fairly cookie-cutter when it comes to actual variety or innovation. These are criminally all solo character missions, too, with communication to team members limited to radio chatter. As a result, there's zero sense of camaraderie, as that original Call of Duty pillar of squad mentality and fighting with your AI teammates is brought crashing down.

With three practically identical objectives to be completed in each of these open combat missions, they all end up blending into a rinse-and-repeat experience I felt like I was playing over and over, just in different locations. I did discover occasional joy in figuring out alternative methods to complete some tasks, such as finding a mortar strike and using it to destroy one of three enemy helicopters instead of defaulting to the provided C4. One particular chapter, titled Highrise, managed to deliver relatively consistent excitement as I ascended multiple floors of an apartment building, hunting down a target The Raid-style. But in all honesty, the enjoyment I garnered from this mission type was fleeting, and I soon found myself producing a small, audible sigh each time the words "open combat mission" appeared on the screen.

There are a handful of more traditional Call of Duty-style linear missions, though, and those offer more consistent fun, but they have neither great highs nor lows. The best is a journey across a frozen tundra involving a snowstorm-decorated shootout at a shipyard. One stealth-focused mission delivers very faint echoes of the CoD classic All Ghillied Up thanks to its potential for two-for-one headshots, but as many imitators have found out since, sniping and a whole lot of laying down in the grass does not necessarily a great mission make, failing to capture the same level of tension that iconic mission provided.

A prime example of this struggle is another stealth infiltration mission (there are too many of them) which encourages you to holster your gun completely in a rather dull exercise that mostly consists of strolling around another Verdansk landmark (this time its northern airfield) and suffering insta-fail death screens if you dare step within six feet of someone. It's yet another example of Modern Warfare 3 feeling like a patchwork of old fabrics as new exciting locations are a rarity and pieces of Verdansk are recycled to diminishing effect. In total, it makes for a fairly forgettable set of missions this time around, even when it's trying its best to unsettle you with its story.

Now obviously, the team at Sledgehammer could not have foreseen the recent tragic acts of terrorism that would impact our real world, the violent response to it, and the countless innocent civilian lives lost. These are all themes that Modern Warfare 3 broaches, though, and with them at the forefront of our minds currently, these issues feel as pertinent as ever and ones that should be handled with sensitivity. It's not an easy situation to navigate, but one you inherently put yourself in when choosing to include such provocative material.

Modern Warfare 3 has perhaps the worst Call of Duty single-player campaign I\u2019ve played. It\u2019s shallow, dull, and plays less like the greatest hits and more like underbaked cover versions of missions past. It\u2019s too busy looking back at former glories rather than focusing on making any new moments worth remembering, wrapped up in a borderline incoherent story with nothing to say. The only part we haven\u2019t seen in a campaign before falls flat, bizarrely cobbling together pieces of the Warzone mode into actively bad sandbox missions, abandoning all of what made Call of Duty so great at its peak and instead delivering a dull string of missions that amount to a thoroughly disappointing handful of hours.

Sledgehammer Games\u2019 big new addition this time around is the introduction of \u201copen combat missions,\u201d which make up half of the story\u2019s chapters. They\u2019re multi-objective arenas that aim to let you tackle tasks in any order and by whatever method suits your playstyle best. Unfortunately, they\u2019re symptomatic of Modern Warfare 3's flawed approach as a whole, opting for a thin veil of openness and choice over Call of Duty's once-trademark blockbuster storytelling. It\u2019s a shame because you can see a scenario where these missions could\u2019ve reached the heights of 2019's Lights Out \u2013 a great example of how to handle non-linear objectives in an FPS level \u2013 but unfortunately, that high mark is missed here. They rarely feel curated or authored, but instead are just spaces you're dropped into and basically told to make your own fun.

This sandbox approach doesn't fit what I'm looking for in a Call of Duty single-player story at all, and feels at odds with what made the original Modern Warfare trilogy the height of cinematic shooters. More than ever, this year's campaign bears an uncomfortable resemblance to its multiplayer companion, as Warzone's and DMZ's open-world approach bleeds further into the level design, to its detriment. Modern Warfare 3 even relies on the same mechanics \u2013 scavenging for better weapons and gear from stashes and tailoring your loadout at a drop box \u2013 communicated by a near-identical UI. If I wanted this, I\u2019d just drop into the battle royale solo and run around opening boxes and fighting enemies that are actually interesting.

There's an interesting idea in here somewhere, but it all just feels hastily put together and fairly cookie-cutter when it comes to actual variety or innovation. These are criminally all solo character missions, too, with communication to team members limited to radio chatter. As a result, there's zero sense of camaraderie, as that original Call of Duty pillar of squad mentality and fighting with your AI teammates is brought crashing down.\u00a0

With three practically identical objectives to be completed in each of these open combat missions, they all end up blending into a rinse-and-repeat experience I felt like I was playing over and over, just in different locations. I did discover occasional joy in figuring out alternative methods to complete some tasks, such as finding a mortar strike and using it to destroy one of three enemy helicopters instead of defaulting to the provided C4. One particular chapter, titled Highrise, managed to deliver relatively consistent excitement as I ascended multiple floors of an apartment building, hunting down a target The Raid-style. But in all honesty, the enjoyment I garnered from this mission type was fleeting, and I soon found myself producing a small, audible sigh each time the words \"open combat mission\" appeared on the screen.

There are a handful of more traditional Call of Duty-style linear missions, though, and those offer more consistent fun, but they have neither great highs nor lows. The best is a journey across a frozen tundra involving a snowstorm-decorated shootout at a shipyard. One stealth-focused mission delivers very faint echoes of the CoD classic All Ghillied Up thanks to its potential for two-for-one headshots, but as many imitators have found out since, sniping and a whole lot of laying down in the grass does not necessarily a great mission make, failing to capture the same level of tension that iconic mission provided.\u00a0

The campaign\u2019s opener takes place in a dark, rainy gulag transplanted directly from Warzone's Verdansk map. It holds promise and can't help but conjure up memories of the original Modern Warfare 2's Captain Price rescue mission, but it sadly never reaches the same level of excitement, due to enemy encounters being incredibly simplistic in nature. Once again, this proves how much this campaign is caught between trying to look to the past for familiar thrills, and failing when looking forward and creating new mission types.

There\u2019s a reluctance to tell that story through gameplay. Instead, you carve your way through enemies before underwritten cutscenes move the plot along. This formula persists throughout and doesn't allow for moments like the Eiffel Tower falling around you in 2011\u2019s MW3, or Shock and Awe\u2019s explosive ending from the original Modern Warfare to occur here, instead reserving all of the scenes of (limited) impact for cinematics. They're undeniably beautifully rendered, complete with lifelike character models, but they do make for more of a story you end up watching unfold, rather than feeling like you're an active participant in. It's another example of what the original No Russian in MW2 did so well \u2013 putting you at the centre of its atrocities \u2013 but instead, you're often kept at arm's length, resulting in an emotionally distant experience.

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