Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III - Campaign Impressions: Lost for words

I've already shared my reservations and concerns about this game as a whole, as part of some impressions following checking out the beta for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III. This is a game, at least in the multiplayer sense, that relies on nostalgia unlike anything we've ever seen in the series. It solely consists of remade maps from the brilliant 2009 Modern Warfare 2, and on top of that, due to its parity with 2022's Modern Warfare II, seemingly isn't bringing that many new weapons as the majority are coming from last year's instalment. Needless to say, the countless rumours and reports that suggested that this year's Call of Duty was supposed to be a premium expansion for last year's game seem ever more apparent right now than they did when Modern Warfare III was revealed to the world at the end of the summer.

This design style also means that there is a huge amount of pressure on the Zombies and the campaign. Alike the multiplayer, we'll have more thoughts on the Zombies when it arrives next week as part of the full launch, but Activision has decided once again to put the campaign in the hands of fans early, graciously providing eight days to chip away at it before the full launch occurs. For a full-sized campaign that's quite a kind time span, but in Modern Warfare III, Activision frankly could've given us three days of Early Access instead, because this story is one of the shortest to date and arguably the lowest point in the entire Call of Duty series narrative. As a near 20 year veteran of the series, this makes me immeasurably disappointed and frustrated.

Glossing over the fact that Call of Duty itself has grown to become a UI and accessibility nightmare, with a launch sequence that would make even Makarov beg for mercy, this campaign is one of the biggest steps back for the series. The action-packed set-piece heavy narrative that always made Call of Duty stories feel like an action movie that you are playing has instead been replaced by what can best be described as Warzone Zombies. The much highlighted Open Combat Missions are simply a farce. It's a fancy way of saying that a mission takes place in a small sandbox that is often a location from a Warzone or multiplayer map. Here you have regular objectives but now have the opportunity to explore and complete them as you see fit. When hearing about this plan, I hoped it would resemble something similar to Rebellion's open locations used in the Sniper Elite games, but it's far from that.

The objectives are mostly 'destroy this thing' or 'interact with this thing', there's barely any major set-piece moments that would make Michael Bay's jaw drop, unless you have the creativity and interest to create them yourself. To add to this, unless you have a desire to explore each of these mini sandboxes to find new weapon blueprints to use in the campaign, the actual objective for a mission might take you 10 minutes to complete. Those rumours that you can blast through this story in four hours are absolutely correct, and considering the state of the frankly miserable looting options (which have no place in a Call of Duty campaign anyhow) make me want to exit the mission quicker than continue exploring it.

Then there's the enemy AI. I've played a lot of Call of Duty and to me it's a ritual to play each new story on the hardest difficulty from the get-go. Usually, this means a marginally challenging experience at times, but in Modern Warfare III, it feels like the enemies have no clue what they're doing. They stand still in open areas and shoot at you like gargoyles, they're inaccurate and dumb, and even when you do something wild and draw the attention of the entire sandbox level, they barely do anything to respond other than sprint at you like Zombies. Again, this doesn't feel like a Call of Duty campaign, it feels like a Warzone campaign, and with that you don't get the brutal enemy AI we've seen in the past, you get the stupid and quite frankly inconvenient enemy AI instead.

This isn't helped by the frankly miserable stealth missions that basically have an automatic failure system in place if you are spotted by enemies. Unlike every other mission, in these ones, if you're detected the enemies will gun you down with an accuracy and prejudice that would make Verdansk's cheating community jealous.

But at the least the narrative makes you want to keep going, right? Kind of. The storyline isn't terrible, but it's so badly held back by every other part of this campaign experience that I can't possibly talk about it as a highlight. The story only seems to advance at the start and end of a level, and then in the cutscenes in between. Everything you do in the Open Combat Missions is more of a means to an end rather than a narrative driving point, and Activision doesn't seem to care about that. Plus, as the Call of Duty storyline is years in the making at this point, with narrative beats that have been explored in former seasons of past titles, there are elements of this story that will not make sense to anyone but the most avid of Call of Duty fans. This must be what it's like to be a partial Marvel fan.

Talking about the Open Combat Missions, In one of the earliest missions the task was to destroy three helicopters spread over a map. Within five minutes of exploring, I found a stealth bomber killstreak hidden away, and proceeded to target the hugely impactful killstreak across the entire level and on a path to destroy two of the helicopters in one go. It worked. To me, this says absolutely everything that needs to be said about how Activision has built and designed this campaign and these Open Combat Missions.

If all of this wasn't enough, the game even has a host of performance and bug issues. I've seen a multitude of visual errors that massively affect the immersion, had a few different crashes for one reason or the other, and even sat through entire cutscenes where the audio didn't play. It's remarkable that a brand with the financial backing of Call of Duty can't even give us an experience that fundamentally works.

This to me, is not a new instalment in the Call of Duty series, it's an afterthought. It should've been a premium DLC for last year's game at best, because the poor implementation of PlayStation Trophies, the way the Achievements are listed on Xbox, the fact that you need around 250GB of empty space on your device to not only download this year's game but also to keep last year's title (but not 2019's Modern Warfare) downloaded too, everything about this game feels wrong to me.

The power of nostalgia cannot save this game from being valued at £60 and Activision should be ashamed of themselves for selling it at this price point. If Ubisoft didn't think that Assassin's Creed Mirage should cost the full £60 price tag, despite that bringing an entire new open world to explore with an interesting story and fresh-feeling gameplay elements, the fact that Activision believes that this game is worth that much of your hard-earned cash is ridiculous. Maybe the Zombies will massively surprise me, or perhaps the multiplayer will make me so stricken with memories from the late 2000s that I will want to rescind that statement. But I highly, highly doubt it.