If the 2019 Call of Duty: Modern Warfare reboot and last year’s sequel were triumphant comebacks, then first impressions of Modern Warfare III’s campaign are a bit more hit-and-miss. The band is still back together, with heroes Price, Soap, Ghost and Gaz all seeing action, with strong support from fan favourites Farah and Keller. What’s more, Modern Warfare III resurrects CoD’s most legendary villain, Makarov. But where Modern Warfare II went big in the style of a Mission Impossible movie, with each dramatic chase and set-piece topping the one before, its sequel seems to be working on a tighter budget, backing up the industry rumours that it started off as an expansion pack.
The big surprise is how the campaign plays out. Roughly half the missions follow the usual Call of Duty template, where you’re hustled along from one objective to the next, blasting every gun-toting goon that wanders into line of sight. There’s plenty of chatter from the rest of the gang, with the action broken up by epic moments and nail-biting battles designed to make you feel like you’re in the middle of a high-tech action thriller.
The rest of the campaign focuses on what Activision calls ‘open combat missions’, where you’re given a wider stretch of ground to cover and a series of objectives you can tackle in almost any order. Troops on patrol will do their best to stop you, with reinforcements always just around the corner, but search around and you’ll find supply drops crammed with armour plating, special weapons and a range of useful gizmos. Much of this will be more familiar from Call of Duty: Warzone and its DMC missions than anything we’ve seen before in single-player CoD.
The freedom is both intoxicating and mildly disconcerting, as you learn to sneak and blast your way around the maps without some commander telling you where to go and what to do. There are some real thrills to be had in choosing how to deal with an objective, then improvising as your plan goes horribly wrong. Yet there’s also a feeling that the lack of orchestration changes the pace and makes the action less exciting, partly because the AI, while smart and perfectly responsive, is never as good at creating all-action moments as a talented game designer.
It's also a bit annoying that a lack of checkpointing can mean tackling huge chunks of these missions repeatedly, even if it helps that you can keep equipment you’ve discovered in previous attempts and add them to your loadout for the next one.
Strong missions, silly storylines
There are plenty of times when the new mix of classic CoD and open exploration works, with some cracking missions like the extraction of one of Makarov’s lieutenants from a crumbling high rise, picking your way through armed patrols and sneaky traps. Another mission in the fog-bound arctic tundra features tense face-offs with enemy snipers and some brilliant set-piece battles.
Call of Duty’s gunplay remains as good as ever, and you’ll get a chance to play with some fantastic weapons, including chunky rifles blessed with thermal scopes and a crossbow that fires exploding bolts. Sure, it all gets a bit ridiculous when your team is telling you to keep a low profile while you’re busy blowing enemies to smithereens, but then subtlety and realism have never been strong points.
Yet while there’s plenty of fun to be had, the new campaign falls short in two key areas. Firstly, you can tackle it in six to eight hours, and more accomplished players will have it cracked in less. Secondly, the story being told doesn’t quite add up. It doesn’t have the big soap-opera twists and turns of Modern Warfare and Modern Warfare II, but it also wastes key characters and throws in ridiculous alliances that, even to our heroes, make no sense at all. There’s a sense here of fan service gone wrong; that the creators feel pulling in your favourite heroes and villains is enough, even if you don’t have any clear idea of what you’re going to do with them.
The result is an oddly schizophrenic CoD campaign that’s fun while it lasts, but only intermittently hits the highs of its immediate predecessors. We’ll wait to play more of the multiplayer and the much-anticipated return of Zombies mode, but right now Modern Warfare III looks like a decent-enough Call of Duty, when we were hoping for another all-time great.
