Video Game Review: Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3
The Good:
It's Call of Duty.The Bad:
12 year old kids screaming in your ear when you're playing online.OK so let me cut to the chase and let you know that this game is fucking awesome. Didn’t we expect it to be awesome though? Yes, we did. And that is exactly what makes it difficult to impress me, but they did just that. Even if it is more of the same, so what? The worse thing that can be done to a franchise like this is to change things for the sake of changing them. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Add to it, tweak it, refine it, but don’t change it. That’s where developers Infinity Ward and Sledgehammer Games got it right, they didn’t try to re-invent the wheel.
Visually, the game is breathtaking. I found myself at several points throughout the campaign mode just stopping to check out the exquisite background scenery, where it’s half-sunk aircraft carriers or falling down skyscrapers, this game looks like a movie. In fact, it looks better than many movies.
The music is excellent, as inspirational music plays at climactic moments in the game making the moments seem all the more heroic. The voice acting is top notch, and the characters are real and memorable. For those of you that have played previous Call of Duty games, there are many returning characters such as Price, Soap, and Makarov which gives the game an added sense of familiarity.
The Campaign mode was shorter than I expected it, I got through my first play through on Regular difficulty in just over 6 hours. Looking back, they crammed a whole shitload of exciting gameplay into that 6 hours. It was short and sweet, almost begging for you to play through again on higher difficulties. Upon completion of the Campaign mode, it immediately asks you to continue to Special Ops mode after the credits are done rolling.
Special Ops is a game within itself, which can no doubt keep you happily occupied for hours on end while you try to get the best scores and beat each quick à la carte mission on the highest difficult. I haven’t played through the Spec Ops mode completely yet but I can tell from the short time that I have spent on it that it’s fucking awesome.
Lastly, we have Online Multiplayer. This is why we buy Call of Duty isn’t it? This is why we play this game for countless hours into the middle of the night screaming at 12 year old kids online over Xbox Live or the PlayStation Network. The joy of fragging another human being preferably in the most humiliating way possible just to show how dominant you are. When it comes to video gaming, this is the highest form of competition for my money. Sure there are other games that have pretty slick multiplayer modes like Halo for instance, but nothing compares to Call of Duty.
This game is almost like having three games in one, on their own any one of these modes would give you hours and hours of satisfaction, but combined it makes the replay factor for Modern Warfare 3 off the charts.
In short, if you own an Xbox 360 or a PS3, you need to own Modern Warfare 3.
