Call of Duty games come so regularly each year that it can be tempting to see them as all being the same, one blob of shooting after another in an endless line.

Luckily, we’ll get a bad one every so often to clear up that misconception – Modern Warfare 3 might just be that duff entry. It boasts the weakest campaign of any COD game in years, a multiplayer component that feels like a major patch for MW2 and is only really redeemed by a sprightly Zombies mode that should take interesting shape over the next year.

A campaign of woe

Even before Modern Warfare 2 came out last year, reports were swirling that Activision planned to give it time to breathe properly by skipping a full COD release in 2023 and instead opting for a paid expansion with new maps and tweaks.

That clearly went out of the window, but you can very much see the bones of such a plan when you play Modern Warfare 3’s campaign, which is straightforwardly pretty rubbish.

It ushers old villain Makarov back on stage and has him pulling bad global strings once again, but in a runtime that barely scratches four hours, it has almost no time to set up dynamics and relationships properly.

The vast majority of its storytelling is done in extremely well-produced but somewhat cold cutscenes that bookend its missions, with only some late moments really putting you in the middle of the story.

The main spotlight falls on what Sledgehammer Games has dubbed “Open Combat missions” – these comprise around half of the campaign and are far less scripted than normal COD outings, with objectives that you can achieve as you like, except with weak stealth mechanics that will soon have you in the usual shooting gallery.

These missions are pretty dire, effectively just populating big maps with bots and making you work through them, and completely miss out on the scripted spectacle that the series delivers typically – the only one I really enjoyed saw me navigating up a tower block, but even then it could have benefitted from more scripted moments.

When the game goes back to its more familiar territory and has you working through more carefully designed levels, it’s immediately silly and fun again, which is no surprise.

Then, just as you’re starting to get into the swing of things, the credits roll after an unearned attempt at emotion, and it’s clear that there will be a Modern Warfare 4 to keep the fight going. It’s pretty poor stuff, and it’s hard to escape the idea that Open Combat missions were Activision’s way of cobbling together a “full” campaign with a quicker timeline than usual, which is a real bummer.

Indistinguishable visuals

If you’re coming to Modern Warfare 3 hoping for a nice visual bump over last year’s outing, you’ll also leave disappointed – Modern Warfare 3 looks and sounds practically identical to MW2.

This means that in the campaign, it’s nice and pretty enough, with good detail and impressively big environments at times, although things are pared back a little in multiplayer to account for the number of players it can host at once.

You get nice lighting effects, and night vision looks great in campaign missions, while weapons are as obsessively detailed as ever, but the re-use of locations from Verdansk in the campaign means that there aren’t enough truly new missions to explore.

When the team flexes its muscles and offers up an icy tundra or underwater ambush, things look great, so it’s a shame that the campaign can’t muster that level of visual flair too often.

Sound quality is solid once again, punchy and crunching when you’re in a gunfight, but I’m still longing for the return of the true spatial audio that MW2’s beta offered once upon a time.

That sort of precisely located audio seems to have had tech limitations because I can’t imagine another decent reason for its absence.

Multiplayer mayhem

There’s a school of thought that no one plays Call of Duty for its campaign anyway, though, so how is multiplayer this year? Well, it’s complicated.

MW3 comes with a full complement of remastered maps from the original Modern Warfare 2 (which is already a bit confusing) – it will also get access to some MW2 2022 maps in time.

These maps are good fun, although there are favourites that clearly outclass others in the roster, so it’s a bit weird that even the most hated have returned.

That means that those who didn’t actually play 2009’s game might discover that some of its maps are a bit mad by modern standards, which can get a bit annoying.

Modern Warfare 2’s mechanics are largely the same in terms of shooting, although some changes to movement have sped things up a lot, for better or worse.

This was very much what the hardcore community was demanding – a return to faster ways. Whether it’s actually better for casual players isn’t clear to me, and it makes multiplayer once again very unforgiving.

The old minimap system is back, emphasising silencers once again, and sliding is a powerful tool, too. With every weapon from last year’s game available to use and a selection of new ones to unlock and level up, there are absolutely loads of guns to master.

One change I can immediately say is fabulous is the ditching of weapon tuning, an insanely complex layer of customisation that made building guns in MW2 and Warzone way too fiddly – thank goodness we’re out of the woods on that front, now.

Still, it’s all a bit ho-hum – most of these changes feel pretty small, and that brings us back once more to the spectral idea that this could have been a $40 DLC pack for MW2 (or, frankly, a big patch to accompany one of its seasons) without anyone really blinking.

Zombies everywhere

The newest version of Zombies is probably the most interesting addition to the mix this year, now a fairly core part of the Call of Duty experience after starting life on the fringes.

Where the classic Zombies setup involves a long series of escalating rounds that you try to survive, this year’s is an open-world alternative based on the new Urzikstan map that Warzone players will explore in a few weeks.

It’s a sort of hybrid mashed together with last year’s DMZ extraction shooter experience, so anyone who sampled that will find a bunch of familiar elements.

You’ll choose an operator, drop into Urzikstan with missions to complete, and do so while navigating through and around hordes of the undead. Over the course of an hour, the threat escalates, and you work within a deadline to extract any permanent rewards you can scrounge from contracts and missions.

Different zones on the map hold different threat levels, offering immediately obvious changes in aggression and enemy density, and beetling around the map is great fun based on around 10 hours of exploration so far.

The close-quarters tension of round-based versions is lost a little, as is the density of easter eggs and level design, but this is counteracted by the extraction mechanics, which encourage last-moment escapes.

You also get a fun track of missions to complete, occasionally punctuated by a handful of cutscenes at points of major progress, and it’s a really nice distraction to sink into.

It’s also great to have a casual mode like this that doesn’t feature PvP (at this point, anyway) – not having to worry about other players sniping you and ruining your evening for no reason is a welcome tonic.

Whether this mode has real legs might come down to its support – DMZ was slightly under-nourished over the last year, with new missions but a paucity of reasons to keep playing. Zombies already have some great cosmetics to unlock. It’s a good start, so I’m hoping it can keep more momentum.

Verdict

Modern Warfare 3 feels emblematic of the tightrope that Call of Duty walks each year – it has to change enough to feel meaningful but come out to a brutally restrictive schedule.

This year, that balance hasn’t been struck, and MW3 feels as slight an update as we’ve had in ages, for all that many of the gameplay changes it makes in multiplayer are welcome. Its campaign is the real demonstration of that quick turnaround, and one can only hope that under its new Xbox ownership, the Call of Duty juggernaut is given more time to give its game the love it needs.