This year’s Call of Duty arrives in all kinds of controversy: reports of a rushed development, talks of expansion pack plans turned into a full-priced release, and an unusually structured campaign – without forgetting all that’s been said about Microsoft acquiring the game’s behemoth of a publisher, Activision. But November seems to mean Call of Duty one way or another, so let’s see what’s in store for us in the brand new Modern Warfare 3 – and what this all means for the battle royale Warzone 2.
Another year, another COD to fish
For the chronologically confused, here’s a little recap of why this game is called like a Call of Duty from twelve years ago. Infinity Ward, the original developers of the franchise, reinvented the franchise in 2007 with the sub-series Modern Warfare, to critical and commercial acclaim and reshaping the war shooter industry as a whole, convincing everyone to shift from the tired WW2 rehashes and moving onto a modern, more “relatable” warfare. The game’s immense success meant the title got two direct successors in the form of Modern Warfare 2 and 3, games you most likely remember from endless nights with your pals on Xbox Live back on Xbox 360. Activision eventually remastered the first game, on top of the campaign for its first sequel, but what followed in 2019, called Modern Warfare, was not that: it was effectively a complete reboot. A revamped engine, a new continuity, and tons of new mechanics, though with the return of some familiar faces. This was then followed up three years later by a sequel, simply called Modern Warfare 2, that once again brought various changes, such as the relaunch of the previous game’s immensely popular free-to-play battle royale mode, Warzone. There have been rumors and reports about the plan for 2023 being a major paid expansion pack with new MP maps and even some SP/co-op content, but true or not what we know is that Sledgehammer Games, of Advanced Warfare and Vanguard fame, were asked to create a direct sequel for Modern Warfare 2 in an extremely short timeframe – that is this year’s Modern Warfare 3, not to be confused with the original game with such a name released in 2011.
In an era of free-to-play games launching with barely any content and then expanding throughout the years, Call of Duty feels like a relic of a different era, but in the best of ways: alongside Halo and to a lesser consistency Battlefield, nobody else seems to manage to deliver a bombastic single player campaign, co-op modes and a packed multiplayer suite at virtually every installment – and unlike said IPs, Activision’s franchise somehow manages to do so every year. The developer costs to do this are astronomical: with 3 main developer teams (Infinity Ward, Treyarch of the Black Ops series fame, and Sledgehammer Games, who’s doing the game that’s being reviewed here) alternating each other and another dozen or so support studios on the case, with reports of devastating crunches to make the ever-so-looming November deadline every single time.
As mentioned, however, a much shorter development time meant that various changes had to be made to how all 3 macro areas of the game work. At its core, the biggest one is immediately noticeable when booting the game: for the first time, there is a unified launcher for the last two games, perhaps giving credibility to those “used to be an expansion pack” rumors. The immediate downside is that, while different packages for the two campaigns, the co-op modes and such can be chosen to be installed separately, the base package to play even just the multiplayer alone is quite gigantic, with over 200GB required if you would like to test out everything this new episode has to offer. If you’re on an Xbox Series S with less than 500GB of usable space or a throttled Internet bandwidth, this game asks for quite the commitment to it.
Hard times
Before diving into the various main areas of the game, let’s get the obvious out of the way: for the reasons explained above, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 (2023) is easily the most iterative episode of the franchise yet. This also means that on a technical level, not much has changed from last year’s game: on the surface, the game’s proprietary engine (famously having traces that date back to good old Quake 2) has not received any meaningful update, with only slight adjustments to controls, general weapon balance and so on. That also means that Modern Warfare 2’s many features are back. Framerates up to 120fps, crossplay between all platforms, keyboard and mouse support, a FOV slider, tons of accessibility options, split-screen, a ridiculously customizable audio setup – you name it. Together with Fortnite, Call of Duty has grown to be one of the better games in terms of giving players accessibility options and customizing their experience to just about any aspect, and I feel it to be important to underline what many of us might take for granted. A fast-paced competitive shooter like Call of Duty may sound daunting for many newcomers, but I applaud the many developers behind it for making it as accessible as possible.
With all the introductions set aside, let’s finally talk about the 3 main game areas, starting from the single-player component: the campaign. Picking up from the story of last year’s Modern Warfare 2 (a game that had an enjoyable but extremely safe and hardly memorable set of missions), we once again follow Task Force 141, trying to stop a global catastrophe. Old school fans will be happy to know that the villain this time is no other than Makarov, who finally finds his way into this rebooted trilogy. With plenty of other classic characters and locations to boot and various dramatic moments, after this many Modern Warfare games, I believe everyone knows what kind of plot to expect. Obviously going to avoid spoilers, but I can certainly hint at the kind of approach this game has: it’s very much non-stop action, either stealth or guns blazing. Whereas the original Modern Warfare trilogy and to a much lesser extent the previous two installments of this reboot series flirted with a lot of moral gray areas of war, torture, and colonialism, this new game feels content with pretty much only offering spectacle and little to think about or understand. To some, that may be a positive change, but for a war series that has had throughout the years some surprisingly thought-provoking anti-war messaging, I believe we’ve lost out a bit here.
A different story
The campaign isn’t even the linear bombastic cinematic experience we learned to expect virtually every year from Call of Duty at this point – in fact, almost half of the story is played through the brand new “open combat” missions. These, unfortunately, are what I suspected after the first campaign gameplay reveal the developers did a few months back. The player is parachuted into a gated mini open world, where they get to freely explore the surrounding areas and buildings, loot their heart out, kill clusters of brainless AI enemies around, and complete loosely connected sub-objectives. Sounds familiar? Well, it should, because this is basically what players have been doing in Warzone and DMZ. It’s painfully evident that the developers did not have enough time to build the usual explosive campaign made of cinematic moments and memorable setpieces, filling tons of gaps with these rushed filler missions. Having all kinds of tools, such as all kinds of explosives, ropes, and more for players to figure out their approach certainly sounds great, but rather than a well-crafted stealth sequence these feel like clearing a camp in any Ubisoft game: formulaic at best, boring at worst. For players looking to play this sort of experience, last year’s Call of Duty offered the extraction shooter mode, DMZ, which has tons of this, with even other players joining the fight for or against us from time to time. Having this repurposed into much more limited campaign segments just feels… wrong.
Getting to the end of this bizarre hybrid campaign won’t take too long either, with length moving around 5-6 hours with some moderate exploration for optional collectibles and whatnot, with faster players easily able to cut an hour or two based on their play style. Completing the 14 missions listed grants various unlocks for multiplayer as well: calling cards, bonus XP, new operators (eg. skins) for the shootouts, and then some. You can even find specific, secret weapon stashes that even give unlockable arms for the multiplayer mode – a pretty nifty incentive for fans of the competitive experience to try their hand at this campaign, as uninspired as it may be. Ultimately, it’s a bit of a weird campaign. The core gameplay of Call of Duty is great enough to carry the action, and getting the option to tackle missions with true freedom of stealth, gadgets, and whatnot is truly a welcome idea. But Metal Gear Solid or Splinter Cell this ain’t, with AI and other core systems not quite refined enough to make these open-ended areas work as well as one would hope, with the linear missions to being on the short and forgettable end and a story that goes pretty much nowhere and rolls the credits before it could hit a potentially interesting note. Hardcore fans will probably find enough fan service and shootouts to have some good hours, but I can’t see this campaign becoming a cult classic by any means.
The unfamiliar undead
Now, let’s move onto the second core area of Modern Warfare 3: the return of the Zombies mode. For those not in the know, Zombies is an immensely popular single-player and co-op experience, originally envisioned by Treyarch and one that’s become a staple for the franchise for many installments, especially in the Black Ops sub-series of Call of Duty games. These maps, throughout the years, were a genius and addictive mix of ingenious expansive level designs, convoluted easter egg hunts, and some of the most satisfying power creep in any videogame ever via power-ups and upgradeable weapons, all surrounded by what may initially appear like a bog-standard endless zombie horde shooter. With the game’s lore involving all kinds of horrors, time travel, and more, there are sizeable chunks of the Call of Duty fanbase that buy these games solely for this mode, with even a large and dedicated speedrunning community that’s been competing on these maps for many years now. While I am more of a multiplayer person, I can’t deny how exhilarating some of these zombie experiences are, and some of my favorite Call of Duty memories go back to exploring and understanding the quirks of these deviously complex maps with my gaming buddies. And this year, despite the game’s core being last year’s Infinity Ward with Sledgehammer’s additions to it, it is Treyarch themselves tackling this revamped Zombies mode.
Sounds very cool, right? Well, forget everything I just said, because this year’s Zombies can barely even be called such. It’s not (only) down to the quality, but the game structure itself. Remember last year’s fairly enjoyable but utterly safe DMZ mode in Modern Warfare 2? That extraction shooter addition to the franchise that tried to blast into this subgenre’s scene with much-limited success? Well, that serves as the base for this year’s Zombies, seemingly put together by Treyarch themselves on very short notice. Meet Operation Deadbolt, introducing the rather generic plot of arms dealer Viktor Zakhaev getting his hands on a mysterious substance that, as a result of a shootout with the police, gets thrown to the ground, immediately turning everyone around into zombies and instantly infecting the whole of Urzikstan, a future Warzone map with very obvious Middle Eastern inspirations. With this conveniently battle royale-esque open world area closed up to the contagion, it’s up to the players to jump in and try to extract some loot. This happens in shared world maps in the vein of last year’s DMZ mode, as opposed to the classic 1-4 player experiences. Here, up to 8 players of 3 members will enter the map in random locations, trying to loot and survive on their own or helping out each other in clearing objectives. To help meet up better, there’s a protected hub of sorts in the middle of the map as well, where folks can meet and upgrade their loot without the impelling danger of the undead. There are a few story missions to play out, but in the end, it’s all about the survival and extraction shooting action.
What’s in your head? Not Zombies
Not even the round-based structure of the classic Zombies experience is retained. Instead, the massive area of Urzikstan has areas of three different threat levels (fourth, counting the level 0 ones), which essentially determines the strength of regular zombies there and what kind of powered-up enemies we’ll find there. Level 1 areas feature zombies that go down with a couple of bullets regardless and minibosses inside of certain buildings that are quite feasible even solo with starter weapons, but going upwards on the difficulty scale it becomes quite mandatory to power up and to team up. For the former, plenty of Zombies mainstays are back: buying weapons off walls, Pack-A-Punch, perks, and even the iconic mystery boxes with their creepy music. But in truth, power creep seems far less relevant than before, given how the giant open world gives players a lot more space to maneuver, hide, and escape from zombies (who are dumb enough not to use windows and walk around to the next door instead, with larger enemies even needing double doors to be able to enter a building), with even vehicles that can be used to very easily mow down waves and waves of undead. For this reason, the difficulty seems all over the place. But again, players build their own experience: like in DMZ and to an extent Warzone, players can find random challenges to complete, strongholds to conquest, and more, so everyone gets to pick and choose their battles as opposed to the more linear progression of standard Zombies experiences. This, of course, also means that there are no real points of interest or specific events that players shall experience, making this mode more of an open-world scavenger hunt with zombies rather than the carefully crafted undead campaigns we’re used to.
The progression, too, is that of the extraction shooter formula found in DMZ. Players can use some of their stashed weapons or enter “nude” (equipment-wise anyway) into Urzikstan, hoping to find good weapons and loot around. With the difficulty of the game area not evolving but being based on where players go, the only real pressure to move is the presence of zombies themselves and the timer: players have an hour to grab as much loot as they desire, then use one of the extraction points to leave by waiting for a helicopter to get them. This is usually accompanied by a large wave of zombies attracted by all the commotion, but given how easy it is to chew the undead by abusing windows, vehicles, and other equipment, it’s a fairly trivial exit all in all. By extracting good loot, players can add great weaponry to the stash, which in turn will allow them to pick already powered-up equipment for the next run. Or at least you’d think so, as multiple weapons and upgrades just seem to get lost once extracted – unclear to me if that’s a bug or an intended feature, but makes for a disappointing surprise when booting the next round for sure. There are even a handful of slots for insuring certain items, just like in DMZ: normally, when players die, they lose the equipment they didn’t manage to extract. These insured items stay with us, however, making it less risky to bring OP weaponry into a run. All in all, it’s a zombified DMZ, a game mode that was moderately enjoyable but that had very little lasting value or replayability. It simply is not Zombies, and by doing so the developers and publisher just open themselves up to a lot of easy criticism. As it stands, this mode is a fun little romp for a couple of rounds with your friend, but even though there are a few funny easter eggs and callbacks, it lacks the creativity, replayability, and depth that people expect from this mode. And with multiple animations, hitbox glitches, and whatnot that I encountered, it doesn’t even have the pristine gameplay polish that people expect from Call of Duty.
Competition time
Fortunately, not everything’s all doom and gloom, because the multiplayer suite in this game is in many ways the best of the franchise in various years. It does have a handful of catches, however. First off, the base is quite literally last year’s game, for better or worse it may be. The TTK has been tweaked upwards (good!), the movement feels somewhat smoother (good!), and the map design is frankly leagues beyond last year’s game (very good!). The reason is very simple: all maps in 2023’s Call of Duty are no other than remakes from 2009’s Modern Warfare 2, not to be confused with the name of the 2022 episode. As such, welcome back the likes of Highrise, Invasion, Favela, Rust, and Scrapyard, with a handful of additional paths, the addition of doors, and of course, the gameplay evolving a good bunch thanks to the dolphin dives, the vaulting, and the various equipment that was not around when 2009’s installment invaded our consoles. While I wouldn’t say these maps aged as gracefully as the ones seen in, say, Black Ops 2, there’s a sense of nostalgia and simplicity to them that trump the new era of Modern Warfare maps. There are still a handful of maps with lots of sightlines and camping spots, but it’s a huge step up from the official maps in most of the recent Call of Duty games since they abandoned the 3-lane format. There’s certainly a level of irony in the fact that this game doesn’t feature a single new map, but the level design of these multiplayer arenas was so much better at Call of Duty studios back in the day that by merely reproducing them with minor tweaks makes for a better experience than virtually any Call of Duty map released from 2019 onwards. Having such fun maps makes Modern Warfare 3 (2023) multiplayer a worthwhile time, but this speaks volumes of how poorly designed recent levels have been. I guess this is one of those aspects the Call of Duty developers need to go back to the drawing board and figure out why the old maps just have a better flow to them.
As per franchise tradition, much of the player agency boils down to the vastly customizable load-outs, which once again allow them to pick up to two weapons (customized via the usual Gunsmith), various equipment, perks, and so on. This year’s episode introduces two major elements of customization to last year’s formula: vests and gears. These effectively substitute certain perks and serve as drastic alterations to the playstyle, allowing for example to carry 4 tactical grenades as opposed to having 1/2 per type, use two primary weapons, have an extra perk, and so on. While this allows for the biggest customization of classes in years, I still think it’s just Pick 10 with extra steps – that system truly allowed for all kinds of combinations of weapons, grenades, perks, and more, whereas here it’s still confined to very specific options. More annoyingly, many important perks, weapons, grenades, and more are locked behind the brand-new, slightly controversial Armory Unlocks. These are challenges that can only be picked up one by one once the player gets above level 25 (the levels have been reset this year, as always), and ask for the completion of various daily challenges to unlock the specific item. They can’t be stacked, and with only 3 dailies per day plus the bonus objective, it can take a needlessly long time to unlock all of the 58 things in this weird system. Sure, players can focus on what they desire and don’t take long to unlock the key items of their builds, but I had multiple occasions where one of the daily challenges for the day required using a specific item locked behind the Armory Unlocks themselves. That means I could no longer complete the dailies and access the bonus objectives to unlock the object that I needed to use for the challenge in the first place! It’s just needlessly grindy and convoluted for the sake of it, and I don’t feel it adds any positive challenge or variety to the progression.
Shoot Bros.
There are plenty of playlists to choose from at the launch of this brand-new Modern Warfare 3. From the unmissable classics like team deathmatch, free for all, domination, search & destroy, and so on, all the way to the big War mode, which features large-scale warfare with the use of vehicles like you’d find in Call of Duty Warzone – or like a miniaturized Battlefield experience. As has been the case from the first Modern Warfare reboot in 2019, this mode is chaotic as all hell, with explosions, rockets, snipers, and even killstreaks. As a casual mode, it’s certainly enjoyable, but as popular Warzone also is, I still think Call of Duty is a game that excels at close-quarters combat, with the movement options, snappy aiming, weapon behaviour, and even the controller-specific aim assist making those experiences the most polished and exhilarating. When it comes to vehicle usage, sniping over large distances, and such, it feels like lagging behind games like Battlefield. But I digress: the game offers plenty of modes in multiplayer. And alongside the aforementioned class customization, of course, the killstreaks are back – they can be substituted for pointbreaks as well if players desire (so that instead of only kills counting towards the rewards, people can use assists, objective captures, and whatnot to get them). Aside from some highly useful elements behind locked behind the not-so-positive addition of the Armory Unlocks, such as the care package, the system works more or less as expected. There’s even the nuke for skilled players who manage to connect 25 kills in a match without dying, wiping away the whole field into a nuclear explosion. It’s cheesy, it’s gimmicky – but it remains satisfying to pull off, much less so to die to it as an unrelated victim.
And what about Warzone 2? Unlike last year’s Modern Warfare 2, this time the game doesn’t relaunch its Warzone client with a sequel – makes sense, after all, considering this is a unified launcher with the previous game. And, much like with previous games, the launch of this new Call of Duty isn’t accompanied by a new season of Warzone, so the Halloween-esque horror-themed Season 6 and its Battle Pass are still ongoing as I write these words, with the first season of the Modern Warfare 3 era starting sometime later in December. We know it’s gonna have a new Warzone map and, for now, not much else. And what about DMZ, Infinity Ward’s extraction shooter mode from last year’s game? Gone, effectively replaced by the “zombified DMZ” which is what this game calls Zombies. If you put the list together like that, it does seem like a complete Call of Duty experience for sure: a campaign, the usual co-op mode in the form of Zombies, and the all-new multiplayer. But taken individually, there are some glaring flaws and omissions from all main modes, as vastly explained above. And while it retains last year’s game’s positive features, it also doesn’t solve most of its issues. One would be the UI, which somehow became even more cluttered and confusing, now that the launcher holds dozens of different sub-areas for the many game modes, many with their hidden little loading screens even. And despite this being effectively an addition to Modern Warfare 2, there’s unfortunately no crossover between the playlists for the games. It would have been awesome to have a single, gigantic playlist that would grow to like 40 maps by the end of Modern Warfare 3’s life, but instead, there’s still a separation that means it’s either last year’s game content or this, with the new modes therefore again limited to a handful of maps. The big War maps, in particular, would have drastically benefited from a higher rotation instead of being merely two. All in all, I think everyone would have been better off if this game was an expansion pack, vastly increasing the variety of last year’s game and tweaking its mechanics, rather than separating the player base again and slapping two extremely rushed single-player/co-op experiences on top of it to justify the full price.
A lot to unpack
From a technical standpoint, there’s generally not too much to point out or to complain about. The game’s graphics and features are virtually unchanged from last year, featuring the same high-quality assets, and excellent usage of lights and shadows – with HDR and 120hz modes supported, should your monitor or TV allow it. Using the 120fps mode in the game’s biggest game modes (such as Zombies) does noticeably drop the resolution, creating a lot of jaggies in the background, but for a fast-paced shooter like this, I’d go for the highest available framerate regardless. Choosing the graphics mode, the game caps at 60fps and features a higher resolution for maximum visual fidelity. Other than that, expect the by-now franchise-standard features: crossplay between all versions (Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 5, and PC), support for mouse and keyboard, highly customizable HUD, controls, and much more. With the game featuring game modes for up to dozens of players and managing lots of moving elements at times (multiple vehicles, possibly hundreds of zombies, and then some), there is a quite strong netcode in place, though there’s also some annoying lag spikes – not to mention the cheating problem that, for yet another year, has not been solved. There’s even an annoying bug that kept plaguing me in my multiplayer matches, where in seemingly random moments the game would freeze for a second or two, then load up the Loadout screen out of nowhere. I didn’t have a keyboard plugged in and there were no buttons on the controller to bring that menu up, so it’s a straight-up glitch that made me lose a few firefights in the most annoying of fashions. But other than that, it’s been a moderately smooth experience, coming off the strong backbone of last year’s game, but without enough news to drastically alter your opinion of last year’s multiplayer suite, positive or negative it may be.
All in all, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 (2023) is, at its best, a safe and minimal upgrade over last year’s episode and, at its worst, a visibly rushed, somewhat poorly designed, and unbalanced collection of game modes. Sure, it builds upon the excellent technical and mechanical background from last year’s game, but much more worryingly: it offers a short Frankenstein monster of a hybrid campaign with much of it being essentially repurposed Warzone content; a Zombies mode that also feels like an unbalanced and unpolished rehash of things we’ve seen in said battle royale mode and last year’s DMZ; lastly, with multiplayer limiting itself to fairly superficial (if generally positive) changes, alongside merely introducing remakes of old maps. On the flip side, it at least manages to carry over the many quality-of-life features of Modern Warfare 2 (2022), bringing generally positive tweaks to the multiplayer and the “new old” maps, that are remakes from 2009’s Modern Warfare 2 – all this make this the safest, yet most fun Call of Duty multiplayer experience in years, which is the true saving grace of this entire package. If that is solely what you’re looking for, this game will be your jam, but to those searching for a compelling campaign or zombie mode, I can’t recommend purchasing this game at all. For a full-price game, the quality and quantity of new content are simply not on par with what people learned to expect from this franchise, making this episode only for the hardcore fans who can hardly avoid hopping onto the latest game. At this point, I can only hope that, under Microsoft management, Activision will reorganize its Call of Duty cycle a bit and avoid releasing such painfully rushed and disappointing entries in the future – especially considering the last time they shipped a polished, feature-complete Call of Duty day one without enormous cuts in some areas dates back to 2017, six whole games ago.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3
Played on
Xbox Series X
PROS
- Somehow, there's a Call of Duty on shelf this year as well
- Multiple positive changes to the multiplayer
- Has it all: crossplay, 120fps, split-screen, keyboard and mouse support, etc.
CONS
- Rushed, disappointing campaign
- Rushed, disappointing Zombies that is literally a reskinned DMZ
- Only old maps in multiplayer
- Doesn't solve almost any of the flaws of last year's game, despite iterating on it
- No Warzone 2 content or new Battle Pass until December
