Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 Reviews

This year's Call of Duty is a mixed bag. Series veterans looking for a great multiplayer experience will find a lot to love thanks to the game's faithful recreation of some of the franchise’s best maps and excellent gunplay. However, Modern Warfare III's campaign is one of the worst in the series’ history.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III recycles old ideas in a stale package that is a downright slog for most of the experience. It commits the ultimate sin of being boring, and it does not bode well for the future of a franchise that, for the last 20 years, has been the pinnacle of popular FPS games.

It was always a question whether Activision could get MW3 to the gold standard in just one short year, unfortunately, the verdict is in and it's a resounding no.

Even with an embarrassingly bad single-player Campaign, the Multiplayer and Zombies experiences are enough to cement this game as one of the franchise's greats.

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 isn't an outright bad game, but it's also not a particularly good one. Taken on its own, it's a slightly above average first person shooter with a poor campaign, but in context, you can see how hurried and limited in scope this game really is. The multiplayer is effectively a classic map pack, Zombies and Open Combat Missions are game modes built within the existing Warzone map, and the campaign's pacing and story come up short. It all adds up to a lacklustre experience and even a sense that Call of Duty is at risk of losing its identity.

Modern Warfare 3 is quite a tough game to judge. Its campaign is good old Call of Duty fun, even if it's too short, and the game's multiplayer is a great time - built on the solid foundations of two different versions of Modern Warfare 2. However, Zombies is a complete miss this year, and the admittedly-great multiplayer is based on past triumphs more than anything else. If you love playing some CoD multiplayer every year then MW3 is another solid entry in that regard, but if you usually stick to one of the other modes or are looking for a more complete Call of Duty experience, we don't recommend picking this one up just yet. Either wait for a price drop, or bide your time in anticipation of its eventual arrival on Xbox Game Pass!

That's really the story for Modern Warfare 3 across the board. The campaign is made up of Warzone content, the multiplayer is comprised of maps that are 14 years old, and the Zombies mode uses a map that will be recycled for the battle royale. $70 is a high asking price for what's here, but those that do decide to take the plunge will find the best Call of Duty multiplayer experience in years and an intriguing open world Zombies mode that, while not quite as fun as the classic round-based Zombies maps, can still dish out memorable moments with friends.

Having exhausted essentially every potential setting, the Call of Duty franchise has been in its reboot phase over the past few years with a new take on the Modern Warfare trilogy. Despite these fresh takes never reaching the same heights as the games they’re reviving, they’ve been fun enough to warrant appreciation by both new and returning fans.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 doesn't do anything new, but it also doesn't do anything wrong.

While the multiplayer is fun like everything else the experience isn’t perfect, in addition to maps that limit freedom in some aspects there is a major issue with spawns. The game has a tendency to spawn you in the vicinity of enemies with no team protection in front of you, this leads to spawn abuse and a lot of unfair deaths just moments after you regenerate. I have no doubt this problem will be addressed in the future though as this year they really seem to be listening to the community at large. The Type 95 assault rifle was considered overpowered so they nerfed it, the maps weren’t big enough and didn’t have enough access points so they released a huge open sniping map and another with doorways and alleys with very few choke points. It really is refreshing to see developers change aspects of their game and admit small mistakes on such a regular basis on a quest for continued improvements and here’s hoping the trend continues.

MW3 picks up right after the end of MW2.  In fact it picks up right after the scene where you threw that knife through the enemies eye.  If you’ve never played a Modern Warfare game, the story may be difficult to follow, but like any good action experience, the story is beside the point. The MW3 storyline, however, serves as perfect backdrop for all the set pieces the game tosses your way, which bombard you from start to finish. Choice is practically non-existent and downtime is minimal. The game funnels you to your next encounter efficiently via on-screen waypoints (usually in the form of the word ‘follow’ above someone’s head) and the pace of the game is frantic the whole time. Most of the time you feel like a very small part of a larger situation and it makes the scope of the game feel really wide. Some of the story in the middle of the campaign feels tacked on, but the end result of the game will be satisfying to anyone, whether they follow the series or not. You can blow through the single player campaign in 5 or 6 hours, but the multiplayer and special ops modes could keep ‘completionists’ busy for months.

When tasked with reviewing an entertainment juggernaut like the Call of Duty series, it's difficult to win. If you lavish too much praise on the game then you are accused of being a mere fanboy, or worse, of being at the beck and call of Activision’s evil empire (note: actual chance of them being an evil empire is minimal). A low score creates the opposite effect, with our entire staff suddenly being fanboys for some other shooter series or just being controversial for the sake of a few web...

Despite its flaws, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 takes the fantastic series we’ve come to love over the years and iterates on it with great success. The multiplayer is hands-down the best it has ever been, with more features, more modes and a ton of new levels and ways to interact via Call of Duty Elite. The singleplayer campaign and Spec Ops mode add value to the overall package, creating something that may not be perfect, but is too damn addicting to pass up.