As sure as winter follows fall, the final quarter of the year sees another in the Call of Duty franchise pop onto shelves giving fans more of what they want but with new maps, weapons, story and so on. Having been badly burnt with MW2 (where I found myself a paying beta tester for the massive problems with that game) I was wary but was able to get it cheap as supermarkets tried to lowball each other to get volume in place of profits. Part of the reason for this was that, although short, I do enjoy the MW campaigns and, wary of spoilers, this is where I started.
The campaign continues the OTT plot and takes the same model of playing several characters across various global settings. OK the device of making Makarov all-powerful and central doesn't totally work but what does work is the delivery. The game play allows for some flexibility within the "rails" on which you're on; I found I could rush direct or flank and the layout of the levels. It is gloriously over the top and it is like being in an action movie. The voice action is manly and urgent, the soundtrack is loud and dramatic and the overall effect is that you really feel you're in the middle of a Michael Bay action movie. It is very short if you're only buying the game for the campaign, but I found it enjoyable and very satisfying as a game. It manages to be incredibly cinematic but yet I never felt like I was a tiny part of something bigger (like I did with the World at War campaign) and instead it was focused, with skirmishes having global meaning and urgency but yet being tight and contained. It doesn't all work in terms of plots and events but I enjoyed it a great deal and the ending was a great build-up to a really satisfying conclusion.
The Spec Ops part of the game remains a little stuck on in terms of the missions – on hardest setting some are near impossible without 2 players but mostly you'll get through them easily enough and their standalone nature means they are not that engaging. Massively better though is the addition of the Survival mode wherein you try and hang on through waves of increasingly difficult enemies. I enjoyed this mode a great deal and it was the one I played most – the supernatural force of the zombies in the Treyarch games (which Infinity Ward have ripped off here) never appealed to me because it felt like just battling the tide. However here the "human" foes armed with guns and moving tactically (as opposed to rushing mindlessly) made me feel I could outsmart and out play them. I'd have loved the fun of 4 players in a party doing it but it does work best with 2 players in terms of the challenge and gameplay.
This leaves the multiplayer – a game mode that has eaten so many days of my time on COD4 that I would be embarrassed to write it down! I have noticed that over the consecutive games I have put less and less time into it, to the point now that the game is social for me – I play it with friends but never alone. Even with friends though MW3 is a weirdly frustrating experience. The spawns are terrible and even in domination (a very stable game mode) you'll appear in front and behind of people all the time – I guess it balances out but it is still annoying. The game play is frantic but not in a good way, streaks are difficult and (with the spawns) deaths are often random. I liked some of the changes to the pointstreaks but too much felt like a step-back from Black Ops – the theatre mode is terrible, the lack of caps/defs for objective games is poor, but these are all details, it is the gameplay that matters. Sadly it is too frantic, too random and too lacking in tactics to be fun. I used to love the mode Domination and "understood" the flows of the game so well I could even "feel" when the other team sort of gave up trying to win. With MW3 there is no "flow" to feel, no tactics to read – no point in trying to flank to the far side of the map when you'll probably spawn there in a second or two! For my money MW3 was worth it because the campaign gave me about 15 hours of fun (a few playthroughs) and the Survival mode alone saw me clock over 35 hours (and enjoy them all) but I must say I'm tiring of it all. The multiplayer is uninspired and too frantic to be fun. Infinity Ward always talk about capturing the COD4 magic, but I don't think they can – they just keep "adding" stuff and the overall effect is to detract from the multiplayer, which is a real shame. A decent game that is worth getting but neither as bad as the haters suggest nor as good as the fanboys proclaim.
