A Call of Duty campaign is nothing these days without a sprinkling of 'holy s***!' moments, and Modern Warfare 3 delivers the goods. While the garbled plotting has been reined in, the blockbuster excess has somehow been ramped up. 'A Call of Duty campaign is nothing these days without a sprinkling of 'holy s***!' moments.' Events are easy to follow, characters behave consistently and while there are some major shocks along the way, they enhance the narrative rather than torpedoing it. Compared to the meandering, disconnected compilation of things happening that led to Modern Warfare 2's head-scratching final twist, this is as lean and concise as Call of Duty storytelling gets. The good news is that the story - a planet-spanning tale full of treachery, terrorism and the sort of unlikely stunts that would make James Bond soil himself - is at least coherent this time. Picking up almost immediately after the events of Modern Warfare 2, it plunges the player into a world on the brink of a Third World War, with villainous Russian hardliner Makarov doing everything he can to ensure we're all tipped over the edge. Manage cookie settingsĪs with all recent Call of Duty games, the single-player campaign is where the skirmish between spectacle and depth is most obviously fought. This content is hosted on an external platform, which will only display it if you accept targeting cookies.

It's conservative in every sense of the word, a paean to military superiority which never ventures far beyond gameplay parameters that were set in stone in 2007. Is it unfair to mark a game down just for giving millions of fans exactly what they want? Or do games that generate this much attention and income have an obligation to stretch the boundaries of their genres?Įither way, Modern Warfare 3 is exactly the game you expect. And like those entertainment colossi, it's as divisive as it is popular.įor every player who loves the games for their razzle-dazzle and online ubiquity, there's another who would gladly see the latest entry slapped with a mediocre score just to cut it down to size. As recently as 2006, with Call of Duty 3, the series was just another well-regarded but modestly successful WWII shooter, fighting for shelf space alongside Medal of Honor and Brothers in Arms.īut 2007's Modern Warfare turned Call of Duty into a legitimate media phenomenon: a superbrand that generates the same enormous numbers as a Tom Cruise, a U2 or a Manchester United. It's been an incredibly rapid expansion as well, a Big Bang that few could have predicted. Call of Duty, to paraphrase Douglas Adams, is big.

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