The story of MW3's solo campaign is the same load of patriotic bullshit you know and love from the series. It's time for World War 3 and we all depend on some brave American Delta Force heroes to save the day and the whole damn planet. Okay, the one good guy who makes it all the way to the end is actually a Brit (whee!) and you get your fair share of Frenchies and some weird Germans named 'Zerstörer' or 'Vorschlaghammer', but for the most part, the game will have you cheering: "USA! USA!"
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| I'm sure tons of German soldiers use call-signs such as 'Zerstörer' |
If you play these games for their story, I pity you. I honestly do. The plot in this game is shit and nobody cares, because you get to blow things up, you get to shoot a whole lot of bad guys and for the most part, it's a really fun ride.
This is where I agree with the reviewers and where I fail to understand the overall criticism coming from a whole lot of people: It's Call of Duty at its finest. You get high speed car chases, explosions, airplane crashes and a whole lot of chaos. It's war, alright. There were moments where I'd feel a major adrenaline rush, charging in Rambo-Style (which usually ends with me getting blown to bits) and moments, where there's so much going on, you just try to stay close to your team mates and somehow manage to get through the whole thing in one piece. There's a constant sense of tension here, the action is as fast-paced and crazy as any good action film and you're right in the middle of it.
Sure, it's a tried and tested formula, which might have gotten a little stale after so many games in a series, but what were people expecting? It's Call of fucking Duty, it's always been about scripted events, about shooting galleries, which are interrupted by scripted sequences, where you get to watch your character do cool stuff in 1st person perspective. You can't say MW1 and 2 and possibly Black Ops were awesome for that and MW3 is crap for the same thing. That's like saying you hate how Diabo 3 is full of dungeons, demons and zombies, because that's too much like its predecessors. Get real.
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| "Boo! MW3 uses scripted events and excessive explosions!" And you've been living under what rock? |
To be fair, the feeling of déjà-vu is a little stronger than it should be. In Modern Warfare 2, there were moments, where the bad guys simply won. They'd point their gun at your face and pull the trigger without hesitation. In one particularly humiliating scene, you'd get to see through your dying character's eyes and watch as the major baddie chucks you and your companions into a pit, pours gasoline all over you and sets you on fire. Back then, this came to players as a major shock. You don't usually see main characters die like that, not through their eyes, not so violently.
MW3 pulls something similar, though less brutally. This time you just get shot in the face and die. Which should still be shocking enough in itself, but you just won't give a crap about it if you've played the previous title. Because you've seen it before, you've been there, it's not new or surprising anymore. It's overused.
What's worse, MW3 also copies a lot of bugs, breaking scripts and flawed gameplay from its predecessors. There are those incredibly stupid moments, where you face endlessly respawning enemies and the only way to move the whole thing forward is by rushing through the enemy hordes like crazy, which seems reckless and not very tactical.
You'll eventually accept that the game wants you to rush like an idiot, only to fail at a later stage, where the game expects you to sit still and kill every single enemy, because that time around, there's no respawn at all. If you don't play exactly the way you're supposed to play, you'll either die or break the script.
At one stage I was supposed to follow a character, who was parking his lazy ass behind cover and wouldn't move, no matter what. All the enemies were dead, there was nothing going on whatsoever, but my NPC, as well as the whole squad of soldiers, just held their position for no apparent reason, forcing me to carry on by myself. So I went ahead, bumped into a bunch of enemies, fought them for a while and then the whole game crashed with an error message. Upon loading up my savegame, all the NPCs would finally move and the mission carried on the way it was supposed to.
There aren't as many of these moments in MW3 as there were in the previous games, but you will inevitably reach a point where your team will stop acting and enemies will either disappear or respawn an infinte amount of times until you figure out how to trigger the next scripted sequence.
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| You don't have to be overly talented - scripts do all the work for you. |
According to Steam, it took me 7 hours to beat the campaign on regular difficulty (yeah, I'm slow), which isn't a whole lot, but the real meat and potatoes of the series lies in its multiplayer component, anyway.
And that's where I can't help but agree with the people, who vent their anger and frustration on websites like metacritic.com
I don't mind how they've recycled the same old engine for yet another game, how MW3 doesn't look anywhere near as stunning as Battlefield 3 and how it's nothing super spectacular anymore. Because in the campaign, they just make it work. There's a shit ton of action! Helicopters, bombers, explosions, cars, boats... fuck, there's so much crazy shit going on at the same time at a solid, stable 60 FPS, I won't complain about the dated engine.
Multiplayer, on the other hand, looks and feels like some kind of Black Ops mod, combined with yet another map pack. So they've changed a few perks, made it less of a pain in the ass to unlock pro perks and they've rebalanced things a bit here and there. Some say it's the most well-balanced CoD multiplayer of all times, because you no longer get akimbo shotguns or infinite marathon perks. Probably the same people who haven't figured out you still get to use akimbo machine-pistols, run across the map and spray bullets like a moron, racking up quite a few kills in the process.
Balance isn't the problem. It never was. People will always find and exploit the most powerful stuff, they will break your game and either you adapt or you stay offline. It's how online multiplayer works. The real problem is that MW3 adds nothing new. Yes, so you get a couple websites jerking off over the oh-so incredible new 'kill confirmed' mode, where you have to collect a dead guy's dog tags before your team gets the points for a kill. Big deal!
What they fail to mention is how the server browser we had in Black Ops has mysteriously disappeared again*, forcing people into shitty, console-style matchmaking. You get to choose a game mode, then the game will pick any random map for you, team you with and pit you against random people, determine the best host and go do the same laggy, rubberbanding peer 2 peer shit that made the online mode on Warhammer 40k so much fun.
*except for broken, dead, dedicated servers, more about that later
Being unable to choose your session by map, ping or player count is frustrating and stupid enough. What's worse, though, is the massive amount of blatant cheating. People locking their crosshairs on you as you approach them from behind solid walls can be just as annoying as paranoid folks accusing each other of cheating for no good reason. The community is lousy, there is just as much raging, flaming and whining going on as Counter-Strike had seen in its best days.
Of course you could just leave a session if you don't like what's going on there, but since you have zero influence on where the matchmaking system will take you next, there is a high chance you'll end up playing with the exact same people again, anyway.
Alright, this isn't 100% true. Hidden in your options menu, you may acticate a dedicated server browser, which might seem awesome when you first hear it. It isn't. Let me show you what I mean:
Empty. Every. Single. Fucking. Server. Zero players across the board.
Wanna know why? Dedicated servers are unranked only. In plain English: You don't get experience points on there, you don't level up, you cannot use your favourite weapons, perks and loadouts, unless the server admin decides they're cool. And with the level-ups, prestige and customization removed from MW3 multiplayer, you might as well play some crappy Korean F2P shooter.
I've made a lot of great friends when I played Black Ops. I was an admin on my favourite server, we had a nice, friendly community and we could kick cheaters and assholes when the need came up. So MW3 has what some people might consider better "balance". It's got new maps. But if, in turn, I get to put up with lousy matchmaking, cheaters, random maps and a lot of drama, then it's not fucking worth it. Sure, the same guys I know and love from BO might set up their own dedicated server for MW3. They might even figure out how to give people their favourite loadouts. But what's the fucking point, when nobody ever plays on those servers? Heck, most people do not even know how to activate the damn server browser!
And to me, this isn't even the worst part. This is the worst part. They're already telling me my brand new game is about to become outdated, I'm gonna have to buy another one in a year, gonna have to get used to new guns, perks, maps etc. all over again. I just don't feel like I'm getting my money's worth if there's a new CoD every fucking year.
Don't get me wrong. Multiplayer can be awesome on those rare occasions where people just get along and have a great time. When all of my friends and I somehow manage to get into the same game at the same time. But we shouldn't be forced to put up with this kind of garbage. Black Ops didn't enforce matchmaking. You may or may not hate Black Ops for the guns, perks or god knows what. But it had fucking dedicated servers. And they worked. Rankings included. Why do they have to take that away in MW3? I just don't get it.
I'll be honest with you. MW3 doesn't piss me off enough to make me stop playing online. But if I could go back, I'd spend my money on something else. The solo campaign was great, warts and all, but I'm not sure 7 hours of fun are really worth 40 Quid. The online mode certainly isn't.
-Cat
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