Single-player gameplay

Modern Warfare 3’s main campaign is a short, sharp and sweet spectacle. Running approximately 6 hours on the normal difficulty, the conclusion to the trilogy ups the ante with the much mentioned World War 3 motif. Now, no one really buys Modern Warfare for the single-player, but the series has always delivered some pretty spectacular levels, coupled with a bat-shit crazy storyline.

By this, the third installment, I have to be honest and say I’m not completely pulled in by the long winded, room-to-room, ‘bullets flying from all angles’ sections. I find these parts incredibly predictable and tedious. These portions also don’t deliver any satisfaction when killing an enemy, rather it all feels a bit underwhelming, like throwing pebbles to knock over flimsy cardboard stands. The sense of achievement seems to have been replaced by a hardened sense of luck, as you consistently dart for cover hoping to avoid the forty odd guns that are trained on you.

What Modern Warfare has always done well is to incorporate large set-piece action sequences and flawlessly weld them into the campaign. By putting you in the driver’s seat and creating an atmosphere that oozes tension and ferocity, MW3 effortlessly brings out the inner action hero in all of us. In my opinion, the game out-does the previous two games in the series by offering up a conclusive chapter that feels much like a roller-coaster ride. You’re hurled through the story at such a pace that sometimes you wish you had longer to take it all in.





When the campaign flows like this, it almost makes me forgive those filler segments featuring never-ending enemy spawns. I won’t go too much into spoiler detail here, but when you’ve got a game throwing you a zero-gravity shoot-out, you do kind of have to applaud its endeavor. Modern Warfare 3’s single-player does offer the occasional level that surprises you by changing the usual format up, and even though a lot of it has been seen before, it can at least be appreciated as a far better effort than before.

The storyline does try to cram in every Hollywood cliché, from chemical weapons to even more pesky Russians. However, fans of the series will undoubtedly enjoy the conclusion to Soap and Price’s tale, especially because of the nods to MW3’s predecessors and the overall familiarity that has grown between the audience and the game world.