World War 3 is Here, How Will You Respond?

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Join familiar faces Captain John Price, Captain John “Soap” MacTavish, double agent Nikolai, Yuri and more in an attempt to take down Vladimir Makarov once and for all, and put an end to World War 3.

The Storyline

The game starts mere hours after betraying and killing Lieutenant General Shepherd, with Price and Nikolai escaping from a hotel in Afghanistan with a near dead MacTavish (from here on in referred to as Soap) in tow. As Soap receives medical attention in one of Nikolai’s safehouses, Makarov’s men begin an attempt to infiltrate the safehouse and kill them. With the aid of one of Nikolai’s soldiers, Yuri, they secure safe passage to an extraction point that will get them out of the country.

The single player experience provided by Modern Warfare 3 is fast and furious. As with previous games in the Modern Warfare series, you’ll jump around between different teams each with their own specific mission goals. The biggest difference I noticed this time around is that while jumping from one team to the next, the story seemed to flow perfectly. There wasn’t one point during my play through where I wonder what the heck was going on.

Gameplay Mechanics

It seems with each new Call of Duty game, the controls are vastly improved. MW3 is no exception, and in my opinion, this time around the improvements are much more noticeable. With so much happening on the battlefield at any given time, I would not have been surprised is there were moments of slowdown, or choppiness. But that is not the case! The games framerate is top notch allowing for what seems to be hundreds of soldiers and explosions happening all around you at the same time. This fantastic framerate allows for much more accuracy when in combat without the worry or concern of a little jumpiness that could very easily throw your aim off kilter.

I don’t think I need to say too much about the guns available other than awesome! As with any other Call of Duty games there’s a nice variety of assault rifles, sub machine guns, sniper rifles and more. The usual array of attachments are back again, including red dot and grenade launcher, and the grenade arsenal will be familiar to any veteran of the series.

Game Modes

Those familiar with any COD offering know that the single player experience is just a small fraction of the gameplay available. The meat of the series lies in the online mulitplayer, and this time is no different. It functions in pretty much the same way as past COD games, with new maps and a few slight tweaks here and there. Kills are no longer the only way to increase your streak, the addition of objective completion has been added, so capturing a flag or planting a bomb in their respective game modes will get you some reward points.

The leveling system for weapons has also been modified to have them upgraded alongside your character while unlocking various perks such as attachments, kick and focus. You now also have the ability to equip multiple scopes on a gun and switch between them.

A new addition to online play is the Prestige Shop which is unlocked after you go prestige for the first time. While I’m nowhere near reaching this mammoth goal, I’ve read that the shop allows prestige players to use tokens earned to purchase features such as additional custom classes, and double XP.

The Special Ops mode makes a return with challenge missions, as well as some weapons that are only available in Spec Ops.

Modern Warfare 3 introduced a new gameplay mode called “Survival Mode” which is similar in concept to the zombie mode in World at War, or horde mode in Gears of War 3. In this mode, one or two players fight increasingly difficult waves of enemies that appear at tactical locations based on where the player(s) are currently located.

Complaints

I don’t have many complaints about the overall offering from Modern Warfare 3 as from top to bottom, this is a must own game for those who enjoy first-person shooters. However, given that there are so many other great games out there, especially at the time of the year that this title was released, I tend to not spend the better part of the next few months playing the multiplayer aspect of the game as millions of other people do. The only thing that I wish this game would do more of was offer me a longer single player experience.

I finished my first play through of MW3 in just under 7 and a half hours, which is pretty typical for a game of this nature, but as in every other playing of a COD game, I’ve been left wanting more. I think that this game was a little worse than those in the past, as even though I should have known the game was nearing an end as the events leading up to its conclusion were unfolding, I was left with a sort of feeling of shock that I was done so quickly.