Soulless is a word that bugs me when brought up during videogame debates. Individual bias, elitist tastes and contrarian attitudes almost always misapply acceptable titles because of this. Even lesser games struggling with lackluster design possess flashes of brilliance, thanks to the enthusiastic teams coding them. Nevertheless, along with Modern Warfare 3, soulless might not be a more apt summary.
On the technical side Modern Warfare 3 jobs. The intending controls are super responsive, motion is liquid and natural, and also no debilitating glitches that require months of patch work exist. For that, the property developers deserve credit. Everything else are not so much.
I’ll admit that I’m a Call of Duty 4 late straggler, however the praise for property developer Infinity Ward’s first non-WWII CoD is well deserved. Its own campaign mode threw numerous FPS conventions out of the window, and brought several memorable set pieces few players will forget. The nuke wiping out the aquatic, the tense post-Chernobyl sniper mission, the AC-130 section with the aloof pilots passively blowing up infantry coming from the sky (now made scarier by a genuine incident mirroring the exact same cold detachment from its pilots); CoD4 was a marvel. Infinity Ward plainly wished to tell a compelling story, partly inspired by real conflicts and partly jettisoned from anti-war movies. Regardless if the anti-war angle worked or not is up for debate but the passion existed. The exact same opts for Modern Warfare 2, in spite of its disjointed campaign and unbalanced multiplayer.
Along with Modern Warfare 3, the game never escapes feeling over thought out and derivative. Take the campaign mode. Although CoD4 and also MW2 had moments of heavily scripted linearity, MW3 shamelessly accepts it. During one segment, I missed two enemies after mowing down a force of thirty, and the next section halted up until I found and eliminated them. Any type of sense of flexibility constantly gets yanked back, which in turn gives you the perception that you’re sleepwalking with the game. MW3’s set pieces try hard to re-enact CoD4’s magic, but fails continuously. Even the greatest series don’t measure up to MW3’s precursors, though none scrubed me as wrong as the “questionable moment” inserted right into campaign mode. Certainly, the segment’s supposed to evoke MW2’s “No Russian”, which in turn showed the terrifying consequences of totally ditching morality for the sake of national security. MW3’s version? I. think it stands for war’s inevitable collateral damage to private citizens? Too bad it comes off as crass and also cheap. The same goes to the anti-war quotes raised after you die. In CoD4, these guys worked as slight jabs versus warfare without being blunt. Here? They’re stereotyped history blurbs that flash right before you obliterate troops with an AC-130.