Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 – happy 20th anniversary COD! (Picture: Activision)

GameCentral offers its final verdict on the Modern Warfare 3 reboot and what is easily the worst mainline Call Of Duty game so far.

Activision is never going to explain exactly what went wrong with the Modern Warfare 3 reboot. They’ll probably never even acknowledge there’s a problem, especially as early indications are that the game is selling just as well as usual. We’ll see what happens over time but it’s not going to take long for most people to realise the game is a dud. The campaign is the worst part but any hopes that the multiplayer or Zombies mode will save it are very quickly dashed.

We’ve already reviewed the single-player campaign, since it was available a week early to anyone that pre-ordered (a baffling decision given its quality). The multiplayer has also been previewed via the traditional beta and while it’s not quite the same level of disaster, the fact that several maps had to be pulled from the game only hours after launch says it all.

There is a base level of competence to the multiplayer that means the game will never be a complete disaster but even Zombies mode, which is ostensibly the most innovative of the three modes this year, is a major disappointment. It’s hard to imagine Call Of Duty ever being worse than this and it’s all because of corporate greed.

For months now, rumours have claimed that there was not supposed to be a new Call Of Duty this year, as developers ran out of time to get the originally planned one finished. Instead, the original idea was to release premium DLC for Modern Warfare 2. It’s then claimed that plan was abandoned and the content that was meant to be DLC was turned into the full price game you see here.

That explains why the story campaign for Modern Warfare 3 is so inconsequential and the multiplayer is solely composed of remastered maps from the original Modern Warfare 2 in 2009.

Rather than needing anyone to leak the information, you could probably guess all that on your own, given the incongruity of the Modern Warfare 2 maps and the various tech blunders, such as Modern Warfare 3 only showing up as a subset of last year’s game in the trophy list and some people reporting that it literally asks for you to insert the Modern Warfare 2 disc to play it.

What makes the failure complete though is that it’s not just the fact that repackaged DLC is being sold at full price, but that the story campaign also happens to be really bad. The story is a non-event and half the missions are weird open world levels that repurpose the Verdansk map to create a sort of single-player Warzone, completely with wonky enemy AI that clearly wasn’t designed for such a task.

Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 multiplayer review

The problem with the multiplayer is that all the maps were designed 14 years ago, and things have moved on since then, in both Call Of Duty and online shooters in general. Many of the game modes in Modern Warfare 3 didn’t exist when the maps were first designed, and this has caused such problems with respawn points that four of them had to be taken out of rotation almost instantly.

Beyond that, the mechanics, graphics, and UI are almost identical to Modern Warfare 2, with nothing substantial having changed since the beta. Call Of Duty’s famous gunplay is present and correct – not even Modern Warfare 3 can ruin that – and while you can import your guns and unlocks from Modern Warfare 2 (further evidence that it’s just DLC) there’s a clear difference with the new weapons, which are more powerful from the start.

Cutthroat, the new 3v3v3 mode, is one of the few unequivocally positive new features. It’s basically just Gunfight with three teams, so it’s not a fantastic work of imagination, but Gunfight has long been one of the best modes and having just one life per round definitely adds to the tension and encourages more careful tactics than usual in Call Of Duty multiplayer.

It’s vastly more interesting than the terminally dull 32v32 Ground War mode, which is Call Of Duty’s failed attempt to beat Battlefield at its own game. The objective-based, 6v6 War Mode is barely any better, as it’s entirely reliant on everyone knowing what they’re doing at all times and because they rarely do it all quickly devolves into mindless shooting. The rest of the modes are fine but they’re just the same as Modern Warfare 2… and most other Call Of Duty games from the last few years.

If you’ve somehow never played a Call Of Duty game before then the multiplayer is a perfectly enjoyable online experience, with lots of modes and options, but that’s the only way you’d ever mistake it for an entirely new game.

Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 Zombies review

The only unknown factor in Modern Warfare 3, prior to launch, was Zombies mode, as there’d been no chance to play it until now. However, Activision had teased that it would be the first to feature an open world map which, in hindsight, we should’ve realised means that it too is just a repurposed version of Warzone pretending to be new content.

To be specific, it’s DMZ mode but with zombies. Rather than Verdansk, Zombies mode takes place on a version of the upcoming new Warzone map, Urzikstan. Ignore the fact that the enemies are zombies (and human mercenaries) and the basics play out exactly like DMZ, with each match giving you 45 minutes to salvage what weapons and equipment you can before being extracted before the time limit runs out.

It’s entertaining enough, because DMZ is a (relatively) fun mode, but it has almost nothing to do with normal Zombies, and completely fails to replicate any of the usual draws of the concept. Instead of tense stand-offs against impossible odds, in tightly designed maps that you can’t escape from, you instead pick and choose your battles from anywhere on the map. You usually spend most of the first half of a match completing boring, easy contracts to get yourself powered up enough to take on the tougher locations, with the stronger enemies located in the centre of the map.

The problem with that is that there’s no tension. In regular Zombies you’re under constant pressure, as the difficultly gets higher and higher and you feel your control over the situation slipping away by the minute. But in Modern Warfare 3 you spend most of your time under no threat at all, until you decide to ramp up the difficulty only when you’re good and ready.

Zombies has been coasting for years, and is definitely in need of a makeover, but ideally one that makes it better, not worse. Even the storytelling is inferior, with none of the obscure references and hidden Easter eggs of previous games. Instead, you just complete vanilla objectives again and again until you unlock a story mission that lays everything out in the most uninteresting way possible.

The idea of an open world Zombies mode could work, because when you do accidentally stumble on an unexpectedly dangerous threat it can be quite thrilling. That kind of revamp requires a rethink from the ground up though, not just reskinning DMZ and hoping nobody will notice.

The mimic is one of the toughest enemies (Picture: Activision)

Perhaps the most damning criticism of Modern Warfare 3 is that even if you don’t mind that it’s repackaged DLC, it’s really bad DLC. Separate Ways for Resident Evil 4 is almost a tenth of the price and yet its story campaign lasts longer and is infinitely more entertaining.

We don’t for a moment blame developer Sledgehammer Games for any of this. They’re just working according to the instructions and limitations Activision places upon them. Sources suggest Sledgehammer only had 16 months to make the game, rather than the usual three years, and yet Activision decided that the short term gain of not skipping a year outweighed the inevitable damage this will do to the franchise’s reputation.

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The fact that this is happening just weeks after the series’ 20th anniversary, and the purchase of Activision Blizzard by Microsoft, shows how much Bobby Kotick and his cohorts just do not care.

Money is the one and only consideration here and you should save yours by ignoring Modern Warfare 3 and waiting until there’s a new game worthy of the Call Of Duty name.

Formats: PlayStation 5 (reviewed), Xbox One, PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X/S, and PC
Price: £69.99
Publisher: Activision
Developer: Sledgehammer Games and Treyarch
Release Date: 10th November 2023
Age Rating: 18

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GameCentral offers its final verdict on the Modern Warfare 3 reboot and what is easily the worst mainline Call Of Duty game so far.