News - Call Of Duty: Warzone 2i (2023) Campaign Review
Welcome back, everybody. I'm Nick 930, and today I want to share with you my thoughts on the most recent entry to the long-running Call of Duty series, Modern Warfare. Modern Warfare 3 is the third entry to the more recent Modern Warfare Trilogy, this time created by Sledgehammer Games with additional support from partners like Infinity War Treyarch Raven software and various other studios owned by its publisher.
Activision. In it, players fight alongside an elite Special Forces Unit Task Force 141 as they respond to several terrorist threats throughout fictional nations in and around Western Asia. The game is a direct continuation of both the campaign beats introduced in Modern Warfare 1 and 2 and the seasonal cinematics featured throughout Call of Duty's recent live service multiplayer model, which therefore features familiar gameplay elements throughout each of its 15 campaign missions.
However, because of the extremely tight time constraints the development team at Sledgehammer likely faced with this latest release, the many issues I had with Modern Warfare 2's campaign have only been exacerbated further, resulting in a disjointed and poorly executed experience that pales in comparison to the exceptionally well-made campaigns from the past, making this Modern Warfare 3 arguably the single worst mainline campaign in the series's 20-year-long history.
So let's start this review by first taking a spoiler-free look at the game story. Modern Warfare 3 kicks off with a familiar setpiece, with a special forces team breaking into the infamous Russian Gulf to rescue a high-value prisoner. Though in keeping with the precedent set by the past two games, this Prison Break is far less bombastic than its 2009 reference point.
The action sequences are a little bit more grounded, with the squad tactically taking out centuries, cutting the power, and using night vision goggles while repelling in through the main prison complex. There are plenty of firefights throughout, but don't go in expecting slow-motion breaches or nods to Michael Bay's The Rock.
For the most part, this entire mission stays true to the classic Call of Duty formula with decent pacing, fun set pieces, and even some well executed narrative bits, but this is sadly one of the few instances throughout the record-short campaign to feature this level of quality. Immediately after this level, the game switches to a far less interesting open combat mission that limits narrative beats to the intro and outro cinematics, along with a few cheesy radio back-and-forth moments that annoyingly repeat themselves if you take too long.
The purpose of these open combat missions is very clearly not to expand on the scope of the story itself but rather to pat out the length of the campaign with boring open-world style objectives. Sid stepping the need to script epic moments or animate AI companions to fight along inside the player, the fan favorite characters do return here, like Price Gaz Ghost and Farah.
The big addition here is undoubtedly the return of antagonist Vladimir Marov, who's been put at the forefront of this campaign, making for a much more interesting and dynamic experience than what we saw in last year's Call of Duty. For the most part, Marov is executed quite well; he seems to be just about as cunning and ruthless as he was in the original Modern Warfare Trilogy.
Though he wants to keep players on their toes, many of his schemes play out a bit differently, with new targets and execution aimed at subverting expectations. That being said, these changes don't necessarily lend themselves to making this character appear any more ruthless. In fact, the scope of his targets feels noticeably less ambitious, as the game relies heavily on using its new fictional nations, like Ukhan and Covia, to drive its story, making his devastating attacks feel much less impactful than what we've seen him do in the past.
Another issue I have with this campaign and many of the campaigns coming out of the Call of Duty series lately is its overreliance on these larger-than-life supporting characters. These characters don't even feel like real people anymore, with no confrontation between them, no personal flaws, or any sign of actual growth throughout the story.
They're basically just a team of C-tier Avengers, bouncing overly cool onliners back and forth at each other until one of them finally breaks the loop and tells the others to get into position. The Call of Duty series has never really been one for interesting, dynamic characters, but it wasn't as noticeable before because the campaigns were being carried out significantly by their action set pieces and variety.
Now that the missions are more grounded and simple, we get more time with each person, and the cracks in this aspect of the game's writing are more apparent than ever. By the end, I really didn't care what happened to any one particular character, considering they're all pretty much identical personality-wise.
These issues are minor when compared to Modern Warfare 3's biggest flaw, its mission structure. In the hopes of strengthening the campaign and making it feel more complete, it appears developers Sledgehammer and their supporting developers opted to make use of the resources already at hand to craft new open-ended levels referred to as open combat missions.
These missions almost always use pre-existing environmental assets from Modern Warfare 1 and 2, mainly the Battle Royale map verdance, and are populated with a bunch of basic AI enemy patrols for players to contend with. The idea is to give players the chance to approach the missions their own way, searching for alternative routes to objectives and discovering useful weapons and gadget stashes hidden all throughout.
Players are given a special pair of B knocks to tag enemies and can then set out in any direction that they feel like, so long as they stay within the invisible boundaries. Parachutes and ascending cables can be used to reach advantageous positions. Night vision goggles can be found to navigate in dark caves, and silenced rifles can be used to stealthily pick away at the enemy to clear heavily guarded positions.
Had these been optional missions like the cooperative spec ops missions from last year, they would have been a nice addition to the campaign, but they're mandatory, and sometimes they're laid out back-to-back in the campaign, making them feel even more tedious. It's more or less the same thing that the Battleground Series has tried doing for years within their own campaigns: repurposing its large multiplayer maps, changing the time of day, and then throwing in some rudimentary stealth action mechanics and weapon stashes.
