Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 (2023) campaign review - vapid and hastily assembled

One scene near the end of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3’s story – no spoilers here, not that there’s anything to spoil – features a CIA agent heavily redacting all the key details of what you just played through. I let go of the idea that Call of Duty might do much of interest, or even consequence, with its story some time ago, but that’s as on-the-nose an analogy as you could ever ask for with Modern Warfare 3.

Even by its own gradually lowering standards, Modern Warfare 3’s retconned, chopped-up, and hastily taped-together reworking of the Shepherd-and-Makarov tale from 2009’s original Modern Warfare 2 is a mess. Picking up directly after 2022’s Modern Warfare 2, which it turns out just reworked half the story (not that you’d really know from playing it), MW3 finishes the job by cutting out any remaining interesting parts and comprehensively sanitising whatever’s left. What was an already barely-there parable about real systems and their related wars has instead been swapped out for a glossy, extraordinarily well-presented, but utterly vapid tale about nothing and nobody. Most disappointingly of all, the typical bombast and relentless forward energy of its linear campaigns, that usually acts as good-enough cover fire for the narrative gaps in Call of Duty, is missing here, too.

Walking it back a bit for one moment though, I should probably start with some sympathy. Reliable reporting suggested this year’s Modern Warfare 3 originally started life as a Modern Warfare 2 expansion. Blame, if we’re being as blunt as to point fingers here, should really go to whatever circumstances or whichever decision-makers caused those plans to change, as developer Sledgehammer, stepping in for Infinity Ward this time, has clearly had to rush things along. Modern Warfare 3’s story is also on the short side, and while that’s never been much of a problem for Call of Duties gone by – for a lot of people the promise of a tight eight hours of closely directed action is exactly what they play these games for – it all adds up to a fairly obvious picture of a game rushed out with less time than it really requires.