Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 (

2011

) ½

If Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 [2009] represents the series at its apogee, then Modern Warfare 3 was when its decline became self-evident. Even at the time, this came as no real surprise to commentators and fans of the game. Call of Duty's publisher, Activision had been milking the series aggressively, giving annual releases (alternating years between developers Infinite Ward and Treyarch) since 2005 with Call of Duty 2 [2005]. It was only a matter of time before this relentless release cycle ground the series into repetitive, formulaic junk. Even the most talented artists can't be held subservient to such a ruthless timetable forever without suffering some degradation in quality. Sure, Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3 was not an atrocious game by any measure, but with its release and the resounding “meh” it generated by way of response it wasn't hard to see what direction the series was going. That the yearly release cycle would continue for the next decade just showcases Activision's commitment to a bad, albeit profitable, idea. The next few years would see a devastating race to the bottom with the once venerable franchise going from mediocre to bad to laughably terrible entries.

The story of Modern Warfare 3 picks up when Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 [2009] left off. The United States is locked in a vicious war with Russia. Despite both sides suffering hundreds of thousands of casualties, the two superpowers remain gentlemanly about the whole affair and the only nuclear weapon used is the one that Captain Price detonated in the upper atmosphere to knock out enemy communications. I find it difficult to imagine this happening in real life, but it's one bit of absurdity that we will have to swallow, as otherwise, the entire campaign would just look like the Aftermath mission from Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare [2007]. While that might serve as a harrowing reminder of the existential dangers of nuclear war, it wouldn't make for much entertainment.

However, this isn't the only absurdity that takes place in the game's plot. After the first few missions set in New York City, the Russians are driven back off of US soil. Given the deteriorating military situation, the Russian president, Boris Vorshevsky, is willing to cut a deal with the Americans and make peace. Better a humiliating defeat abroad than an invasion at home after all. Unfortunately for him, Vladimir Makarov the terrorist from the last game who slipped away is determined to escalate the war, so he stages a coup and kidnaps President Vorshevsky. This leaves the entire Russian military apparatus, bar its nuclear arsenal as Vorshevsky stubbornly refuses to give up the launch codes, in the hands of Makarov, and he is determined to continue the war against the USA. This is all fine and mostly consists of the characters acting reasonably even if they are, as is the case with Makarov, genocidal maniacs. No, the problem is that to keep fighting the war Makarov determines that the best course of action is to launch a full-fledged invasion of Europe. No, not a specific European country with close ties to the US like the United Kingdom or Germany, but the entire continent from Scotland to Sicily. I've heard of “opening up another front” before but this is ridiculous.

Obviously, as a strategic decision, this doesn't make a lot of sense. Having just been beaten soundly in a straight fight, the best option is not, generally, to drag an entire continent of nations into the war against you. I'm sure that the close allies of the US like the UK would have gotten involved in one way or another but I'm quite confident that the fence-sitters in Paris would have gladly spent the war eating croissants and watching the Yanks and the Russkies kill each other from afar. The decision to have Russia invade Europe is a case of the needs of the game driving the plot rather than the game developing naturally from the story. In this case, Call of Duty needs a series of missions in a variety of exciting locations and having the Russians invade Europe allows the game to take the player on a tour of war-ravaged European capitals.

Yet, this seems to have been a miscalculation on the part of the game designers, as two of the cities they drop the player into are Hamburg and Berlin, a pair of cities that were practically leveled during WWII and rebuilt in a soulless modern style that makes them look like every other city of earth. Indeed, trends of modern architecture have made several of the cities they chose for missions like London and New York City, look depressingly similar as well. It doesn't help that all the cities you fight in are significantly damaged by the ongoing conflict, and are often so strewn with wreckage and rubble as to be barely recognizable underneath. Of the cities Infinity War chose for their levels, only Prague and (to a lesser extent) Paris still retain a significant individual personality. With a whole continent of locations to choose from, I certainly would have preferred a mission in Syracuse or Barcelona. Perhaps time crunch was a factor here as well, as many assets created for the NYC levels could have been recycled for Hamburg, Paris, and Berlin.

To make matters worse, the new character you play for most of these missions, code name Frost of Delta Force, is painfully generic. Neither the player character nor any of his squad mates have a personality to speak of beyond blandly competent professional soldiers, and even their heroic deaths at the end of the game make little impact. Hell, even his name Frost, seems like it was randomly generated by some kind of algorithm for military callsigns. Fortunately, while the Americans are battling the Russians across Europe, Captain Price and Soap (joined by the new player character Yuri) have gone into hiding and are tracking down Makarov to settle their score. The legacy characters are much more compelling, and even a touch human. In particular Price and Soap play off each other in a way that constantly betrays the warmth the two men have for each other underneath their gruff exteriors. The only issue is that when you're on a mission with them, their banter will quickly make the player feel like a third wheel.

The most glaring issue here is the art direction. Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare [2007] and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 [2009] had hardly been vibrant, colorful games but at least there were occasional flashes of color here and there. In Modern Warfare 3, each level just feels like a long, ugly gray/brown mess. The levels all feel the same, even when they take place in wildly different areas way too many of them have the same general look and feel. There were levels in Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare [2007] that took place in the same city at different times of the day and they felt more distinct than levels that take place in entirely different countries in Modern Warfare 3. Sure, some missions stand out like the raid of the castle, and the mission where you hijack a Russian sub in New York Harbor, but unfortunately, these are the exceptions rather than the rule.

At times Modern Warfare 3 suffers from trying to repeat the success of the previous titles. This is most obvious in the game's attempt to add a controversial mission to compete with Modern Warfare 2's No Russian. The problem is that No Russian while grotesquely violent and unsettling was not gratuitous. It was an integral part of Modern Warfare 2's plot, indeed without it, the rest of the game could not take place. Moreover, the presence of No Russian gave lie to critical accusations that Call of Duty was just jingoistic propaganda. Here was a mission where the player character was tasked by their superior officer, an American general, with the task of aiding a group of terrorists in an act of senseless destruction. We are presented with an image of the American leadership as indifferent to the deaths of civilians to a frankly frightening degree (a depiction which, incidentally is all too often completely accurate). The morality of the player's actions in the mission and the ethics of his commanders are dubious at best. Despite its flaws, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 [2009] and the No Russian mission, in particular, were stories set in a world where good and evil were hard to distinguish and evil actions may sometimes be committed for noble motivations. The mission added weight and complexity to what could have been a straightforward tale of good and evil.

The controversial moment in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, by contrast, is one where the player character tries and fails to stop a terrorist attack using poison gas. This poison gas attack kills thousands of civilians but we are put in the shoes of one family (a father, a mother, and a little girl) who are caught up in it. While this sequence does hammer home the gravity of the situation by giving us a small, human moment to latch onto during a larger tragedy, it is nowhere near as morally complex as No Russian. All this moment tells us is that the villains of the game (Makarov and company) have committed a heinous crime; go get them! Indeed, looking back on the campaign Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3 is largely missing all the moments in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 [2009] that made me squirm. No enemies are being dragged off to be tortured, no extra-judicial assassinations ordered by lone commanders, and no acceptable civilian casualties.

Moreover, the whole tangent on the poison gas attacks is largely inconsequential to the plot. Aside from a couple of missions in Africa where Soap, Price, and Yuri are tracking down the origins of the weapons they impact nothing. Sure, the Russians use them as an opening salvo of their European invasion but this all happens off-screen and could just as easily be something else. The whole affair reeks of box-checking, as I suspect it was mandated from above rather than arising naturally as the game's story developed. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 [2009] was a massive success, due in part to the controversy generated by No Russian, and so another controversy was demanded.

It seems like Infinity Ward, having knocked the story out of the park with Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 [2009], had no idea where to go with the world and characters they had created. Obviously, they needed a third game both to satisfy the taskmasters at Activision and also to wrap up all the loose ends of the second game's plot. You can't just leave America and Russia at war, with Russians occupying the Eastern seaboard. You sure as hell can't leave Makarov, the main villain of Modern Warfare 2, running free somewhere in the shadows. Yet, it's obvious that they had written themselves into a corner and were not sure how to proceed. It would have been far better if the plot for the third game had been mapped out at the same time as the second, so the developers could adjust the story as they needed. Unfortunately, I suspect this is just another casualty of a rapid-fire release schedule that prized consistent releases over artistic vision.