Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3’s campaign is a hollow shooting gallery

Call of Duty’s single-player campaigns are known for their follow-along gameplay. You are usually a part of a squad, detachment or even an invasion. Your squad will often be led by an experienced and deadly leader. This leader chooses the doors to break through, bad guys to shoot in what order, and paths to take as he stealthily guides you into enemy bases. He eliminates threats surgically and gets occasionally involved in larger and more explosive gunfights. The gruff, walrus bristled Captain has been that father figure for most Modern Warfare titles. Price is the central mythology of Modern Warfare.

Modern Warfare 3. marks a shift, then: a few missions into the game, the camera zooms into his puffy cheeks and beady eyes as you, for the first time in the series (that isn’t a flashback), assume control of his corporeal form. No longer are you the young know-nothing who passively follows along; now you get to play as Call of Duty’s emotionally unavailable dad. It’s an unsettling shift, which reflects the way the third game in this rebooted franchise has started to move away from the familiar and towards strange and unsettling terrain.

It is not only that Who are you? You can play the game as a changeModern Warfare 3,But also the way you play. There is far less emphasis on the linear levels of past games. The game is far more immersive. Modern Warfare 3.’s campaign is spent in what its developers call “Open Combat Missions,” which, in a single-player twist on the series’ popular Warzone offshoot, have your character air-dropping into a large arena where you are given relatively free rein to tackle objectives as you see fit.

Image: Sledgehammer Games/Activision

If not in your immediate vicinity, then at least within radio range. They’ll check in with information about each mission’s objectives, as well as other points of interest to watch out for. You are, in all but name, on your own. You, alone, must sneak around these spaces, trying not to tip off guards and attempting to figure out where you’re supposed to go. You can go beyond Call of Duty games have taken their tonal cues from something like HBO’s Band of Brothers, Modern Warfare 3.Feels a lot like RamboYou can also find out more about American Sniper. Your team is dispersed, and you alone must bear the responsibility that the game constantly reminds you is yours: getting your hands dirty in order to stop bad guys who’d do the same.

The weight of responsibility feels greater, the unseemliness of your task more intense, when it’s just you, alone with the fallout of your actions. Kate Laswell (a CIA operative from the 2019 reboot) must meet an informant in a Kastovian base. Laswell has to kill a major of the army and the soldier who is with him to get into the building that the informant hides in. She must also take the identity card. Laswell justifies it to herself as a worthy sacrifice, and over the radio her ally blames it on the game’s villain, Vladimir Makarov. But there’s no one else around to grimly nod at the necessity of her actions, to spread the load of immorality. Even if their actions are horrendous, soldiers at war come across much different than a gunwoman.

Image: Sledgehammer Games/Activision

Even the game’s big narrative moment, its version of the original Modern Warfare 2.’s infamous “No Russian” mission, has you playing as someone left all alone. Samara, an Arab woman on a trip to her family. The game’s Russian ultranationalist villains grab her and strap her into an explosive vest. The Russian ultranationalist villains smugly acknowledge that she is a good terrorist and can blame an Arab country who has not been involved in the conflict. They then force her into a crowded plane cabin full of terrified passengers, who are grabbing at her before the vest explodes.

Her isolation from her allies is meant to drum up players’ anger at the game’s villains. The callousness and meaninglessness of anti-Arab racist remarks in the game decontextualized to the real world makes this moment unearned. Even though the in-game nation Urzikstan was problematically fictionalized there was something meaningful about seeing Farah Karim leading a group of Arab women to overthrow their prison officers back in the 2019. Modern Warfare campaign. This visual is distorted when a woman from the group is selected, made a sacrifice, and used to incite a feeling of righteous anger and fury at a villain who’s already comically evil. Karim wipes out all evidence from the hijacking, and Samara vanishes. The sacrifice of Samara is not for a greater cause and does not have any meaning other than the plot.

Image: Sledgehammer Games/Activision

In the previous Call of Duty game, you still committed war crimes but rarely alone. You are usually in a group of like-minded people, all together. In the games, heroes were often shown sacrificing themselves for others, and surrendering to higher ideals. These ideals were often noxious and unjustifiable on closer examination; 2019’s Modern Warfare, for example, blames an atrocity America committed in the first Gulf War, the Highway of Death, on Russia; 2022’s Modern Warfare 2.The first line of the script is a reference to an extrajudicial drone attack on a major Iranian general. The game begins with a direct reference to the extrajudicial drone strike of an Iranian major general.

It may not seem important, but it is. When you eliminate the sense of community, when your games are about solitary feats, or stealth, then you reveal the true brutality of war. My actions can easily be submerged in the cinematic world of dramatic peaks and troughs, silent moments and loud, if they are set within the context of a movie, complete with dramatic peaks and crests, quiet and loud, as well as quiet and noisy, quiet and loud.

If my current experience involves me meandering in a large open arena while taking potshots silently at unwitting guards, much like the soulless and cigar-chomping Solid Snake I have been fed, then it is harder for me to believe what they are telling.

Image: Sledgehammer Games/Activision

Vladimir Makarov might be returning, but we’ll see more of the villainous dialogues and sneering threats he is known for. But if, as a result of the game’s open-ended approach, I’m already feeling disconnected from any sense of momentum, sense of purpose, or connection to my teammates — if my experience is a choice between straightforward extermination or stealth mastery, in a stepped-down version of the game’s Warzone, which is itself entirely stripped of meaning and geopolitical context — what does it really matter who the villain is, or who the good guys are? Even when they are both cast as fictionalized members of invented nations?

Modern Warfare 3.The series has been completely disassociated from its history and meaning. It continues the previous games’ practice of adding political texture to explosive ultra-violence, but it has never been more of a hollow shooting gallery, a ghost of a game and a departure from everything that may have once made the franchise compelling to play.

Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3Released on PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5 Windows PC, Xbox One and Xbox Series X. The game’s campaign was reviewed on PS5 using a pre-release download code provided by Activision. Vox Media maintains affiliate partnerships. Vox Media earns commissions from affiliate products, although this doesn’t influence the editorial content. This is where you can find additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.