Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III Review

Modern Warfare III is two games wearing one price tag. The campaign, assembled on a visibly compressed schedule, pads its runtime with Open Combat Missions, warmed-over battle-royale sandboxes wearing story-mission costumes, and spends Makarov, the trilogy's marquee villain, on a plot that ends mid-sentence; the difficulty-to-make and story columns wear that schedule honestly. Multiplayer is the redemption arc. Launching with all sixteen 2009 maps rebuilt was cheeky, but the pool remains genuinely great to fight on, and Sledgehammer's tuning, faster movement, slide-cancel back, longer time-to-kill, reversed most of the previous year's sluggishness to produce the best-feeling Call of Duty gunplay in several seasons.

The aggressively open-ended Zombies experiment split its faithful but showed a pulse. As a full-priced annual flagship it is the franchise's assembly-line reality made uncomfortably visible; as a multiplayer package in year two of support, it quietly became easy to recommend. The B is the average of a C product and an A service.