Call of Duty – Modern Warfare III (2023) review: Once more unto the breach

The high-profile series amassed more than $1bn in revenue for the PlayStation owner in the 12 months of 2021 alone. Millions of players spend a third of their game time in CoD’s world.

As a result, Microsoft has assured Sony and the regulators it will do nothing to threaten that console availability for years to come, such is the sensitivity around the annually updated military shooter.

Those financial insights came from poorly redacted legal papers but you can bet Activision and Microsoft also knows to the last dollar how valuable their signature franchise is – even going to the trouble of putting an unskippable ad full-screen for it on the dashboard of every Xbox recently.

Little wonder then that Activision eagerly feeds the yearly upgrade cycle with a new game every November – although the word “new” is stretching the definition to breaking point in the case of Modern Warfare III.

Like 2022’s remake of Modern Warfare II, this instalment takes as its starting point a highly popular and well regarded original from more than a decade ago – and then it begins to fiddle around with it.

But the inside story seems to be that MWIII (2023 edition) was intended to be a considerably different game but wasn’t going to hit its release date. Activision could obviously not have countenanced a year without Call of Duty juicing its coffers and so this alternative has been rushed into service instead.

Boot up into the menus and it’s immediately obvious that Call of Duty the brand now trumps all else, with the home screen now a giant launcher for any owned CoD titles going back years. Wanna play a little COD: Black Ops? Last year’s MWII? Or battle royale themed Warzone? It’s all here.

After a little rummaging and a lot of installation (more than 200GB, ooof), you find that this year’s MWIII looks like the full package – a campaign, several multiplayer modes including Warzone and, yay, the return of Zombies. Yet not all is it appears.

The first evidence of MWIII’s curtailed development lies in its inconsistent story mode, which follows the prison escape of Russian madman Vladimir Makarov and his deadly threat to global security. Unusually for a CoD yarn, it switches between the familiar grandiose but linear firefights and freeform large maps with a series of objectives to be completed in any order.

On the one hand, these missions showcase the awesome technical skills at Activision’s studios. Check out the scarily lifelike facial work in cut-scenes, or the gorgeous natural scenery in deserts, mountains and urban areas. On the other hand, there are copious signs of insufficient quality control, with characters clipping through geometry and unforgivable glitches. One stealth mission to plant GPS trackers finished abruptly but successfully in the middle of a shootout with dozens of enemies – not very secretive, eh?

The open-world missions don’t make any more sense with their semi-roguelike structure that allows you carry discovered weapons into subsequent runs. It’s no Dishonored but look past that dissonance and they prove an agreeable change of pace.

Multiplayer seems to largely recycle the maps from the 2011 edition of MW3, albeit suitably polished up and gleaming. They certainly offer endless frantic action but players with long memories may wonder whether it all feels too familiar.

That brings us to Zombies but not the compellingly twisted variation many had grown to love. Instead of a rounds-based wave of enemies, you’re dropped into a sprawling map with as part of a three-person squad and offered a selection of tasks (kill, collect, etc) to complete before racing to an exfiltration point. The undead are almost an afterthought here, mere cannon fodder as you work with your team against other human squads to seize your goals.

There’s no doubting the fun quotient and the challenge ramps up when you tackle harder NPC foes. Yet it just resembles a repurposed Warzone to me, not nearly as wacky as the days of characters voiced by Jeff Goldblum and Ron Perlman.

Call of Duty has rarely been as flawed a package as this and perhaps it’s getting dinged so much by critics because MWIII this year falls below Activision’s usual technical standard. Anyway, if you don’t like this one, there’ll be another along in 12 months’ time. Microsoft is banking on it.