Culture

I realise that reviewing the single player portion of a Call of Duty game is like reviewing McDonalds’ salads: It’s there on the menu, but no one expects you to pay good money for it. However, I did enjoy the campaigns from the first two Modern Warfare games, and subsequently thought I might kill a few hours with the third installment.

The third game revolves around a stereotypically evil Russia invading the US and Europe in “World War Three”, blowing shit up and killing some innocent people. You play some special ops delta force American guy, Derek (his mates call him Frost, a much cooler name); and Yuri – a (you guessed it) Russian renegade soldier dude fighting with some British renegade soldier dudes from the previous games. Between these two soldiers, you get to kill a whole bunch of Russians (and some Africans) with some high-powered weaponry, in order to stop the war and bring the terrorist who is actually responsible to justice. Although the story makes more sense than Modern Warfare 2, it still comes across as a pro-war, anti-communist, Cold War wet dream – far removed from the almost-believable plot of the first Modern Warfare.

In terms of the gameplay itself, it’s exactly what you expect: Aiming down the sights of a rifle with a lot of knobs, mowing down hordes of enemy troops and taking cover behind some crates for a few seconds to heal your bullet wounds. As per usual this is punctuated with some special missions where you control WALL-E with machine guns, and the obligatory AC-130 raining-explosions-from-the-sky.

It should all be as fun as the previous games, but it’s not. It feels subtle at first, but the game won’t let you do anything: doors need to be kicked down by your AI mates, battles are already started by the time you arrive, you get told when and how to engage the enemy and there is never any reason to change your weapon – the gun you get at the start of the mission is already the best. It subtracts further from the already limited interactivity a linear FPS has to offer.

– Vimal Patel