Review: Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3

The action is big.  The destruction is big. The gritty dialogue is big. The amount of money being made by Activision is big ($400 million in the first day alone).

In keeping with that theme, the single-player mode in CoD:MW3 is epic in scope and purpose.

Continuing from the story in Modern Warfare 2, the Russians have invaded the United States, partially spurred on by a massacre in Russia blamed on Americans. The heart of New York City is in the grasp of the Russians as the movie (er, game) begins.

Meanwhile, the real mastermind of the attack – Vladamir Makarov – continues to plot attacks. His first is a series of chemical attacks in major cities across Europe.

Within these overarching stories, you play as several foot soldiers in the battles. You are again often joined in the action by British special ops Captain John “Soap” MacTavish, who serves to lead through some levels and fill out the back story. While mostly conducted afoot, some of the levels again cast you as a bombardier targeting clusters of enemies from on high.

Gameplay is fast and furious, with non-stop gunplay in New York, Paris and other hot spots across the globe on a grand scale. The series has never adhered to the idea that the more realistic, the better.

Everything is over the top in C0D games. The weapons, the action, the dialogue – everything is on hyperdriven caffeine. Now, this isn’t a knock against the series. If you’re going to go for it, you might as well go big.

Multiplayer action in CoD:MW3 has been tweaked somewhat from MW2.

New gametypes have been added - kill confirmed, team defender – and the concept of killstreaks has been revamped.

In past games, putting together a string of kills – without dying – made available new actions. It could be a helicopter that would fly in a kill enemies or a remote controlled car packed with explosives.

The sole focus of killstreaks was to encourage a player to kill as many of the other team as possible, without encouraging players to use teamwork to achieve goals.

Modern Warfare 3 is attempting to remake the concept with Pointstreaks. Instead of rewarding for only killing, players can garner points by working together. Pointstreaks can be carried over even after death, in some cases.

Pointstreaks fall into three strike packages - Assault, Support and Specialist. Assault rewards punish the other team, such as Predator missiles or attack helicopters. Your point streak resets on death. Support package persists through death and includes ballistic vests for teammates and SAM turrets that destroy aerial killstreaks. Specialist allows you to earn additional perks during the streak, which resets on death.

Of the new gametypes, Kill Confirmed is perhaps the most innovative. It is played like Team Deathmatch, but upon killing an opponent, his dogtag must be retrieved by a member of your team for the kill to be added to your total. The opposing team can deny the kill by getting to the dogtag first.

The video vault also returns, for those players vain enough to want to preserve matches and screenshots online. I also found it invaluable in determining cheating players, making it much easier to identify and report miscreants taking advantage of glitches.

New to the CoD series is Call of Duty Elite – a super special club available to players that allows them to view stats online and other goodies.

Elite is divided into two tiers – free and premium. Free is limited, with the ability to edit your profile, create classes, join public groups and perform other mostly administrative stuff. Premium ($49.99) adds monthly downloadable content, competitions with prizes, exclusive clan benefits and more.

Elite was not functioning yet, so there’s not much else to report on it.

The Call of Duty series has become the Madden NFL of shooters – a yearly offering with enough tweaks to bring the fans back for more. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 is the latest and greatest of them all, at least until next year.

Platform: PlayStation3/Xbox 360

Manufacturer: Activision

Rating: Mature

Score: 9 chilies