I liked some of the changes to the pointstreaks but too much felt like a step-back from Black Ops – the theatre mode is terrible, the lack of caps/defs for objective games is poor, but these are all details, it is the gameplay that matters. The game play is frantic but not in a good way, streaks are difficult and (with the spawns) deaths are often random. The spawns are terrible and even in domination (a very stable game mode) you'll appear in front and behind of people all the time – I guess it balances out but it is still annoying. Even with friends though MW3 is a weirdly frustrating experience.
This leaves the multiplayer – a game mode that has eaten so many days of my time on COD4 that I would be embarrassed to write it down! I have noticed that over the consecutive games I have put less and less time into it, to the point now that the game is social for me – I play it with friends but never alone. I'd have loved the fun of 4 players in a party doing it but it does work best with 2 players in terms of the challenge and gameplay. However here the "human" foes armed with guns and moving tactically (as opposed to rushing mindlessly) made me feel I could outsmart and out play them. I enjoyed this mode a great deal and it was the one I played most – the supernatural force of the zombies in the Treyarch games (which Infinity Ward have ripped off here) never appealed to me because it felt like just battling the tide. Massively better though is the addition of the Survival mode wherein you try and hang on through waves of increasingly difficult enemies. The Spec Ops part of the game remains a little stuck on in terms of the missions – on hardest setting some are near impossible without 2 players but mostly you'll get through them easily enough and their standalone nature means they are not that engaging.
It doesn't all work in terms of plots and events but I enjoyed it a great deal and the ending was a great build-up to a really satisfying conclusion. It manages to be incredibly cinematic but yet I never felt like I was a tiny part of something bigger (like I did with the World at War campaign) and instead it was focused, with skirmishes having global meaning and urgency but yet being tight and contained. It is very short if you're only buying the game for the campaign, but I found it enjoyable and very satisfying as a game. The voice action is manly and urgent, the soundtrack is loud and dramatic and the overall effect is that you really feel you're in the middle of a Michael Bay action movie. It is gloriously over the top and it is like being in an action movie. The game play allows for some flexibility within the "rails" on which you're on I found I could rush direct or flank and the layout of the levels. OK the device of making Makarov all-powerful and central doesn't totally work but what does work is the delivery. The campaign continues the OTT plot and takes the same model of playing several characters across various global settings.
Part of the reason for this was that, although short, I do enjoy the MW campaigns and, wary of spoilers, this is where I started. Having been badly burnt with MW2 (where I found myself a paying beta tester for the massive problems with that game) I was wary but was able to get it cheap as supermarkets tried to lowball each other to get volume in place of profits. As sure as winter follows fall, the final quarter of the year sees another in the Call of Duty franchise pop onto shelves giving fans more of what they want but with new maps, weapons, story and so on.
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