Playing through this piece of shit on veteran is one of the most joyless experiences I have ever had. There is nothing good here, the gameplay is some of the most bland stuff ever, the visuals are absolutely washed out and ugly, and not only is the narrative 100% uninteresting, the messaging and takeaway is as miserable as the rest of the experience.

Anti-war, but only in the way that the game is so mindnumbing, you would not want anything to do with the desensitized and distasteful garbage displayed.

When I was playing a kid called me a racial slur, I proceeded to find his address and murder his parents. Who's laughing now Timmy? WHO THE FUCK IS LAUGHING NOW?!

Turns out Timmy was my son and I just killed my ex-wife and her husband. The police are looking for me, I'm scared, and I'm typing this over McDonald's Wifi.

God I need a Papst Blue Ribbon.

So, Russia attacks Europe in MW3. All of Europe. At once. It's easy to dunk on the game for this major contrivance - a lot of people have, after all, it's one of the most commonly brought-up complaints about MW3's plot. But it is fucking insane, the idea that Russia can mobilize entire armored divisions across Europe just like that, especially since they spent a lot of time getting their asses kicked in COD4 and in MW2, the latter of which featured a Russian invasion on America.

There is no fucking way they'd have that many usable resources after losing so frequently. If this was an alternate reality where Russia had conquered a lot of territory and thus had control of those conquered territories' military power & supplies, MW3's plot would be (slightly) more believable, but somehow, someway, we have to suspend our disbelief and buy into the notion that a country that's lost two incredibly scandalous wars is somehow stable and powerful enough to invade the entirety of Europe. And also America. Again. And it just doesn't work. It doesn't work in isolation (the strategy of 'invade all of Europe simultaneously' would be the tactical blunder of the fucking millennium) and it doesn't work in context to the larger narrative. Russia should barely be scraping by, especially since their ICBMs were destroyed in COD4 and their spontaneous war against America didn't work at all, not to mention the fact that not every Russian supports Makarov's plans, to the point where the literal President of Russia wants Makarov stopped and there's an entire faction of anti-Ultranationalist rebels that want Makarov stopped. It's so stupid that even the average player might be able to pick up on just how outlandish Makarov's plan in this game really is.

At least Price and Soap's side of the story is engaging as per usual. Seeing them struggle to hunt down and kill Makarov is genuinely the only cool part of a bloated story - once again, for the third time in a row, the plot only starts working whenever the Brits are involved. It's cool seeing their supplies dwindle over the course of the game, Soap's death is a decent moment all around, and Price's final spat with Makarov is a great way to cap off their rivalry. Honestly, if MW3's campaign had just been an expansion pack DLC to MW2, featuring like nine or ten missions of Price and co. wrapping up loose ends with Makarov, I'd have been satisfied. The plot works when it hones in on the disavowed Task Force 141 and not the stupid ass WW3 narrative.

Wish I could say the rest of the game is quite as fun as the Price and Soap stuff. The shooting feels pretty good and there's a nice variety of weapons, but there's a strange lack of immediacy and punch to the weapons and shooting in MW3. It's not bad or anything, but I feel like the weapons aren't as explosive or attention-grabbing as they were in MW2. Maybe it's a sound design issue. The multiplayer is fine, I guess. It's pretty unmemorable across the board, especially when it comes to overall map design, but to be fair, it had to compete with MW2, a game whose multiplayer literally defined an entire generation of gamers and revitalized the entire industry of multiplayer gaming. Anything after that would feel a bit... lesser. I do enjoy the co-op and especially survival mode quite a bit, though - I think the co-op elements of MW3 are the best aspects of the game. This game becomes a lot more fun playing survival with a friend. It ain't quite Nazi Zombies, but it's pretty damn fine in its own right.

The problem is that everything MW3 tries to do, barring the co-op, just feels like a less effective version of the stuff that worked in COD4 and MW2. The story is contrived and genuinely themeless this time around, the shooting feels bland compared to MW2's god-maker gameplay, the multiplayer map design is pretty mid across the board, and there's a feeling of pointlessness that kind of sinks its way into the entire game, a distinctive lack of that spark and inspiration that made COD4 & MW2 such genre-defining games to begin with. MW3 just feels like another functional shooter, and by the standards of the two excellent games that came before it, that's hardly anything to write home about.

All of Europe. Simultaneously. How, man?

It's arguable to say most games of its ilk never seemed to understand what made the MW series work! Doubly so for its much derided campaigns, mindless shooting for equally mindless setups.

Even if I'd be remiss to call this truly great, there's something to the encounter and level design of this game that feels like a lost art to me with its expansive, linear driven spectacle that feels calculated as it is deliberate. This form of game design was derided then as it is now, but how many of them communicate such a clear, readable sense of flow and variety that keeps the player focused? So to speak, its structure predominantly supposed on making you constantly aware of every pinpoint action and view you're making with clear, legible enemies that have distinguishable silhouettes and composition for its encounter design bolstered by its generous usage of cover placed throughout much of its level design promote this mindset heavily, especially with how its pacing is always changing into discrete chunks of gameplay variety (perspective switching and mechanic mixups galore) that is always shifting. It's intuitive and snappy to a degree "cinematic" games need to be, with an immediacy to back it up. Doesn't that give a wiff, but faint calling of the pleasures of the once dominant light gun shooter, where twitch aiming and setpieces takes precedence over anything else?

MW3 to its advantage and detriment amps this up to a bloated degree, its theatrical, jingoistic sense of war into an intense pyrrhic thrill ride, the machismo firing on all cylinders into something dazzling.

Foi criticado na época por ser mais do mesmo, porém ainda consegue ser um bom jogo!

Campanha muito sólida igual MW, MW2 e que encerra a história da trilogia sem nenhuma queda de qualidade.

Multiplayer inferior ao BO1, MW2 porém ainda é bem divertido, não tem muito mapas muito bons mas esse foi o cod que trouxe várias coisas novas pra franquia que são usados até hoje então foi importante

O Melhor Spec Ops da trilogia, simplesmente, sem comentários.

Modern Warfare 3 was never a popular game in the franchise but it has always been a special one to me. As a kid, I likely spent countless days of my life playing this. Dozens upon dozens of hours playing the multiplayer. If I was playing a game that wasnt far cry or borderlands, it was call of duty. And this was the one I played the most. I loved the campaign, it inspired a lot of dumb stories I wrote and generally it was one of my favorite games for the longest time. So when I eventually got a PS3 a while ago, this was top of the list on games I wanted to replay. And just yesterday while sick I decided to dedicate my whole day to it. And there was some really lovely nostalgia. Now the game is far from perfect but it still for the most part holds up and is just as good as I remember. The campaign has a lot of really memorable setpieces and for CoD the story is really good too. My only real complaint is too much of it just amounts to Sandman, Soap or Price yelling the characters name and telling them what to do. I would prefer a little more agency and less restriction but its a linear mostly on the rails game and isnt really that big of a deal. Unfortunately, there is a bug where if your PSN account was created after 2019 you aren't able to play the multiplayer. This was pretty heartbreaking for me, but I did walk through some of the maps in local play to relive the little nostalgia I could. Special Ops missions are basically harder versions of campaign missions. Not something I care for but its nice to have. The real great addition is survival mode. Its basically waves of increasingly tough enemy soldiers and its a whole lot of fun, I really hope a future game brings it back.

Overall, Modern Warfare 3 is still a really fun time all these years later, and I'm happy that I got to play this again. One for the books.

Trophy Completion - 52%
Time Played - 10 hours this time, true number uncountable
Nancymeter - 85/100
Game Completion #53 of 2022
May Completion #3

Modern Warfare 3 is essentially Modern Warfare 2 but again...and yet worse, much worse.

I don't think you could possibly replicate the magic of MW2 because that game found the sweet spot between a hilariously dumb story and a fun and exciting fps game.

But how do you follow it up? IW came up with an answer: Do it again...no different from before. Like the games even look identical to one another, 2 years apart and this game just looks like an expansion pack to MW2. I think MW2 may even look better graphically speaking somehow.

The only things saving this game from being just bad are:
1. the ending is pretty satisfying
2. spec ops is pretty fun even if its way worse than in mw2 (way too trial and error imo)
3. survival mode is fun
and 4. the set pieces still work sometimes.

The game plays like a list of cliches from the genre, slow motion, random explosions, unbelievably dumb plot (Russia invades Europe! All of it! At once! While also the president is missing...and he was about to declare peace...who the fuck send the russian army to invade Europe?), that one sniping part, characters dying for no reason, the shocking moment (woah a kid dies), too many turret sections to count, obligatory AC-130 part that makes me thank Spec Ops the line even more for showing how fucking awful using that type of weaponry actually is, instead of treating it as a momentary power fantasy (cough cough mw3), also racism.

I mean c'mon you go to Africa in one mission and kill like a thousand black people just to find out it was all for nothing cuz Makarov wasn't even there...alright IW why is this shit even included? It's literally just a random detour that goes nowhere and feels just like a poor excuse to shoot up some foreigners that aren't Russian.

Anyways another issue I had with this game is that I NEVER knew who the fuck I was playing as, sometimes you're Yuri, sometimes you're random American guy nr48210, you play as the Russian president's body guard in one mission, also Price in the last mission, prb some other people I forgot.

The game does a poor job at giving you context, it's more of a disconnected series of set pieces than a coherent story and it makes the game feel like it simply doesn't care enough to give you a good story, the only part that matters is at the end when Makarov dies, rest is just kinda filler when it comes to the story.

Also for some reason, at the end of the game, they just decide to kill off a lot of characters because they clearly had no idea how to tie up their character arcs since nobody has any so the best they could think off is just killing them.

Idk looking back, while I did enjoy mw3 for being mw2 but different (well not that different, well actually its just mw2), the more I think about it, the less I like it.

The ending might be badass but the rest of the game is just kinda trying too hard to capture something it can't possibly hope to catch and no amount of dumb shit will make up for it...well ok maybe the Eiffel tower collapsing almost makes up for it. Almost.

Just truly unbelievable how disappointing this campaign is. Sure, maybe the multiplayer wasn't bad, maybe the shooting feels good, but by this point this is a standard, it's all as much of a given as it's been for the first three mainline titles in the Call of Duty franchise, and everyone was already bored of that by the third game too, despite the increasing level of graphical fidelity and improved gameplay diversity.

But this game lacks even that, there's a lot of new gimmicks for sure but they all boil down to painfully slow sequences, so many stealth sections, a monotony of a Call of Duty campaign has never been as bad as it is here. It feels like they tried to break the monotony of shooting by having enemies drop different types of weapons more often, but why in the hell would I want a silenced ppsh for an all-out, guns-blazing assault? All this to try and focus the narrative on Price, Soap, and a new member of their unit: Yuri.

And they butcher their story horribly. They decide that their poster boy Price and the fan-favorite Soap will now by mythologized, they will become legends, superheros akin to those of the last two Treyarch titles, but this isn't a Treyarch title. Modern Warfare was always a poltical thriller exploring the terrors of fucking modern warfare. It wasn't about Soap or Price, it was about the entire world getting to see and understand how technology changed the face of war. MW3 is like, idk, alternative history time, let's do full-on WW3 across Europe, let's actually retcon that a character was in places they were not, let's have that character be the new protagonist, let's have 2000 more impossible odds but also make the game shorter. There's so much wrong with the direction this series went for in its finale. And, again, by now its style, presentation and gameplay are fully played out, so it couldn't even muster a finale consistent with the two previous entries, they had to pull things out of nowhere for, well, literally no reason, I can't imagine why they couldn't let you play as Price the entire game, delve deeper into his psyche or something, have psychological warfare be the main theme of the third game. It's just an idea, shouldn't be taken too seriously, but I'm just confused by every narrative decision made by this game. What we got is a game that decides it's a great idea to have a scene where they cut away from the action to show a child exploding from the perspective of one of her parents. Disgraceful.

The final level is a return to reveling in violence. Isn't it so freaking awesome how you murder the guy and watch him die and do a quicktime event to punch him and hang him? So antithetical to all that the Call of Duty franchise tried to say about war once upon a time. And to think they add civilians to that last level, giving you one final chance at commiting war crimes...
What a disgrace.

Easily the easiest Veteran campaign. Good, I wanted to get this over with as fast as possible. It's very generous, but still not generous enough to do the fun stuff you're able to do on lower difficulties. Most of the missions are gimmicky or stealth-based, so it's not like Veteran makes a big difference anyway.

Closing words: fuck this campaign. Boring, butchered, egregious, appalling, disappointing.

A satisfying conclusion to the original Modern Warfare trilogy!

Admittedly when this first released I was a little underwhelmed but replaying it all these years later and its a solid entry in the series. I love how brutal Captain Price is in this one and he's my favourite character in the franchise. Billy Murray seriously deserved some kind of award for his performance here because he really sells Price being at the end of his rope.

My biggest flaw I guess would be the gameplay just isn't that innovative. The new weapons are fine but compared to MW2 there kinda lackluster. I also find the campaign the least memorable of the three though Soap's death and Makarov finally getting his comeuppance were done well. The actual story is good but the levels while fun just aren't as iconic as the ones from the previous two games. Its also odd you can't turn on hit markers in the campaign but there in special ops?

Survival mode is a lot of fun with Village being my favourite map. Model 1887 supremacy boss!

RIP to Soap, Yuri, Sandman, Grinch and Truck!

Can we get a bloody remaster already though?

Just like with MW2 I didn't play through the entire game this time, but I have beaten it before (twice IIRC), so I'm marking it complete. However, this time the reason for my abrupt stop wasn't my annoyance with the game, but rather the fact it just started giving me an error at the loading screen of Eye of the Storm. The first time it popped up, it actually messed with my hard drive, and I had to run fsck on it. I tried launching it two more times, but then decided not to push it, as I simply don't think the game is worth it.

Still, I played through 12 out of 18 missions this time, and I think this gives me enough of a perspective to judge the game.

I feel like, as the new people were put in charge of this, it was a bit of a challenge for both the gameplay department and the story department as to how to follow up on the previous two MW games.

In terms of the gameplay MW1 and MW2 are radically different. With the first one offering an old school CoD gameplay with a relatively open level design that allows for flanking and maneuvering, and the second one being almost entirely on-rails. I think MW3 managed to strike a sort of balance between the two. Most of the game is still extremely linear, but occasionally they put you in locations with a lot of cover and room for strategic approach. And these areas allow you to advance at your own pace and choose how to engage with each enemy. The game also has less "horde mode" sections (if any), which is a good thing, and way waaaay more scripted sequences, which this time I thought were done more professionally than in MW2. The game strips players' control more often, but this only means that there's less situations where scripts do not work as intended. I think with the occasional sandboxy level design, you still get more actual gameplay out of MW3 than you got out of MW2.

Regarding the story, I feel like the new writers realized just how dumb the first two games were, and had to come up with a way to follow them that wouldn't make them look just as dumb. Considering this, I think they've managed to do a great job. I don't think you could've written a better story for MW3. I feel like they intentionally chose to simplify the nonsensical political nuances of the first two games, and focus more on a simple revenge story and some generic Tom Clancy stuff for the war sections. There's very few mentions of ultrantionalists and Zakhaev or their political scheming. You could genuinely just jump into this game and enjoy it as a pulpy depiction of World War 3. It's still stupid and ridiculous, but once you go past the premise, it kinda works. Most of the game takes place in Europe and America, locations that the devs are familiar with. Which is also good move, because they're not gonna misrepresent obscure areas like the first two games did. I've been to Paris once, and this game does seem to depict it relatively accurately.

All in all, a mixed bag precisely because it is a mix of the good and the bad of the previous entries. But a huge improvement over the infuriating MW2. I feel like this is the kinda game you can just spend a couple of evenings on and move on with your life. It doesn't try to reinvent the wheel, so ends up being just "another" Call of Duty game. Neither great, nor terrible, but you can have fun with it, if you're willing to overlook some flaws.