Definitely fits the bill of the overblown third part in a trilogy à la Matrix Revolutions, Pirates of the Caribbean At World's End, Dark Knight Rises etc.

Apparently in this one you play as a character who was totally present during the big events of the first two Modern Warfare games the whole time (which basically just acts as a greatest hits flashback). Weak ass storytelling.

Basically what I felt upon the game's original release - that it felt like the first COD that was just going through the motions.

It's easy to forget just how groundbreaking Call of Duty 4 was given the oversaturation of modern military shooters in the past 15 or so years, and Modern Warfare 2 only served to build and improve on that formula. This game felt like Modern Warfare 2.1, only piggybacking on its predecessors successes. Both Call of Duty 4 and Modern Warfare 2 have a number of memorable missions, but I could not tell you a single mission from this game. There's just an extreme lack of restraint, with every single mission devolving into everything exploding with a threadbare plot that's mostly just an excuse to blow more shit up. It's a game that feels soulless, more of an explosive shooting gallery than a genuine campaign.

Modern Warfare 3 is a good ending to the original MW trilogy; the story has its moments of high action and heartbreak, the guns feel nice to use, multiplayer I have many a night where I was up late playing it with my friends when I probably should have been asleep.

I'd say it is a stepdown from 2, as there are some real dud maps and the lack of originality started to become apparent for the COD games. This is one of the first ones where it felt like "another COD game, the series is basically 2K or Madden now" started to be a common criticism. It had become more obvious that they were starting to treat these games like sheer cash cows rather than, ya know, games.

Fun to play these days, especially for Survival, but it's shown its age as time has gone by.

It's about this time when Infinity Ward/Sledgehammer has run out of tricks in its bag. All of the beats have become fully routinized by the third entry: the Shocking Moment, The Betrayal of Trust, The Dramatic Killing of Beloved Characters. The ability to elicit shock or surprise has dwindled, and even the large scale spectacle that worked so well in the last entry has lost its luster. It's tempting to view this as a commentary on the numbing tedium of endless combat, with all of the interminable dreary gray settings, but I don't really think anyone in charge of the game was interested in operating on that level.

Also MW3 the only COD multiplayer I've ever played, and while it's not actually "good" in any real sense, it does scratch a particular Pavlovian itch with that contact/kill sound effect.

This game's probably my least favorite from COD's Golden Age (COD4-BO2), but it was still pretty good. It felt like Modern Warfare 3 would never live up to the hype of being the sequel to the critically acclaimed Modern Warfare 2, and I suppose that was true to an extent. Modern Warfare 3 had interesting ideas, and concluded the Campaign trilogy with a stellar showing, while Multiplayer implemented awesome features like the Specialist Killstreak system. Splitting Killstreak types into Assault, Support, and Specialist was a cool idea, and it worked pretty well in practice. It was more balanced than Modern Warfare 2, but there was something really lacking there that I can't quite put my finger on. Perhaps Modern Warfare 3 suffers from the success of Modern Warfare 2, living in its shadow too hard to really shine or stand out in any way. I'm not sure. It was still a great game, though.

Score: 88