Pretty fun seeing and agreeing with this tweet yesterday & blindly starting From Dust only to realise it was exactly the same thing.
I think being an observer of the press cycle and online blowback in 2011 for this game coloured my expectations a little - those were my halcyon Born Different, Born Innocent days - I expected shit from a butt I'll be perfectly honest with you. Thoughts and prayers for the unfortunates who purchased this game at release, full price, expecting a fully-fledged God Game by the then on-top-of-the-world Ubisoft. People were pretty scathing as a result of their expectations being sidestepped, to the extent that I was successfully scared away from even trying the game all the way until now, over a decade later.

Anyway I thought this was fine lol. A fun little puzzle game where you worm around a map, scooping up elements and plopping them where they'd hopefully aid and protect your villagers from natural disasters. Hits some surprisingly high notes at points with thanks to some surprisingly good fluid physics and overall level of presentation - making tsunamis, terrain-warping earthquakes and volcano eruptions a truu thrill. Routinely £2 on Steam, which I'd say is apt, but you're honestly better off pirating the thing. The version of uPlay From Dust is packaged with is about ten layers deep into being fucked beyond repair, and the port in general feels like it's peddling to power its own iron lung.

one might say that Akira Yamaoka is the Snoop Dogg of video game music, showing up in shit way below his pedigree as long as he gets paid. his own personal Corey Feldman feature is his work for Stray Souls. Stray Souls is a UE 5 asset flip made by an ex-Bloober uber-racist with no real ideas or vision beyond being sorta like other games you know and FINALLY giving Silent Hill a Dark Souls dodge roll. don't worry: it has lots of AI generated slop in it too! it's got that Slender fangame pacing and design, a nauseating camera, what could be defined as animation, and a 'the cake is a lie' reference in this video game released in late 2023. tbh, if it weren't for the devs being transphobic art thieves i'd support it for being a lil funny but there's no heart behind this slop. cutscenes goofy tho!!! worth watching but not playing.

With the Phantom Pain, Kojima avoids the kind of spectacular descent into villainy that the fans wanted and the trailers promised. Instead he gives us the Sopranos season 6 of Metal Gear (but instead of a depressed mobster, we play as a depressed war criminal). Maybe that sounds like one of those hack game journalist "the dark souls of x" comparisons but it's true. The best case scenario for all of our favorite characters at this point is a swift death.

Spoilers below.

After losing everything in 9/11 Ground Zeroes, having his mind and body shattered, Snake just... gets what's left of the gang back together, rebuilds his army, and tries the exact same shit again. Only now, it is completely devoid of purpose; The revolutionary anti-imperialist cause of the 70's is all but forgotten. There's a sinking feeling of dread as the camera pans to "our new Mother Base" in the helicopter after rescuing Kaz; an undeniable sense of this being a pointless, doomed effort. But since being a soldier is the only thing these people know how to do, they are stuck repeating the cycle. They're just going through the motions at this point; You really get a sense of that as the once charismatic and driven Big Boss is rendered a mute with a permanent thousand-yard stare who just does whatever Kaz and Ocelot tell him. When he's at the base between these missions he just stares at nothing and vapes for five hours straight. Far from the badass antihero that people expected from trailers. Venom Snake is actually kind of a directionless loser, which makes him just as good of a player stand-in as Raiden.

And the missions in this game, while incredibly fun and well-made, really beg the age-old American question "What are we even doing in Afghanistan?". The plot feels totally incomprehensible at times; you spend the whole game going after random acronym organizations, shell companies, and mercenary groups with some vague connection to Bin Laden Skullface and al-Qaeda the American deep-state/Cipher. But every single character is lying and basically, everyone is Cipher. I had to repeat mission briefings multiple times at certain points to figure out what the hell was going on, and I still really don't. You could say that's just bad writing, but it works for what the game is trying to do, which is to make you feel like someone with a severe head injury. You're not supposed to understand this convoluted imperial entanglement - no one can. Especially not someone as fucked up as Snake.

And like Snake, the returning characters from Peace Walker are reduced to these broken versions of themselves. The only person who seems to be doing well is Ocelot, who has really come into his own as the sort dead-eyed psychopath that thrives in this kind of environment. Honestly? Good for him. Kaz on the other hand is a crippled, traumatized husk driven by revenge which is in turn driven by his own guilty conscience, and Huey has become a delusional, pathological liar focused solely on self-preservation. The few unnamed soldiers who survived 9/11 Ground Zeroes are literally running around as raving lunatics in the wilderness. All of these people were supposed to die a decade ago, and instead they linger on as hollow men. Even the metal gear Snake fights is broken - it literally doesn't work without someone's magical powers. It's just this technological abomination created by a madman. When it tries to chase Snake it gets stuck in rocks because its sheer size is self-defeating, and Snake easily sneaks away. Probably the most obvious meta joke in the game (watch the last couple minutes of the launch trailer and tell me the game isn't making fun of itself). These Metal Gear (Solid)s aren't what they used to be. I mean come on, Metal Gear Rex roared like a T-Rex; Metal Gear Sahelanthropus... makes monkey noises.

Even Skullface, who was built up in trailers and in Ground Zeroes as this terrifying villain, turns out to be just a sad joke like everyone else. His plan is the most nonsensical, harebrained shit ever explained by a villain in any Metal Gear game. He spent a decade practicing a 10 minute theatrical monologue about why he has to eradicate the English language and give everybody nuclear weapons to unite the world. It makes absolutely no sense, it's a parody of Metal Gear villains, which were already parodies of 80's movie villains. While Skullface is performing his monologue in the jeep (to the wrong person), Venom just hits him with that fluoride stare and loops through a 20 second idle animation. Then Sins of the Father just... starts playing as they sit across from each other in complete silence and avoid eye contact. It's one of the funniest scenes in the entire series, mistaken by many fans as simply botched and awkward on accident (rather than on purpose, which it was). And if that wasn't obvious enough, Skullface's defeat is just straight up slapstick comedy; he gets crushed by his own non-functional Metal Gear in the middle of another absurd speech. Genuine comedy gold.

I think a lot of people overlook the humor in this game. It's a lot more muted and sad than in the rest of the series, but it's smarter here than in any other entry. Miller's "why are we still here" speech is MEANT TO BE FUNNY AND OVERLY MELODRAMATIC, as well as depressing and hard to watch. The way it ends, with that uncomfortable silence before he just... awkwardly sits back down? That was on purpose. The tone is that this has all become a very pathetic (and funny) spectacle at this point. Kojima's famously asinine dialogue becomes something really transcendent here; each hollow, ham-fisted statement really drives home the fact that everyone is just making this shit up as they go along now, trying to weave some bullshit heroic narrative out of a long series of L's. Kojima is telling us: "This is you dude. This is the American Empire. Your War on Terror is as darkly funny as it is monstrous." MGSV isn't the self-serious death march the trailers painted it as.

The way V's cutscenes are shot adds to these moments too. The shaky, handheld camera builds documentarian realism and a sense of witnessing real atrocities in more high-stakes scenes, but can also lend a comedic awkwardness to these exchanges between characters. I've seen someone compare it to The Office as a criticism but I think that's a feature and not a bug, as strange as it sounds. Somehow, it just works so well for the tonal balancing act this game maintains. But what really elevates V's cinematography thematically is its use of continuous shots. One-takes are often criticized as being essentially a gimmick, style over substance. But in Metal Gear Solid, a series defined by the juxtaposition between hard military realism and over the top fantasy? It's pure genius. Having all of this insane Kojima bullshit captured in documentary style is so fitting for this series. Perfectly hyperreal.

Speaking of hyperreal, let's talk about Quiet. I've thought a lot about whether her portrayal plays into Kojima's contempt for the audience (and the Metal Gear series itself for that matter) or if it's just a part of the game that didn't land. I was inspired by this article to conclude the former. In classic Metal Gear fashion, Quiet's characterization is ridiculous and offensive, but ends up transcending its low-brow trappings and having an emotional payoff - all while playing into a greater meta-narrative. And if you don't like that method of storytelling, then you sure picked the wrong media franchise. That scene of her speaking for the first time to guide the helicopter through the sandstorm is genuinely great. It perfectly encapsulates Kojima's ability to make something ridiculous, cheesy, and melodramatic - but still deeply affecting and with a lot of heart.

But let's not get ahead of ourselves; Quiet is absolutely a biting self-parody of Kojima's own portrayal of women throughout his series and in the wider industry. It's Kojima saying "Is this what you like, you sick fucks?" or possibly a case of introspection on his part ("Oh God, is this what I like?"). She has some hastily made up bullshit explaining why she wears no clothes, she is literally incapable of speaking for herself, and she undergoes gratuitous violence and imprisonment. Kojima obviously knows how ridiculous this is; he's seen basically every American movie, he knows this isn't how you're supposed to respectfully portray women. No, Quiet's portrayal is purposefully exploitative. Her objectification starts out fairly straightforward, but it becomes more and more disturbing for the player to partake in as the game goes on, in order to heighten the dark absurdity of all of this (particularly in Chapter 2, which is where everything in the game falls apart, on purpose). The point of Quiet's character, and the whole game really, is to give players exactly what they want in the most contemptuous way possible. To make you "feel ashamed of your words and deeds", you could even say. MGSV is about getting exactly what you want (another MGS game, endless content, revenge on Skullface, a sniper gf) and resenting it.

To build on MGSV's portrayal of women though, I think it's important that Paz takes on the role that she does in this game. She makes an initially very confusing reappearance - that first moment when you see her is genuinely unnerving, as if even the strange, fucked up Metal Gear reality we have become accustomed to can't explain what we're seeing. Out of all the unrealistic fantasy bullshit we've seen in this series, a series where it feels like anything goes and there are no rules or laws of physics, this is the first moment where I went "Wait, what? How?" But as we find at the end of "Paz's" side story, this is all just a projection of Snake's fragmented psyche. It's incredible in the way it makes you question what's real and what isn't, while simultaneously using Paz as a proxy to just straight up diagnose Snake's own mental disorders. But it's tucked away where most probably never saw it - like a hidden repressed memory somewhere in Snake's mind.

It perfectly conveys his nostalgia for a time that was never even good, as well as his crushing guilt and helplessness over the death of Paz. It's genuinely moving. That last tape of hers is something right out of Silent Hill 2, and it adds such depth to Snake as this miserable person that you should absolutely not want to be. For Snake, women really are just these fixtures of loss, shame, and regret - feelings that no doubt originate from the killing of his mother figure, The Boss. And despite all of the talk about getting revenge and taking down Cipher, the only time we ever see Snake get animated in this game is in his scenes with Paz. Snake's desire for redemption, his insistence on nuclear disarmament that feels strangely out of place, and his statement at the start of the game that he's "already a demon"? It's all about Paz, man.

One thing fans really disliked about Snake's portrayal though is that he never really seems to become the demon we knew him as in the early games. We never get to see The Exact Moment Walt Became Heisenberg. Quite the opposite; his intentions appear to remain heroic all the way to the end. The only scene where Snake approaches the kind of evil fans wanted to see is when Snake appears to murder the children in the mines but ends up saving them instead. In trailers this was depicted as if Snake actually goes through with the murder; to me, this is the smoking gun of another Kojima bait-and-switch. Fans wanted a game full of shocking, flashy acts of villainy on the part of Snake, and Kojima deliberately lead them on in trailers (just like in MGS2) but denied them of it in the final game. What did fans get instead? Spreadsheets.

Don't miss the forest for the trees; Snake is absolutely responsible for unimaginable atrocities during the events of MGSV. But instead of sensationalist images of man's inhumanity to man, Kojima shows us the banal cruelty of what it really means to be at the top of the war machine: You're just... on the computer, like everyone else. And everything you're doing is represented through so many layers of abstraction that it is impossible to understand the consequences. This ties directly into the themes of Metal Gear Solid 2 as well; by issuing your orders via this computer interface, you are even further removed from what is happening in reality. You just do a cursory cost-benefit analysis before sending the next death squad to do god knows what in some African or South American country you don't even know the name of.

And when a disease outbreak hits Mother Base, Snake's iDroid computer makes it easy for him to commit ethnic cleansing, sentencing scores of people to imprisonment and death for the language they speak. It isn't until all of the digital artifice is stripped away, and Venom is forced to enter the quarantine zone and personally slaughter his own men, that he has any crisis of conscience (and you actually lose some of your best men, because Kojima never fails to give the story actual weight via game mechanics). And you can say "Venom didn't want to do it, he had no choice." But that's exactly the point. If the Metal Gear Solid series is about one thing, it's about individual will being crushed under the weight of systems and institutions that have become organisms in and of themselves.

It doesn't matter how much Venom yearns for redemption. It doesn't even matter if he's in charge of Diamond Dogs. The system of global private warfare that Big Boss and friends established has taken on a life of its own, just like the Patriots of MGS2. His own intentions are irrelevant. If this system demands he kill his own men, he will do it. If this system demands that Raiden later kill Solidus, he too will do it. All actions within the system, regardless of intent, perpetuate the cycle of violence, war, and profit. Even if Venom disarms all of the nukes and brings about the Peace Day that never came for Paz, it just sets up the nuke free world that we hear about Big Boss exploiting in the intro to Metal Gear 2.

That's why everything in MGSV takes on such a hilariously pathetic flavor. Nobody, not Big Boss, not Zero, not Skullface, not Venom, has any agency in any of this. They're just flailing, looking for anything they can do to enact their will in a system that now imprisons its own creators. The only person who manages to achieve victory over the system by the (chronological) end of the series is, once again, Revolver Ocelot. And he only does so by shedding all individuality, tearing his mind into a thousand schizophrenic pieces to always be one step ahead of the algorithm. And it's all because he wants to fuck Big Boss. In the end love wins, and I think that's beautiful. But for everyone else, they are doomed to perpetuate the system they so desperately want to be free of.

And to what end? The truth is that there is no point to this system beyond its own self-perpetuation - it's a Snake eating its own tail (pretty good, huh?). The soldiers of Diamond Dogs, and every other PMC, kill so that they can keep killing. It's all for the love of the game at this point. Sure, they did the same thing back in Peace Walker, but at least back then it felt like you were blazing a new trail, sending a ragtag band of freedom fighters to oppose imperialism - that's long gone now. Any lofty goals this organization may have had are now lying somewhere at the bottom of the Caribbean. All of the bullshit Snake and Kaz spout about "fighting for the future" and "standing tall on missing legs" are just words to talk the gun out of their own mouths, to convince themselves that they are still moving toward something.

But they aren't. In the end, after killing Skullface (which was made purposefully unsatisfying according to Kojima) as revenge for the events that destroyed his life a decade ago, Snake is left to rot in a hell of his own creation. There are no holiday celebrations or fun outings like on the Mother Base of Peace Walker, and it's far lonelier; Quiet is gone, Huey is gone, Paz is long dead but still haunts him, and some of his best men are dead by his own hand. His only friends, Kaz and Ocelot, are just using him in some schizo game of global 4D chess. Even Eli and the child soldiers are just suddenly gone, and your metal gear with them - much more simple and poignant than the infamously cut Episode 51 would have been.

The effort to rehabilitate these kids, and maybe figure out Eli's origins? Track him down after his escape? Nope, you never see them again; they're just another of Diamond Dogs' many failures, another part of yourself that will be missing forever. All you can do is take the same helicopter ride to do the same (flawlessly crafted) stealth infiltration missions again and again and again, because senseless murder is the only thing that makes you feel anything anymore. And with the battlefield always shifting to adapt to your tactics in-game, you'll never make any real progress. Oh yeah, and none of this is actually real and Snake's entire life is fake. And deep down, he knows it.

So what about the real Big Boss? Well, he's basically stuck in the same cycle, only he has shed even more of his humanity than Venom. By using Venom's life as a tool in his own geopolitical game, Big Boss has committed the very same crime that was done to him and The Boss back in Operation Snake Eater. And all you can do about it is watch him ride off into the sunset to pursue yet another stupid evil scheme (that we already know will be a total failure), before getting right back to work like the epic gamer you are. Because you the player, like Venom, love LARPing as Big Boss no matter how pointless and repetitive it becomes. You'll complain about how Chapter 2 is "unfinished" and repeats the same missions from Chapter 1 (those were optional just fyi), but guess what? You're still gonna play those missions.

The Phantom Pain left players with such a profound feeling of emptiness and loss, and that's the real reason they felt it was unfinished. It's not because of any actual missing content - MGS2 had far more cut content, backed up by documented evidence, not just internet memes. But the difference with that game was that there was no falling out between Kojima and Konami - a convenient scapegoat for any aspect of the game that wasn't what fans expected, anything that hit players the wrong way. But that gnawing void you feel playing this game, the feeling that something is missing? That was intended, and it's honestly pretty heavy-handed and obvious when you approach the game on its own terms. I mean do I even need to say it? The pain from something that's missing? It's barely subtext.

Kojima purposefully denied us almost all of the campy, goofy nonsense we love about the Metal Gear Solid series to force us to confront how fake and hollow the legend of "the world's greatest soldier" really is. The level to which this game irrevocably shattered the minds of Metal Gear fans, leaving them eternally chasing their White Whale (the Moby Dick references weren't for nothing), is a testament to how the whole experiment was a resounding success. It snuck past gamers' emotional defenses, subverted their media illiteracy, and made them actually fucking feel something for once. Something real, something about their actual lives even.

There's a reason the game ends on a mirror - it's because the game is trying to hold one up to its players. And they could never forgive it for that. For turning their shallow, campy video game funtime, where I get to be a cool secret agent and Solid Snake is my dad, into a challenging work of art that interrogates their life. Because it's true: you are Venom Snake. You're a slave to the whims of others, your own desire for satisfaction. You do not know why you do the things that you do. And everything you're doing here - in this video game, in the digital realm - is ultimately fruitless. Fans complain about how there's no real resolution or ending to the story in MGSV, but it seems to me like that's the point: There is no resolution to be found here - not for Snake, and not for you. None of this is moving toward any conclusion or moment of truth. If you spend your life playing video games, you certainly won't ever see one. Like Venom, you'll never understand yourself, never have a real identity. The only way out, to freedom, is to stop fighting - to stop gaming. You can't save MSF, or Paz, or the Boss, or even Snake - you can only save yourself. Get out while you can. In the words of Naomi at the end of MGS1: "You have to live, Snake."

And that's the way this story ends. No Mission 51 "Kingdom of the Flies", no unwinnable boss fight against Solid Snake like fans wanted. Not even a sudden cut to black à la the Sopranos. Just the same meaningless thing over and over again, but somehow getting worse, until it's just... over. Not with a bang, but a whimper. If Metal Gear Solid 4 was about accepting the death of something that has clung on to life far longer than it should (the Metal Gear Solid series), MGSV is about being denied that noble death, brought back to life in some profane necromantic ritual, forced to live a tortured, half existence for all of eternity.

MGSV is best summed up as Kojima's way of saying "You guys wanted to keep playing Metal Gear Solid forever? Fine, here you go. Enjoy yourselves." He knows that he'll never be able to give this series a conclusive ending - he already tried that with MGS4. Instead, Kojima hands it off to the player, letting each of us come to it on our own, privately. One day, each player will get tired of the same missions and the same fucking helicopter ride and quietly decide for themselves, once and for all "Alright... I guess Metal Gear Solid is over. I'm done." and turn the game console off.

Yeah man, this sucks.

Congratulations soldier, you have graduated suma cum update and are at the top of your class at Activision. As part of your duties, we will now implore you to launch the current iteration of Call of Duty. You have clicked "Call of Duty" in your steam launcher, now that you have loaded the game, please restart so you can install another update. After this you must navigate through a menu filled with more tiles than a Home Depot. Congratulations soldier, you have located Modern Warfare III, please wait as we restart the game once more so you can magically be teleported a la horadric cube into what we hope is the right game. Now, in your best David Byrne impression please jest aloud "that is not my beautiful wife" as you gaze at the familiarly unfamiliar menus. Surely you have loaded into the same game right, everything looks similar but... it feels a little off? You look more and let out a "this is not my beautiful house" as you open up the weapons loadout menu for multiplayer. It's okay though, the game may require jumping through more hoops than a dog agility course, but at least you got to something worthwhile right? Oh no you gaze up at the product you have purchased with seventy hard earned United States Dollars and relent "where is that large automobile?"

This game sucks man.

Let's start with the campaign, or rather the first red flag of many that draped the release line of Modern Warfare III. Gaming journalism in the tail-end of 2023 is effectively meaningless, trusted content creators are really the only place I'll look for reviews in, and even then I take my own favorites with a grain of salt. I know why SkillUp doesn't like something, and at this point after however many years of experience in the field he has, I know why Jeff Gerstmann may not like a title. It's with following creators like this that you can form a benchmark in gauging new releases. Publications like IGN, Gamespot, and even my former flame in Gameinformer have greatly lost any credibility that they had in a reduction towards meaningless clickbait laden SEO borne ad revenue vulturing. This isn't a joker moment essay on the industry, it's just an introduction to the doom and gloom that surrounded the singleplayer content of MW3 before it came out... again. Just about every media outlet and individual that had an advance copy seemed to approach the campaign with a heightened degree of malaise that was greatly foreign to the the series thus far.

It's short, like real short. I beat it in two days as I had obligations going on but it could easily be done in one sitting. At the end of the day, this isn't a big issue as first person shooters ultimately run a serious risk of monotony (see my recent review of Nightdive's Quake II,) and all things considered short games when paced well can out perform some of my favorite longer titles (Looking at you Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance.) The problem is that MW3's singleplayer is like a McDonald's McBurger order that they somehow managed to completely destroy. A McBurger doesn't have the best ingredients and it surely doesn't have to last, but man at least fucking do it right. This campaign jumps more sharks than Will Smith did in 2004 with next to zero exposition as to the legitimate motives of the antagonists, reasonable efforts by the "good guys" or a fitting ending. That McBurger you want has mayo on it, they forgot the cheese, and they didn't even include the fries in the order. You're so sad you don't even go back, you're out of money because you don't have your card on you and the fourteen cents in the cupholder won't get you another McBurger. Gas is running low and you just have to get home. That's how MW3 felt like with Like a Dragon: Gaiden on the horizon. The campaign was so extremely sad as a user experience that I wanted it to be over with almost as fast as it started.

Careful Snake, this is a sneaking mission!

Why was every level a sneaking mission in MW3? Why was I as the player so greatly enabled to sneak and silent kill my way through the entire game? I didn't see Hideo Kojima in the staff credits. Each level design felt like an afterthought, almost as if Activision was trying to resurrect a playable singleplayer experience like it was a Beatles song written over fifty years ago. Wait... that happened? And it was kinda okay? Oh. Seriously though, sneaking my way through some poorly designed open-zone maps that had a hard focus on not engaging in an all-out firefight against your enemy felt like a massive antithesis to the Call of Duty I grew up on, and even experienced last year with the re?release of MW2. You could tell some guy in the board room in the fourteenth hour of crunch was implored by upper management to add some variety to the environmental experiences of MW3. "HEY HOW ABOUT A WATER LEVEL, HOW ABOUT A SNOW LEVEL, HOW ABOUT... MAKAROV RUNNIN' AROUND" he frantically says as bits of hair fall from his scalp. He spins around in his Steelcase Series 2 3D Airback Chair beating his chest and slamming his eighth cup of coffee within the hour. Did I mention this man is a literal chimpanzee? It was nice seeing the familiar faces from the franchise heretoforth in Ghost, Soap, and Price, but its clear they just needed the guys to do a few more things for a few hours with no real end point for some campaign content. I am not joking with you when I say that the entirety of this game could not have happened and I believe the geopolitical state of the world within Call of Duty would have remained the exact same. You know it's bad when the McGuffin's in the story don't even lead anywhere with any legitimate credence or point.

I spent seventy hours last year playing Soul Hackers 2 in a mostly lukewarm experience and I legitimately think it was a better use of time than the two half afternoons I spent on the MW3 campaign. It's not just bad, it's aggressively uninteresting and that is one of the larger indictments you can have on a game with a budget of this caliber.

You decide the campaign wasn't for you, so you load up the mulitplayer, which is more or less the only reason you bought the game. Excited you are to play the old Modern Warfare II maps that you played in 2009 when you were much younger and the world was much more innocent. I'm kidding by the way, as a Metro Detroiter at the time the world was decidedly not better, but whatever. You remember all those broken lobbies on Rust that you got north of 100 kills on because some guy who had computer skills seemingly more insidious than Mr. Robot and wanted to level up quick? Yeah, Rust is back baby and it... sucks! I love going back and playing some Shipment on MW2 (2022) because the gameplay loop fits, its quick and really doesn't overstay its welcome. Everyone has the same sightlines and there are legitimate places to hide if you need a breath. It's such a tight experience because it has been optimized to be so, and even then its only really fun in bursts. Well, Rust is back and it sucks.

The immersion you have in breaking the "Wow Modern Warfare 2 (2009)'s maps kinda suck" was a moment I had way too quickly in MW3 to enjoy the rest of the game. They're unfair a lot of the time, boring, and you'll play them NONSTOP because there were 0 (Zero, nil, nada) new maps in the release of MW3. How lazy can you be to cook up a bad at best singleplayer with zero new content in the environmental design of the multiplayer? Sure it felt cool to quickscope some dudes on Highrise for a few minutes, but then I realized that you could and would be killed from everywhere just like you were back in the day. I'm not old, but I'm not a spry slide canceller either. I can hold my own in most FPS' quite well, but it was clear I hadn't studied the blade as well as the other folks loading in to this game with the optimal builds to abuse some genuinely miserable design on these maps. Rust gives you no moment of reprieve or a place to even think of setting up, Invasion takes approximately forty years to travel from one point to the end (that is if you are going mach 3.2 in a Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird,) Afghan rewards camping more than an REI, and Terminal has spawns that could have been better created by a Hainan black crested gibbon (yes I did have to give "species of gibbon" a google") given fifteen minutes in a world editor. The bottom line here is that the maps are nostalgic and varied, sure, but they don't feel good to play in the modern gamesphere. The temporal shift I feel in jumping from MW3 back to MW2 in regards to map design is colossal.

And then you load into the map.

I'm convinced you could watch the entirety of One Piece's 1075 current episodes in the time it takes to kill someone in MW3. I don't even know who this rewards? Getting the drop on one person or a group should be a vindicating experience to the predator stalking their prey, and in most games it is. In Modern Shitshow 3 you could read every accepted book within the expanded Warhammer universe before an assault rifle mag could take down two to three enemies. This was the most immediate shellshock to me coming from MW2 the day before, even moreso than the poor design of the retro maps. I kept shooting, I aimed well, I checked the time and four hours had passed, the same guy was still in front of me. I can't conceive of a reason to bump this up from where it was at in MW2 and even MW1 (2019.) I don't know who this benefits, because it surely isn't those who have the skill. Gunfights in MW3 feel more like they do in an Apex Legends or something where it's not necessarily the drop you get, but how you engage after the drop, which was never Call of Duty to me. Several times in my few days of playing have I been shot and had a full opportunity to disengage prone and run to cover because the enemy didn't account for the four hundred and fifty years that were required to kill me. With the first bullet of your magazine, a nineteen year old Lebron James is the first pick to the Cleveland Cavaliers in the 2003 NBA Draft. By the time you've killed the guy, he's now thirty eight and in his sixth season with the Los Angeles Lakers. I streamed this to friends and family alike in discord calls to confirm whether or not my suspicions about how poorly tuned this felt was just on me or not, and the resounding takeaway was Time to Kill (TTK) was simply way too long. In the time it took to write this review I have listened to aespa's 4th Mini album "Drama" twice through, this is not enough time to have killed someone in MW3.

I have three hundred something hours in MW2 over the last two-ish years and I unlocked just about everything I needed to outside of battle pass added content. The big billing was that I didn't have to unlock the guns that I had unlocked in MW2 once more in MW3, which is... good. But why do I have to unlock perks again? More on that in a second. Why do I have to unlock the same exact killstreaks (by grinding levels) once more? Did my operator (of whom I play the same exact one) forget the phone number to his VTOL guy? Does it really require fifty more levels or however much it actually is to relearn this all? It's stuff like this that clearly indicates to me that MW3 is the money hungry cash grab it appears to be, dangling enough in front of the player to make it seem familiar, but taking enough away that they feel the need to get it all back. Oh even more fun, all those guns you still have, remember that? None of your loadouts carry over so I hope you either took screencaps of your ten classes from MW2 or remember every single change you made to tune and augment your weapons, because haha pranked! Tee hee! Silly you!!! Those didn't carry over! After attempting to re-create my go to classes from MW2 I gave up and realize my enjoyment of the game shouldn't rely on living in the past (ironic ain't it,) and that I should give the new guns a try. Same as it ever was.

I'd just like to make fun of this game's "perk" system real quick before I close out. Instead of having perks like you've had since the original CoD: Modern Warfare back in 2007, you have... equipment! It all does the same shit, but check this out... it's gear! Because "Scavenger" was too familiar with the player, you now have twinkles space dust rubs fingers in the air does a mystifying spin in my pointed cap and robes "Scavenger gloves!" Thats right perks were too reasonable so we've subbed them out for gloves, boots, vests, and headsets? I couldn't tell you what does what (outside of boots) because I don't care anymore. I am completely indifferent to this experience. As soon as I unlocked the Gunner Vest I put it on, because it is Overkill from the last few games, allowing you as the player to carry two primary weapons. This was a non negotiable for me in MW2 because I like to have both my close and long range options offered. I mistakenly thought this might resuscitate my enjoyment of MW3 from its Mariana-Trench level grave but it didn't, because it turns out a dilapidated McBurger is still a dilapidated McBurger. In equipping my vest, just like real life, I couldn't wear boots anymore. My #xXxT4CSPRINTxXx wasn't as long as it used to be pre-vest, but that was a sacrifice I was willing to make. At Max Boot level, again because perks are too hard to use and make no sense, you gain the ability to SILENTLY MOVE WHEREVER YOU WANT. Because that's fair! Level to win! Max level you become Psycho Mantis!

I have zero willingness to max out my rank in this game or really dedicate any more time to the multiplayer experience of MW3 because just about every element of it is somehow more magnificently frustrating that I could imagine. I would sooner pay someone an exorbitant fee to slap me as hard as they can when I wake up every morning then spend another hour playing on the same exact maps I spent hundreds of hours on fourteen years ago with a shooter experience this poor.

Dobby can't be hurt anymore, Dobby is a free elf. I am Dobby.
This game sucks man.

Campaign:
Not quite as bad as people made it seem, but significantly worse than we deserve and are paying for.

Still a truly spectacular piece of shit. 2/10.

Multiplayer:
No prestiges or Season 0 content, MWII macrotransactions and Battle Pass fill the store, same insufferable UI, and undesirable matchmaking practices.
The fantastic sound design, visuals, gunplay, and nostalgia bait maps can't make up for all the shortcomings forced upon this studio by the suits.

4/10, painfully subpar. Will play at least another 100 hours and be a part of the problem.

there's a lot said already abt the hypnotically repulsive audiovisual presentation with the frantic camera and barebones controls, it made me feel tweaked out and paranoid in a horrifying way and it rocked, but the thing worth talking about for me is the structure of this game, how vitally spartan its character is. how utterly, necessarily devoid it is of much sympathy for its leads. i skimmed through a playthrough of K&L1 after playing this, which i have no desire to ever play, and it just felt very of its time. a pair of antiheroes make a huge mess of things and argue incessantly and ruin lives but you gotta love their camaraderie and attitude!! and then the women in their life dare to nag nag nag at them about all the fucked up shit they get put through because of them until they inevitably get shot, because they talk too much

the second game inherits their disgusting personalities and their capacity for misery--in fact increases that aspect to a fever pitch--and you might look at it as just following in the boring footsteps of its predecessor with a more interesting aesthetic going for it. but the difference is how unsettlingly off things feel from what you'd expect. the cutscenes are so curt, there is hardly any kind of relatable stakes for the characters other than some vague deal to further imperialism (they dont care abt that part obviously why would they). everything happens with hardly any dramatic rhythm, just hot headed banter and death, with things getting worse and worse. the misogyny is still here but even that has a different tone; the women in kane and lynch's lives this time become little more than convenient excuses for them to continue their evil rampaging, not the motivation to do better that they probably tell themselves they are to help them sleep at night. they're in a hell of their making.

the bluntness behind the narrative helps make the bond between the two MILES more interesting. lynch's schizophrenia isn't exploited for :twisted: funny comedy this time but instead to render him as a pathetic crazed animal with a gun. and the stroke of genius of basically ignoring how K&L1 ends gives kane's more levelheadedness by comparison a delusional sociopathic underpinning. they scream at each other about how much they ruined each other's lives (much like the women they love in the previous game hmm [thinks really hard abt this]) yet at no point in the game does that tension come to a head between them like the first game would tease. it always evaporates away awkwardly. there's no bro moments of "heh you're alright" or anything like that ever in sight because they do not deserve that, they just drop their in-the-moment tantrum and go back to doing the only thing they ever know how to do. this is because, despite how they are unable to actually feel love or not destroy things, they ultimately understand each other better than anyone. they NEED each other so bad. AND YET!!! not even this is portrayed with much more than a kind of pity, if that, it's just a human tendency to prefer not being alone in your cosmic punishment. it's nothing to get too attached to.

if this game has anything that could be called a positive human emotion it wants to hone in on, it's this, and it is so incredibly compelling in its smallness to me that it sticks out beyond the rest of the genre subversion in the game to heighten it further. even a couple of rabid dogs will feel loyalty towards each other, when they know neither of them's going to heaven