We have truly failed at this whole gaming thing when 99% of people I talk to don't know about the existence of this series.

With its incredibly unique combat system, Mega Man Battle Network is a breath of fresh air every time I reach for it. Admittedly, this version of it is the most stripped down, it's the later games that would refine the mechanics and controls to make for more memorable fights, but even at its simplest it is a joy to play. Dodging attack feels fantastic, and finding openings or creating them using specific abilities is more satisfying than almost anything its contemporaries could muster.
The freedom of approach is another huge draw. Finding new forms of attack to add to your repertoire can be as enjoyable as furthering the plot. Finding a unique enemy just to think "Wow, I wonder what attack can I get from them" creates an addicting cycle, but you also get rewarded for collecting by unlocking new areas, attacks and bosses.

And I always found Mega Man, the original series that is, to be a golden standard for creativity. Each installment you would get not just a solid-to-great platformer but also the excitement always comes from discovering what types of "-Men" you could fight and how their areas would look like, and they would never disappoint. It's no different here, the re-invented bosses, changed to fit the game's retro-futuristic art style, are always exciting to encounter. It's so easy to fall in love with GutsMan, NumberMan, ColorMan and others, there's simply an impressive amount of variety on display.
But it doesn't stop there, the regular enemies themselves are very memorable as well. The grid-based combat allows for these encounters to feel unique, but not overwhelming. Getting acquainted with them in the attempts to obtain their chips, then having them join you in the adventure moving forward means it's easy to grow fond of them.
Plus, the aesthetic, which changes slightly each game, feels like a perfectly captured lightning in a bottle. Likely drawn up in the early era of the internet, there's plenty of charm in this early vision of the web and futuristic technology. The backgrounds of each person's computer scream personality, and traversing the internet using a humanoid is always a concept I'm fond of. It's also scary, don't get me wrong, having people hack into traffic lights leading to cars literally EXPLODING in broad daylight can be quite traumatic, but there's always this great music that keeps you going—to save the world, to save your friends. The main theme especially is just perfect, and its future renditions would often improve on it as well.
The human designs are also very expressive and varied, the kids in the school have these weird-looking mouths, Dex, Mayl and Lan (named after, you know, internet things because this game is adorable like that) show the range of these designs, and the evil characters are all menacing in their own way.

I can't say enough good things about this game and its sequels. I wish it was at least as popular in the West as it was in Japan, I wish it was more influential or that its influence would have come quicker. All this on a Gameboy too, as if the system wasn't fantastic enough. I can only hope that some day, these games would get re-released, but for that to happen, the fanbase would need to grow, which is why I encourage you to play and share the word of these games around. I think the sheer bravery at display in this mix of RPG/Action/Card games is worth being remembered more than it already is.

There is not one mechanic that was changed in this game that I like. The regenerating health sucks. In the first game getting hit by a stray bullet was noticable, here it's NOT getting hit that's noticable, because if one or two bullets from an entire magazine do not hit you, you can just run-and-gun into the enemy with no repercussions. Submachine guns feel better here, but the rifles suffer a good bit. Maybe I could enjoy this change if they didn't remove the quicksave feature. I'd be more than happy to charge in if it didn't mean going back several minutes every time. No idea why the sprint from the expansion pack was removed (especially since your allies can sprint but you cannot) making the checkpoint system even worse as you have to slowly get to the point you already were in, but due to the incosistent enemy behavior you sometimes will die retreading these steps. The levels are also much smaller and shorter, you can see this especially during the defensive ones. The Soviet campaign ends with something akin to Pavlov's House from the original, but instead of the building you defend being several stories tall, here you have two rooms one each floor, two floors total, and a staircase next to each room. There's just not enough space to maneuver. Also, one of the biggest selling points of Call of Duty was moving together with your squad, I think, but here your squad is trash and cannot shoot enemies standing right in front of them and nobody is checking their behinds, meaning you will occasionally get killed by a random enemy who spawned behind you or didn't peek their head before. And possibly the worst thing is the grenades spam. Some chokepoints are just annoying in the worst sense of the word, super unsatisfying, and on harder difficulties alternating between running away from grenades and running into cover after getting shot once means you can spend way too much time on one checkpoint.
Also, why in the world does a sidearm take up an entire weapon slot now? You move much faster with it so it could totally fix the sprint issue, but it takes up as much space as an anti-tank weapon apparently?

As for additions, I like the multiple objectives in theory, but these missions tend to get more frustrating than anything due to the endlessly respawning enemies. There's apparently thousands of enemies just behind each objective that disappear when you walk next to the building's window. Also, nobody secures the objectives you already captured, meaning that the AI who runs there will still run there and you will, again, get shot in the back. Smoke grenades are my favorite addition, they allow for cheeky plays like running through the smoke to catch enemies unaware provided you know their positions, because they do not move.

Game could still be fun if it had larger levels, there's still that great sound design and those good feeling guns. Some okay bits but largely I was just reminiscing of the better missions from the original. Big ups for being able to throw potatos at NPCs in the tutorial, best part of the whole experience tbh.

An excellent feeling game first and foremost—loud, overwhelming and oppressive at times. The levels are quite long, making for pretty intense and frequent shooting segments only made better by the health pack system everyone seems to shun. A stray bullet hurts a lot, making for a more methodical approach of desperately trying to shoot down the enemy closest to you to lower the chances of getting hit as much as possible. This is faciliated by the quicksave system which is there for a reason—if you get hit too hard you just reload and rethink your approach. It's a unique gameflow, which the following games unfortunately completely give up on.

The defence sections on Veteran, be that the bridge in the American campaign or the multi-level building in the Soviet campaign, are some of the most memorable moments in any FPS I've played—there's this level desperation of trying to get past a horde of enemies, make just a small opening with a few shots to get to an anti-tank weapon before it blows up your position. It might seem unfair, but in reality the size of these levels allows for switching firing positions and experimenting with your approach to defense, which is really lacking in the next game. For those moments alone the game comes highly recommended.

Worth noting is that the switch from the first two campaigns to the third one is really jarring, the Soviets are misrepresented in a pretty clear attempt at glorifying the US and UK forces by contrasting them with the "reality" of the other side of the war. The scenarios they showcase are just ripped from a movie Enemy at the Gates, and not even based on some of the true cases from history which have not been easily disproven.

Regardless, good game, surprisingly good even. Give it a shot.

I haven't played too many console shooters before this, definitely not recently, so I really enjoyed seeing how the series is tweaked towards them when it is built with only them in mind. Enemies shoot less often, aim assist allows for less accurate aiming, both rifles and machine guns are viable. All that makes for slower, more methodical approaches, although it can ramp up to faster run-and-gun segments very effectively. Very enjoyable gameflow.

Then you hit the tank missions, those are fantastic. You move between tight and open areas, you control all your weaponry and have to aim the machine gun unlike the other games. These are the most fun missions in the game, and the pace is great thanks to the fact that the tank's health regenerates.

But then, everything comes crashing down starting from the African missions and onward. The checkpoints became incredibly scarce, you'll get a maximum of one checkpoint for most levels going forward, some missions you have to complete in one go. On the highest difficulty (which is hard not veteran in this game) this is just brutal, you can explore and scrounge for healthpacks but sometimes it's just not enough. This is especially annoying when the mounted machine guns come into play, you just can't move past them without taking damage but you have to shoot them down, so just hope and pray you can aim in time before they annihilate your healthbar. From here on out the game becomes largely unsatisfying, with the exception of another fantastic tank level and the final assault on a bridge with healthpacks aplenty.

Had to resort to save states for a lot of the second half of the game to not rip off all my remaining hair, but the tank sections coupled with other select levels are so good that I can't discredit the experience, it was well worth it. Comes recommended on difficulties other than hard, alternatively you can try hard, but there's no reason to feel bad about using save states when going gets too hard.

First Call of Duty game by Treyarch, who would go on to make Black Ops. Largely a disappointment. The worst offense is the sound design, the game is incredibly quiet and music cuts out and doesn't start again after you die, making playthroughs on the hard difficulty often be just... silent. In all the presumed chaos everything is actually so quiet that you can hear the tracks of background noise looping. This does not fit with the tone it sets out, which differs from the previous games.

This is the first Call of Duty game that really feels like war is not treated as something truly awful. The narrator talks in this American TV voice from the time, by the end he goes "this many people from the division have died!" as if it's a badge of honor of some sort. The plot is actually character-driven (Brooklyn my boy) so there's a lot more quips and the characters do die, which means that there's more emotional attachment in theory, but it's all rather basic and forgettable, and it is largely due to the aforementioned lack of atmosphere.

The game is rather easy for the most part, easier than the previous games, there's certainly missions in the latter half that took a long time to beat on the hardest difficulty but that is the standard for those games at this point; the ridiculous ramp up in difficulty is as big a staple of these WWII-era games as the M1 Garand is.

The shooting feels great, maybe better than it does in Finest Hour, but their sounds are just as weird as everything else here, plastic almost, making firefights not as satisfying. The feedback for hitting enemies has also been slightly reduced. What has been added, however, is RAGDOLL. It can make for very funny moments, which I appreciate.

The missions follow the basic formula, and there is sadly no real standout. There are definitely missions that are more difficult and you spend a lot more time on those, but even with that they fail to make an impact. The tank sections are fun, different but still good. Really makes me wish they stuck with one control scheme and made a console-exclusive Call of Duty: Tank game.

Not really worth playing over any of the other games up to this point I don't think.

"The Americans are rightly miffed"

One of the least fun games in the series so far, at least on Veteran, which is very, very unfortunate. I loved the idea of experiencing one front through the eyes of multiple different nationalities, it's the only CoD game to feature a Polish campaign and the first to include a Canadian one. The assault on the occupied France, with the resistance helping the British, the Polish tank division working together with the Americans and Canadians during the final assault, this interaction between the campaigns is a great idea which makes for what is likely the most engrossing CoD campaign yet. Unfortunately, everything else makes it so the experience is as miserable as possible. Some characters have solid character arcs, while others are head-scratching. Why present the French resistance as some cowards, why have this French guy be a presumed spy only for it to go nowhere, why have this Canadian kid die the moment he decides to do something heroic when your characters do much riskier things all the time? The writing doesn't help much. Who can forget such an iconic line as "Would you look at that? A pisser pissing?" to introduce stealth as a concept only for stealth to never appear again.

Gameplay suffers tremendously due to the terrible job someone did at making edges of objects believable. The entire time you're in forests, you will shoot at a guy who is clearly visible behind a tree, but your bullets won't hit him because there is actually an invisible wall where he's standing. Enemies will also shoot you through solid objects, such as wooden window frames and others, while you are unable to penetrate the same objects with your bullets.

The AI, both of your teammates and enemies, is always set on running towards certain points. It makes for countless moments where your teammates run past enemies, enemies run past your teammates, or they run into each other and stare awkwardly for a second before resetting. In general, enemies tend to focus on you, the player, a lot more than your teammates, which sucks, because you already take more damage than in any of the previous game.

Hardest Veteran campaign so far in my opinion. Checkpoints are back, of course, but you can die in one magazine, sometimes you'll die and you have no idea how or from where. In some stages, you tend to move around a lot between defensive points, and during retreating it tends to feel random whether you'll die or not. Sometimes even smoke doesn't help.

There are certainly positives, I mentioned the story but the ending of the Polish campaign especially, while a somewhat frustrating level, it was very poignant and beautiful, same goes for the American one. The introduction of the ability to actually drive a car (usually you'd just be shooting out of it) made for some quite entertaining sections. The game looks good, you can actually recognize people by their faces for the first time in the mainline games, and there are memorable setpieces for sure.

The game just feels a bit rushed out is all, uneven and frustrating to play for most of the time on the hardest difficulty. I remember it a lot more fondly back when I first played it on normal. One thing that remains a weird choice to me is the inclusion quicktime events and the controls for mortars and anti-tank weaponry. Feels unnecessary.

I still hold more affinity for it than Treyarch's previous CoD game. The way this campaign is structured and presented is likely what inspired the future games in the series, and it is an overall ambitious undertaking. I have a soft spot for it is all, perhaps.

Absolutely mind-numbing while also being absolutely mind-boggling. You simply cannot get used to the fact that you use the face buttons, the buttons on the right, to LOOK AROUND. If this is a staple for PSP shooters, I'd rather just not play any more going forward. Awkward, slow, sometimes there's a guy right in your face and you start thinking about how to turn towards him.

Maybe it would be a smoother learning curve if the game didn't just follow every single beat from the previous WWII CoD games. It's the most boring selection of moments and objectives, every mission is utterly forgettable. It just makes you want to get it over with as fast as possible, or go play any other game.

The redeeming factor is that the game has its own pace when compared to the previous CoD's. It leans a lot towards run-and-gun: enemies will spawn until you push, the auto-aim makes for snappy targetting, and, somehow, both rifles and machine guns work with this style. All this leads to a pretty short game, something I think could be enjoyed better on a ride somewhere.

Veteran, as always, highlights the worst parts of the game. Here it's the fact that enemies can shoot you through solid objects! Teammates are also wildly inconsistent, and can get stuck, leading to a forced reset. You kind of just need to have a grenade on you at all times in case you need to throw it under your feet, there is no reset to last checkpoint button, only resetting the entire level. This is still the easiest CoD game so far. The survival mode, in which you can't heal from any damage, sounds... horrible. I'm not doing that.

On to bigger and greater things. This is the final CoD game before Modern Warfare. A desperately needed change, and nothing shows it better than this game.

A terrifying game. Its bone-chilling nature, if it is engaged with earnestly, comes from two factors. First, the obvious one, the nuclear threat, portrayed through a mixture of three different tragedies: Chernobyl, a failure of a mission by the American troops, and the looming presence of an even bigger nuclear disaster. The second, likely less noticable if this was to be someone's first CoD game, is the horror that technological advancement brings to armed conflict. It struck me first on the second American mission, when you put on the night goggles and see all these lasers coming from the guns of your allies contrast with the lack of lights on the side of the enemy. Then, you use the Javelin missiles, you also get some aid from air support. If you die as much as I did, you're likely to see the messages popping up—a staple in the series—however, there's less of these inspirational, detached quotes about war. They are replaced by the costs of the weapons of destruction that have been assisting you. Soon after you get to see from the perspective of air support, where targets are no longer people, they're white outlines—the allied ones are pulsating, the enemies are not. It's the most I've been invested in a CoD title up to this point. It was a truly challenging piece of media, one that doesn't stray from not only cleverly, but also very openly criticising the actions taken by certain governments. The best writing in the series up to this point—a plausible, slightly hyperbolized political thriller with very memorable moments.

The setpieces are undeniably the best ones in the series so far. Modern Warfare has one of the best defensive sections—where you defend a point waiting for extraction together with your sniper teammate who is unable to move due to injury—while also having undeniably the best offensive sections, so many that I can't even choose one, but pushing through enemies towards a point of any kind is intense, difficult and satisfying, upping the stakes and, subsequently, investment in the story.

Veteran is rarely unfair in this title, my only complaint is that the enemies behave a bit inconsistently but the sections where I truly got stuck for longer than I'd want to are few and far between, and they are placed appropriately, given how they would clearly be the most difficult ones for real people as well. You absolutely need to use certain tools at your disposal, the flash grenades especially are key to finishing the last missions, in particular the epilogue plane section.

Modern Warfare is a gaming pioneer and a tough pill to swallow. It holds up fantastically. The moment of eeriness, as well as those of overwhelming noise and pressure—the haunting vignettes of people who got to experience war in its most devastating version so far.

Final Fronts is a game that purposefully tries to be a lesser version of a different game, a downgrade of World at War, and at that it succeeds. It is excellent at being bad. A true overachiever.

While Call of Duty, as a series, always tries to be on the frontier, trying to be the most beautiful and graphically advanced game among its peers, Final Fronts, on the other hand, is probably the only game in the series that puts very strict limitations on itself.

With a different set of mission than the game it is based on (although this released a day prior, ironically) I got tricked into trying it out. Anyone reading this, on the other hand, shouldn't bother. The little amount of new content is more of the exact same tasks from all the previous WW2 titles, and it feels even more mind-numbing and, occasionally, looks about as good as Roads to Victory. Think about it: it feels like the PSP title on the PS2. Don't forget this was released 2 years after Call of Duty 3, which was also released on the platform.

The enemies do not react to shots until they are dead. You pop three shots into someone's body and they don't flinch for a second. The guns feel more plastic than ever because of this, and the sound design and mixing is the worst it's ever been. The whole game feels plastic—an antithesis to the real World at War. There's also the fact that, at random, if an enemy hits a headshot on you, you die in one shot, and you can't even tell from where. This did not happen too often, but when it did, it was the most annoyed I've felt playing these games.

There some okay shooting segments, some funny accents, the entire British campaign is basically a joke about having a soldier called "Sharp" becoming a sniper and it ends on his allies calling him a "sharpshooter." This doesn't really matter to me, however, as this title annoys me not only because of the aforementioned reasons, but also because it feels like an undelivered promise, a purposeful step backwards and, unfortunately, a game that simply should not exist.

(Well, it's also the worst FPS I've ever played up to this point, but, the other reasons make for a better review ending)

What a confusing story this campaign tried to tell. Treyarch, clearly still chasing after Infinity Ward (given how similar certain parts of the presentation are to those in Modern Warfare) has attempted to take an inward look into the legacy of the first three Call of Duty games. It includes more gore, more reveling in the killing by your protagonists and the characters around them. They seem to examine the mindless killing of the previous games, have characters who are almost comically relentless and brutal, give players scenarios for sparing their enemy. Whereas the first game ended with the Soviets taking the capital as you look at someone else carrying the flag, here you carry the flag as you charge and slaughter through it. Truly, they got to the bottom of what Call of Duty was about, hyperbolized it and made you consider what war truly was.
Except they didn't.

Having binged all the Call of Duty games prior to this one, I can safely say that not once did they incentivize reveling in the killing. Far from it. Every previous game is loud, scary, the atmosphere is oppressive and desperate, Modern Warfare perhaps the most terrifying of them all. They never represented war fully, but they were great at sparking interest in history, in the people that fought in the war and the unique and unbelievable events that they had to go through in order to put an end to it all. Ironically, this is the only game where you are indeed incentivized to be the superhero of each scenario, to destroy your enemies and finish them off as they beg for mercy. Reznov, as a character, works because it's easy to see these situations from his point of view: Dimitri is the superhero, he cheats death over and over again, he is able to complete every task given to him. What doesn't work is Dimitri, he is no longer the simple, though slightly lucky soldier of the past games, he is a killing machine who laughs as he nears death. Same for the American protagonist. It's pretty clear that this game is trying to showcase the dark descent of the soldiers beginning to feel pleasure from violence and murder. But for the American campaign, it is only at the very end, for around 5 minutes where they begin to start calling their enemies animals and scream to kill them all. For the Soviets it's all the time. It feels like there's an attempt to have the cake and eat it too: both technically undergo the transformation, but obviously they show much, much less of the Americans participating in such animalistic behavior. Technically it is an interesting premise, but combine all these head-scratching moments I had together with the music, consisting primarily of electric guitars, and the overtly stereotypical (even for a shooter and even for a Call of Duty game) portrayal of racial stereotypes and what remains is, to me, a very unconvincing narrative.

What's also frustrating is the Veteran difficulty, once again. Drastically unbalanced, it rarely makes you wonder "damn, how could anyone manage to get through this," instead making you wonder "why are there 3 grenades being thrown at me 60% of the time." You run around so much during firefights in order to avoid these barrages. It looks and feels silly. Some objectives are fun to overcome, overall the Soviet campaign plays quite well and the flamethrower in the American campaign is the most unique weapon in the series, making for completely new ways of tackling scenarios. Also, the best-feeling PPSH and the best plane level, hands-down

Although I haven't played it, I think the Zombies mode which began with this game fits this style much better. It would be much easier to tell this story if the enemies were undead monsters. What we have instead is a game that, for the first time in the series, fails to make war look scary, all in an attempt to make it look different. Dedicating it to the soldiers who fell in battle feels wrong, given how many are portrayed as killers reveling in the mass murder they commit.

Black Ops is the game in which Treyarch has truly found their style. They took a shot by giving the Call of Duty protagonist a voice, and surrounding him with a character-based, conspiracy-theory-ridden plot of epic proportions. They did a great job—what a gripping story, and right from the get-go too! The first two Modern Warfare games took a bit to get going or hitting their stride, but Black Ops begins telling its story from the moment you launch the game, the opening cinematic, the menu, everything about the presentation of this game feels purposeful, and it all comes back around at one point or another. It's probably my favorite type of storytelling, and I never thought I'd see it done so well in a Call of Duty game of all things.

It manages to avoid many trapping of Treyarch's previous game, World at War. The Vietcong aren't just these loud caricatures, they're people genuinely fighting with everything they got, the game doesn't focus on their way of fighting and doesn't hyperbolize it with loud noises or jumpscares. Mason is as much of a superhero as Dimitri, but not only does his character have more depth, but they also adjusted the style of the presentation to fit such scenarios. There is still brutality, but it isn't reveled in, it's all kept within the calculated precision of a special operations unit. Reznov makes a return, as entertaining as before and is utilized incredibly well. If I were to highlight one complaint, I don't really think the ending was that necessary. I'm sure they take this thread somewhere in the future games, but I'd rather not end on such a note, or present it differently, with a bit more mystery behind it. Maybe don't follow the scene where the main antagonist drops such a bombshell with this EPIC MUSIC, LOOKING AT THE SUNSET AND THE DESTROYED REMAINS YOU LEFT BEHIND YEEHAW. There's times this game shows restraint and it benefits a scene greatly, and I wish the ending was one of them.

The gameplay is perhaps more varied than ever, which appeals to me greatly, and designed for constant fun. Not since Call of Duty 3 (also a Treyarch game) have you had so much freedom in controlling vehicles. Some might say the helicopter-steering is a bit simplified, but if you ever tried to control a helicopter in other, "realistic" games, you'd know to be grateful. Jumping from shootout to shootout to a little gimmick, all with many unique, memorable weapons at your disposal (several missions have entire stashes for you to choose from before charging in). Treyarch definitely pushed for machine guns to be the main type of weapon, but so many of the weapons have different versions, attachments that not only feel good to play around with, but add that much needed diversity throughout the campaign. The flamethrower attachment is the only one that feels truly underwhelming. I personally never found the use for the shotgun one, but I'm sure someone else could. They once again outdid themselves with the PPSH you get for just one level, so all can be forgiven.

And another banger of a Veteran campaign at that, though I definitely felt frustrated a few times (I believe you can get one-shot randomly if the enemy hits you in the head, because I had this happen to me at some of the tougher checkpoints quite a few times) but the checkpoints are generous and the freedom of approach, as minimal as it may be, allows for tackling a situation from multiple angles. Still, I wish they could get the AI of the companions down by now, I can't stand looking at an enemy run past an ally to shoot me right in the head this much during one campaign.

I even spent a bit of time on Zombies this time around. Fun mode, I can totally see why it became such a hit, I mean they throw you into it right after the campaign and you play as freaking JFK right then and there. It's ridiculous, like the campaign but even more so—the mode fits the overall style like a glove.

Black Ops, though it wasn't the terrifying potrayal of war that Modern Warfare was, is perhaps an even better game. It found its lane and truly owned it, I can't imagine how satisfying it must have been for Treyarch to come out of Infinity Ward's shadow, and I cannot imagine what a time it must have been for the fans of the CoD franchise, to finally have these two companies rival each other in the quality of the product they put out.

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.