It almost feels hard to even judge the campaign. Sledgehammer had poor communication, was rushed in trying to turn this from an expansion into a full-fledged game, and apparently underwent a lot of crunch as well. That sucks!
That being said, all of this is absolutely glaring while playing through it and makes for one of the worst campaigns in a while. In absence of interesting or fun setpieces we get copy-pasted segments of Warzone gameplay on maps that don't feel tuned for a singleplayer experience with stealth at all. The shipyard and dam levels are particularly awful with this due to the complete lack of cover making it hard to avoid any enemies seeing you. The only real unique gimmick level is a copy-pasted AC-130 mission that was already in MW22. I didn't love the gimmick stuff in the past two MWs but at least it felt like something different, like a change of pace. The most original stuff here is like 10 seconds of bomb defusing at the end.
The plot suffers from all the same issues in many ways. I'm not gonna claim any COD campaign as high art, but at least the other MW games have been... coherent? This one is just a complete mess from start to finish. Makarov is rendered a total unthreatening goober by the fact that it jumps from terrorist attack to terrorist attack without any of them feeling like they had any sort of impact. The most we get is a plane sequence that ends up being more stupid and nonsensical than anything, and even that is basically cleared of consequences by virtue of it just being a stupid plan in the first place. Look, stuff like the nuke scene and No Russian in the original trilogy was silly and over the top too, but at least they had actual impact on the player and story, while this game won't have a single scene that sticks out to me in a fewyears days. We even get some bizarre 20 years late post 9/11 commentary that makes the other games seem nuanced in comparison with how quickly it's blown over. Beyond being incoherent it's just plain unfinished, and the lame cliffhanger ending feels like a final slap in the face to players.
As I said before I almost feel bad for Sledgehammer and I doubt they were much happier about having to ship out this mess of Warzone levels and Warzone cutscenes. Activision robbed them of a chance to make a better campaign and that really sucks. Will I still enjoy this game? Yeah probably, at least they had a good foundation to build on with multiplayer. It makes it hard for me to score this game because I do think the reboot trilogy has some of my favorite COD gameplay period and I'll likely get another 100 hours out of it. But this game just made me plain sad. Take me back to when the biggest complaints of this series were that they were making too many space games.
That being said, all of this is absolutely glaring while playing through it and makes for one of the worst campaigns in a while. In absence of interesting or fun setpieces we get copy-pasted segments of Warzone gameplay on maps that don't feel tuned for a singleplayer experience with stealth at all. The shipyard and dam levels are particularly awful with this due to the complete lack of cover making it hard to avoid any enemies seeing you. The only real unique gimmick level is a copy-pasted AC-130 mission that was already in MW22. I didn't love the gimmick stuff in the past two MWs but at least it felt like something different, like a change of pace. The most original stuff here is like 10 seconds of bomb defusing at the end.
The plot suffers from all the same issues in many ways. I'm not gonna claim any COD campaign as high art, but at least the other MW games have been... coherent? This one is just a complete mess from start to finish. Makarov is rendered a total unthreatening goober by the fact that it jumps from terrorist attack to terrorist attack without any of them feeling like they had any sort of impact. The most we get is a plane sequence that ends up being more stupid and nonsensical than anything, and even that is basically cleared of consequences by virtue of it just being a stupid plan in the first place. Look, stuff like the nuke scene and No Russian in the original trilogy was silly and over the top too, but at least they had actual impact on the player and story, while this game won't have a single scene that sticks out to me in a few
As I said before I almost feel bad for Sledgehammer and I doubt they were much happier about having to ship out this mess of Warzone levels and Warzone cutscenes. Activision robbed them of a chance to make a better campaign and that really sucks. Will I still enjoy this game? Yeah probably, at least they had a good foundation to build on with multiplayer. It makes it hard for me to score this game because I do think the reboot trilogy has some of my favorite COD gameplay period and I'll likely get another 100 hours out of it. But this game just made me plain sad. Take me back to when the biggest complaints of this series were that they were making too many space games.