If you become emotionally entangled at any point in the campaign's story, there's probably something wrong with you. Even with some favorite good guys and bad guys reprising roles from previous games, there's no emotional involvement with MW3's narrative. The MW3 campaign picks up right where the preceding Modern Warfare 2 left off, with the United States under heavy assault by Russian forces, a conflict initiated by sinister subterfuge that sparks outbreaks of factional violence around the world.
At any skill level, these are some of the finest hours of console shooter campaign in several years. If you're any good, you can cut it down to a little over five hours. Foolhardy players will get a bonus half-hour replaying some sequences. It doesn't explain why it's so good.Įxperienced but average shooter players selecting "regular" difficulty, taking their time and never rushing, can probably get six hours out of the campaign. This probably explains why the campaign is so short. The narrative single-player campaign is an excellent training ground for the multiplayer modes, where both casual fans and gamers new to the franchise can hone basic skills at an easier pace, without the frustration of learning the game at the bloody, twitchy hands of constant players. If you were advanced in Black Ops six months ago and pretty damn good at Modern Warfare 2 more than a year back, you'll still need time to acclimate yourself to the multiplayer environment of MW3.
I really should play the campaign first.Įven if you've dabbled in Call of Duty way back to the original, groundbreaking PC title, it requires practice to hold your own in multiplayer modes. Unless you're a gamer who hasn't missed a day playing multiplayer Call of Duty since Modern Warfare 2, you'll quickly arrive at the same conclusion about MW3: Hey, they're right. Modern Warfare 3's online multiplayer is a mostly happy marriage of Modern Warfare 2's solid gameplay with many of Black Ops' finer features, repackaged with some changes specific to MW3.