A prison escape opens the campaign with genuine confidence, and the escaped mastermind’s false-flag spree, chemical missiles, a downed airliner, financial warfare and a London train plot, gives the task force a globe-hopping chase. The pace is relentless and the set-pieces occasionally land, with a boneyard assault and a dam bomb-disarm night mission providing linear highlights. Yet the narrative foundation is shaky from the start: the continuity reuses names rather than characters, resurrected figures feel like reincarnations, and battle-royale lore seeps into campaign explanations. It is a hybrid experiment, confident in its systems and uncertain about its own story.
Core gunplay is the campaign’s saving grace. The shooting feels tight, responsive and satisfying in a way that carries the whole experience, and it is difficult to imagine finishing the campaign without that foundation. Voice acting, across the returning cast and the new additions, is the strongest single element of the rebooted trilogy, lending even the weakest scenes a professionalism the writing does not deserve. The two together make the campaign playable; neither rescues the structure around them.
The open combat missions are the campaign’s big swing and its central problem. Built from battle-royale maps with armour plates, loot boxes, colour-rarity weapons and faster movement, they play like a sandbox grafted onto a linear campaign, and their sheer number, roughly half the fourteen missions, wears the concept thin by the third appearance. Some genuinely work: a crash-site investigation and an oligarch’s estate play as proper stealth playgrounds, and the movement speed is a real improvement. Others, a shipyard cargo run and a reactor mission, are bland fetch-work where the Warzone DNA shows at every seam.
The story falters on execution as much as concept. Yet another missile plot in three consecutive entries invites fatigue before the credits, and a gas scene where a main character survives a toxin that melts everyone else is the most blatant plot armour in the series. A mid-campaign reveal re-energises the story briefly, but the London tunnel finale’s central character death plays nonsensically, with the victim standing idle while a struggle unfolds inches away. The shock lands; the logic does not. Post-credits, the ending raises stakes it has not earned.
Enemy design adds friction the gunplay cannot offset. Armoured enemies are exceedingly spongy, absorbing magazine after magazine and standing among the series’ worst design decisions, and unclear stealth detection rules compound the frustration in the open missions. Visual glitches accumulate: square-shaped screen artefacts, duplicate NPC models and odd lighting distortion. Three crashes to desktop across the campaign push the stability from annoyance toward dealbreaker, though the game at least recovers cleanly each time.
Difficulty sits on Regular and rarely challenges beyond the spongy enemies and detection quirks. The linear missions fare better than the open ones, tighter, better dressed and free of the loot-box scaffolding, and the campaign’s best stretches are all linear: the opening prison escape, the boneyard, the dam. When the campaign trusts its own format, it works; when it borrows another’s, it stalls. The ratio of borrowed to native is the difference between a good campaign and a frustrating one.
Overall, this is fun to play and painful to sit through: satisfying gunplay and excellent voice acting wrapped around an incoherent story, overused open combat missions and visible battle-royale seams. Spongy armoured enemies, three crashes and yet another missile plot complete the picture, and the campaign understands exactly why it became the rebooted trilogy’s black sheep. The handful of strong missions and the core shooting keep it watchable, but the verdict is genuinely divided.
