Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III concludes the reboot trilogy with a fourteen-mission campaign whose core gunplay feels genuinely satisfying. The story that wraps around it does not hold up, recycling the missile premise and feeling directionless.
The shooting carries the whole experience, feeling good enough to sustain the campaign through its weaker stretches. Voice acting is the other consistent strength, with the new Price performance singled out for praise.
The open combat missions are a mixed bag, recognisably Warzone gameplay with gun boxes, coloured weapons and armour plates throughout. A few, like the stealthy Crash Site and the oligarch financial interrogation, work well, but running them back to back wears thin.
The opening prison break and the stealth sniper mission with Price stand out as the campaign’s best set-pieces. The AC-130 gunner section and the faster movement of the open zones add variety to the routine shooting.
The reboot characters read as hollow reincarnations rather than the same people, and a key character’s exit is mishandled. Armoured enemies and riot shields make fights spongy, while the forced armour-plate system adds friction to every engagement.
Three crashes and odd visual artefacts, including squares filling the screen on certain effects, mar the presentation. The Z4 launcher and the limp C4 throw rank as the weakest equipment in the kit.
Overall, gunplay and voice acting anchor the campaign, but the weak story and the repeated open combat missions pull hard against them. The result is a shooter that never quite coheres into a confident whole.