Possibly the closest they have come to making a genuine sequel to CoD4... but not quite. Still alot of stupid issues.
Singleplay... play it on Veteren difficulty and this has to be the easiest AI to ever grace a CoD title. You only face real difficulty in the final 3 missions... and then it's headshot city. Allied AI, as usual, runs straight into enemy gun fire, and take prime cover spots regardless of you being there first... thus pushing YOU out into enemy fire, and those final levels will see every enemy knowing exactly where you are and every bullet on the battlefield will find its way to your head, no matter what the weapon or the distance. The worst example I encountered of this was one of those idiotic checkpoint saves in one of those final levels where I would reload only to be killed by the AI aimbots before the game code actually gave me access to control the game. Lazy coding.
The story incidentally... no where in the league of retardation of Black Ops, but it didn't live up to CoD4 or even MW2. All that talk about it being a worthy story finisher... nuh. It starts off well enough but it just runs out of steam and becomes.. .alot of padding.
Singleplay levels as well... uninspired. Most of them felt genuinely tired. At least the past two MW's had a sense of character to their layout and how they mixed in the guidance weapon systems... this just felt like "we have the formula for success, do as was done before"
Multiplay...
This is where we come close to getting a genuine sequel to CoD4.
Perks... the revision made to the perks system is fairly extensive. This is basically what MW2 should have had. A decent amount of thought went into balancing and implementing this system... if you pretend all the other CoDs between 4 and this one didn't come out.
Hitboxes... same old crap from MW2. Headshots from bullets that are at least a foot the left or right of someone's head. Console gaming.
Weapons... now this is interesting. After playing it enough to unlock all the weapons and leveling up a handful of preferred shooters... here's the odd and disturbing thing I noticed. Having a gun at the highest levels... as in 29-31... you seem to get more headshots, and just more kills in general. Sounds odd but if you pay attention you'll find that it just seems easier to spray and pray with success. I noticed that I was stopped doing controlled bursts because it was actually more effective to get spray kills. I daresay there is an inbuilt aimbot feature to this new weapon leveling system.
Maps.... they're okay. It's a mix. Some are good for quick close action, some are specifically designed to be air killstreak slaughter fests. The upside is that there aren't any real camping points unless you're playing Domination where you can force the enemy team to respawn in the region of one specific flag point on each map, making it possible to spawn kill them for awhile. They can be fun for the same ole mechanics this game has to offer, but they are very much casual-gamer centric.
Respawns... identical to CoD4.... nothing has been changed, nothing fixed, nothing improved. Still annoying to have your assault killstreak taken from you because some random respawn popped an enemy up right behind your backside.
HAX... yep, just as bad as MW2. Aimbotters aplenty and nobody is doing anything about them. No way to kick them, no way to report them from within the game. Steam isn't really setup to deal with the epidemic that is CoD aimbotting and wall hacking. Half the time when I check the steam list of "players you've played with" it doesn't properly list the current match list, and doesn't always list everyone that was in the previous maps so it makes tracking down a name to report very tedious IF it even works in the first place.
Servers... absolutely retarded. They put servers back in the game only to force you to level through P2P matches only. They've improved the P2P matchmaking and lag issues somewhat.. but it's still seriously bad. Lag is a major issue, and there are times where you can finish a match and while you're in the lobby the system will pull you out of that "server" and throw you into another grouping, sometimes one that has already started. And yes, it still throws you into american matches even though you (or I) am not in the USA.... but why waste your time leveling if you just want to play properly on a server you may ask? Because this leveling restriction is in place, who actually bothers playing on the servers? Very few people. And that may also be due to the fact that many of these servers have that whiney CoD culture behind them. So you're entering servers that are bolt-action-sniper equipped only... no killstreak matches... no nade matches... no SMG matches... no perk matches.... and how few people actually play this game in "hardcore" mode, also known as friendly fire ON? Few. Very few.
Pub Player Base?.... still a ton of bunny hoppers, whiners, idiot children that voip with profanity and death threats.
Competitive... hahahah... for children that have been into CoD since it became a big success with MW2, yeah maybe. Everything mentioned above just reaffirms that CoD4 is still the best CoD that was made for multiplay. Back when seeing someone with a red or blue tiger stripped weapon in a killcam meant they had real skill. Otherwise, play Black Ops for relatively decent ping response if you want the Console of Duty experience.
I'm glad I found a way to get my copy of the game dirt cheap.
There were several decent things in Black Ops that MW3 failed to take.
1) Proper server implementation... meaning you get people to play on servers by having officially sanctioned leveling hosts so people can feed their addiction to grind up those useless prestiges giving you players to kill
2) dive-prone... that was a funky new mechanic Black Ops had which should be in alot of other FPS multiplayers... it is a funky mechanic that kind of counters the bunny hoppers.
3) the mechanic to earn CoD money to buy-unlock everything in the game... weapons/emblems/etc. The unlocks in MW3 require the least amount of skill of all the CoDs, at least be honest about it like Black Ops and let people unlock what they want when they want regardless of their current level.
Oh yeah... and the coop Spec Ops... yeah that part of the game probably does count as a genuine evolution in terms of features and improvements from MW2... but will you care? Not really. It's still against dodgy AI that starts off too stupid and then escalates into insta-headshot no matter where you are.... if you bother surviving that long in the wave-after-wave missions.
It still doesn't offer anywhere near the amount of fun that the zombie mode does by comparison.
One good thing to come from this game is that everyone I've encountered playing this online... despite many of them wasting their lives grinding up a prestige icon, they all admit that this is just the same ole, and that this franchise is dying.