Not a bad game, but hardly anything special.
MW3 is actually a pretty cool game. But before I get into the game itself, some background is in order. The COD franchise has been coming out with a new game every year, and they started selling for $60 back when games normally retailed for $50 (anyone else remember that?). So I have been skeptical. I had owned CoD, CoD United Offensive (an expansion to CoD that was practically a stand alone game), CoD2, CoD4: MW, and CoD: World at War before this game, so you might say that I follow the franchise. I skipped CoD3 because it was console only, ie it never came out for PC and I didn't own a console at the time. I have also, up to now, skipped MW2 and CoD: Black Ops because I have been boycotting $60 games. Unlike on Xbox 360 and PS3 where games are $60 because game developers must pay a royalty to Microsoft and Sony to sell games on their platforms, PC games are $60 because companies are greedy. Of course they cannot just charge whatever they want, video games still follow the laws of supply and demand. So if people didn't buy the $60 games, prices would stay at the already prohibitive $50. Thus my decision to not buy $60 games. Unfortunately it didn't help, and $60 is now the standard retail price for a mainstream video game on PC (this is also partly due to the combined Activision-Blizzard but that's another story for another time). Even were the more recent CoD games not priced at $60, CoD: WaW was amazingly disappointing. It was a fantastic game, except it was completely unrefined. Even after a number of patches, the game remained extremely glitchy, laggy, and unbalanced. In my view this problem is the result of a push for squeal development. Rather than smooth out the kinks in the game already on the market, you abandon the gamers who paid for the game, and develop a new game for them to pay for. I am not over exaggerating here either. A new CoD game has been released every November since 2005. Its the Madden of FPS games now. I have actually beaten the campaign on every CoD that has ever been released, and logged a fair amount of hours on all of their multi-players as well. They do get better each time. They add little things to the game to give it more depth, like running, or customization of your character. So its not like they don't improve every year. They do. So what does this have to do with MW3? Well its lets you know where I'm coming from, basically.
Review
So what do I actually think of MW3? I like it. Its not the best game ever, by any means, but its pretty solid. First, I found it fairly fine tuned. There are no glitches that I have run into, although I'm sure there are some. The level of customization means that its unlikely you will every encounter another character like your own, and there aren't that many cheese characters running around that everyone seems to play as, aside from akimbo machine pistols. On the down side, you have to play a lot before you can reach this level of customization. On the one hand, I understand why this is. In order to keep you playing you can't get what you want right away, you have to earn it. On the other hand, by the time I get what I want for my character, I'm getting tired of playing. My solution is rather than a levels system, why not use the xp directly to unlock things? This allows player to focus on the weapons, attachments, perks etc. that they want, rather than waiting until they are the appropriate level. For example, if I want to use the Mk-14, I'm going to have to wait a lot longer than if I wanted to use the Scar-L. But if I could use the xp to unlock the Mk-14 directly, I could get to using it much faster. So how are people kept playing if they get what they want to use so fast? I don't know about you, but I have a variety of different combinations of guns, perks, and attachments that I like to use, and I like to try out new ones, experiment a little. Well if you want to do that, then you have to keep playing and keep earning xp. The other downside to the multi-player is that some of the kill streak rewards require so many kills that by the time you get them the game is usually over because of the, now, small game sizes. Since the game no longer uses dedicated servers, instead picking a host player, the game size is pre-set. Of course its pre-set to the exact same size as for the console version which, historically, is smaller than what is typical for pc. The lack of server customization means that pc users have to play a game that was designed for console. Anyone who games seriously on both platforms will tell you that its very different. Map sizes and player numbers especially should be different. In previous CoD games, maps that were too small for pc could be omitted from the map queue and player numbers increased to a comfortable level. Can't do that this time around. I've only talked about the multi-player so far, and that is for good reason. While you can log dozens of hours on the multi-player, it only took me 5 hours to beat the single-player on the hardest available difficulty. Its short, and easy. And the story...it has one, but that's about all I can say for it. The CoD single-player used to be all about telling a story, it was part of what made CoD innovative. There aren't many other FPS games out there where you feel a real attachment to your character and to the other characters in the campaign. Part of this was due to the realism. Realism made it relatable. That realism is gone. CoD is well within the range on science fiction now, which has its own positives and negatives, but is not what I expect or want out of a CoD game. Thus the story has weakened. I spend more time going o_O than getting into the game. So there you have it. I have some minor gripes about the muli-player, but its generally good. The single-player, however, is a perpetuation of the downward spiral CoD single player campaigns have been experiencing for a number of years.