In 2011 there were some FPS games that tried to compare with the bad boys, there are shooters today that are trying so hard to emulate the mechanics of Call of Duty, then there some shooters like Brink that tried to compete against Team Fortress 2 and then you have a game like Modern Combat Domination on the PS3 which aims to be something of a cross between Call of Duty with a mix of gameplay elements from Vale's incredible Counter Strike games. Modern Combat is a series of FPS games that were released on the iOS and this game is one of two games in the series to be released on consoles. Modern Combat Domination may have gotten the ideas from other shooters down but it is a shooter with little content on offer and suffers from overall lack of polish and execution.
Modern Combat Domination is an online game where players are playing as either the Special Forces or the Mercenaries sides in online and offline matchmaking. There is no Single Player campaign to partake in so your only options are playing online with other players or setup matches against the AI controlled bots. There are about 7 game modes on offer from Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch which are your simple gamemodes where you and also your teammates need to get the highest number of kills to win while Domination is where you control points on the map to score. The best modes in the game are the map specific game modes they offer up elimination style rounds where you have only one life per round and have to eliminate the enemies or to attack or defend an objective on the map. Two maps offer up Boom and Bust while another map will offer up a Extraction, Escort or Sabotage game mode to play. There are only a handful of maps available to play on from a Factory, Hideout, Sandstorm, Headquarters and lastly Souks and each of these have their own map specific game mode available.
Where the game really takes the influence from Vale's Counter Strike series is within the gameplay where you have to buy weapons with in game money earned from defeating enemies and completing objectives. You start each match with little cash to spend on weapons, grenades and armour but the more successful kills and round completions will allow you to purchase more powerful weapons and this is where the game feels and plays more like Counter Strike and the game really shines there especially during round-based elimination matches. There are about 32 weapons in the game available and you are only going to be getting your hands on the later ones just by gaining enough experience points from each match you complete and levelling up, you can also unlock attachments to your weapons by levelling up such as red dot sights, silencers, scopes as well as a grenade launcher rather than completing any specific weapon challenges.
Now Modern Combat Domination's gameplay does play out like Counter Strike where you have a fixed Health bar instead of regenerating health but it does have the Aim Down Sights from other modern shooters which allows you to aim your shots easier at enemies and the melee knifing is assigned to its own button so you won't be doing any knife running like you would in Counter Strike. Weapon's accuracy spreads out if you try to hold down the fire button whilst also moving around so the best way to play it is to fire in short controlled bursts while you crouch otherwise, you'll never hit your target. If you are not used to Counter Strike's gameplay you might struggle a fair bit with Modern Combat Domination and the way the weapons handle but at least you do get the option to play the game with AI controlled bots to help you get the hang of it. While playing with players online does seem more fun initially and eliminates predictability but however arguably it is much easier to get the progression system going by playing the online component alone with with AI bots and good thing about that is you still get experience points that way which is very helpful. The AI bots are predicable yet fairly competent without making them complete aim botting scum, dumb or useless, but they don't waste time using whatever best weapon they can use against you and can hit hard especially if they have shotguns. If you do get killed during the round-based elimination game modes with AI bots on your team you can take control of any of your teammates which is a good way that you can still play without having to wait a long time for the round to finish doing nothing after being taken out. This is something, however, that is bound to happen to you a lot because gameplay has a couple of issues that can frequently overwhelm the game experience.
The biggest thing to mention is that it is very light in content, like I said there are only 5 maps and only 4 game modes available if you point out the round-based map specific game modes like Boom and Bust and Extraction together as one. With the game this light on content an average player can see what the game has to offer within a single afternoon. There is no DLC or any proper Single Player content in the game so all you are doing is playing the same maps over and over just to increase your rank just so you can get the better weapons you want to use which does gets boring after a few hours.
Mechanically Modern Combat Domination has gotten the basics of the Counter Strike gameplay right, from the weapon handing and the health system but adds the ability to aim down sights and also have a melee button but there some issues with the hit detection. Now I do get that you are supposed to be aiming down the sights, crouching and firing in short controlled bursts as spraying and praying tactics isn't going to work all that well because of the recoil, those rules from Counter Strike apply to Modern Combat Domination but sometimes however even when the crosshair is lined up on the head while aiming down sights and crouched the bullets seem to go wherever they want and don't go where the bullet is expected to hit the target even with the best weapons in the game. This often leaves you needlessly wasting extra ammo than you should just trying to hit an enemy especially if they are close. You just have to fire multiple burst fire shots at an enemy and hope for the best and while that's not bad for one enemy it's worse with multiple enemies around. You try to fire back against multiple enemies on screen while evading to get to cover the bullets again even when aiming down sights and crouching and moving slow again the bullet trajectory goes where it wants too usually going off to the side or not hitting anything leaving you as an open target for everyone. It's just bad hit detection no matter how you look at it and it really makes the shooting very problematic when you are trying to get a kill before someone gets you. The spawns on the Deathmatch, TDM and Domination game modes are also very atrocious often spawning an enemy behind you which causes other players/AI bots to shoot you out of nowhere while you try to process where you just spawned in from, because that you spend in game currency to get weapons having this spawn system where you can spawn in the same room as other enemies and them just shoot at you the moment you just spawned is just cheap and you end up wasting a lot of money. This might not seem bad for less players but it is too much if you allow more players/AI bots into the game server. The game does offer different control options from using a standard controller or the PlayStation Move Remote, I do however recommend playing with a standard controller.
While the money system translates well into the round elimination-based game modes like Boom & Bust and Extraction the same cannot be said for basic game modes like Deathmatch or Domination. This is because there is little difference between weapons and any player can do just as good in a match with a cheap weapon like the MP5 the same way anyone can get a good number of kills with an expensive weapon like one of the sniper rifles or the heavy machine gun. There is a stat system showing the accuracy of weapons and the damage they can do but in actual gameplay many of weapons I noticed seemed to be as accurate as each other and did the same amount of damage hitting either the body or the head. They all had the same recoil and handling and the real differences I noticed with weapons are the rate of fire with full auto weapons and also the magazine size. For the other game modes trying to spend money on the other weapons can be very expensive and very risky because you're likely to end up being a straight up easy target the moment you spawn in cause of the awful spawn system and the money you spent on the gear you wanted for your next spawn just ends up being wasted. It is mostly easier to just use the money to buy basic weapons and full armour and go through the basic game matches that way and make use of the enemy weapons if necessary.
What is really one of the biggest issues with the game is the presentation & technical performance. Compared to some of the other FPS games released in 2011 Modern Combat Domination isn't a great looking game, there are decent looking weapon and character models but the environments are very generic and the details on them are very low resolution also the grenade explosions look rather poor and the animations are basic at best. There are serious frame-rate issues where you have more players in the game it starts to get choppy and often times when you engage in a gunfight the game stutters like crazy and often screen pauses for a couple of milliseconds which 90% of the time causes you to throw your aim off which again leave you as an open target for everybody else to shoot at. The game also glitches up a lot usually after a couple of matches where you start the next match you start to see textures going crazy which forces you to restart the game, also the game suffers from long loading times and occasionally the game crashes up. These are serious issues that you don't want to put up with when you are playing an online game and yet I am surprised that the servers are still up and running on the PS3 version to this day and the developers have not bothered to patch the game up to improve the performance.
Modern Combat Domination is at its best when you try to take it as a Counter Strike clone with some modern shooter mechanics minus the health regenerating system and it wouldn't be so bad if not for the bad hit detection alongside performance and technical issues. There is so little content on offer even for the game's £6.49 price tag that the devs charge on the PSN Store and the game does become boring after playing the same one or two maps over and over just to increase your ranks just so you can get an insanely rare trophy on your PlayStation profile for doing so. It's not going to compete with the big boys of the FPS genre in anyway shape or form and the game itself is very lacklustre but compared to so many online games that we have in the current age today where we they get released in an unfinished state you could do a lot worse and you are not really wasting much of your money and time on this game. At least PlayStation 3 owners like myself in the UK can get a Counter Strike style game on the system to play when the port of Counter Strike Global Offense on the PlayStation 3 didn't get released in the UK which is saying something.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Game Score: 5.0/10
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Game Title: Modern Combat Domination
Platform: PlayStation 3
Developer: Gameloft
Genre: First Person Shooter
Age Rating: PEGI: 16+
Release Date: 16th February 2011
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Good Points:
---------------------
Offers mix gameplay elements from Counter Strike & modern shooters like Call of Duty
It's very cheap to buy
You can play online with AI controlled bots
The Bad Points:
---------------------
Bad hit detection and bullet trajectory where bullets go wherever they want
Terrible spawn points in some other game modes which causes you to easily waste tons of in-game money
Awful stuttering, performance and technical issues
Very little content on offer with few maps and game modes plus no actual offline Singe Player content
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Reviewed by: Anthony Hayball (AQWBlaZer91)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------