Category: Video Games

This is our Zombies review for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3. Check out the single-player review for our thoughts on the campaign or the multiplayer review for our thoughts on PvP.

Like a lot of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, this year’s Zombies mode has undergone what might be described as a “Warzone-ification,” forcing its traditional PvE elements into a larger, more open map. But as popular as the Warzone side of Call of Duty (or in this case, the extraction shooter mode, DMZ) might be, mixing it together with Zombies just dilutes both. This is less a new take on Zombies than it is a DMZ reskin, and with disparate elements cherry picked from both modes mashed against one another. It has had some highlights in the first few hours I’ve played across eight or so matches, and I still have lots more to see, but so far it’s more often been slow, a bit dull, and at odds with what has usually made Zombies fun.

Operation Deadbolt, the name for Modern Warfare 3’s Zombies mode, takes place on a version of the upcoming Warzone map of Urzikstan. Gone are the usual wave-based battles through smaller, dedicated maps that you explore and unlock as you go. Instead, the moment-to-moment gist of the mode is almost exactly what you encounter in DMZ: Head into the map, search for cool stuff, and call a helicopter to escape with it before you’re either overwhelmed by enemies or the 45-minute match timer expires. On its face, there’s not even much to identify this as a Zombies mode other than the zombies themselves, at least in the early hours.

Though its loot-and-escape mechanics can create both exciting situations and a lot of risk-and-reward calculations for you and your squad of two others, they feel opposed to what Zombies normally offers. The mode is usually all about tension — waves of zombies keep filling the map, requiring you to dispatch the threat, set up defenses, and seek out increasingly better weapons to handle even tougher hordes. The ticking clock and rising difficulty meant you needed to keep moving and manage your resources carefully, or you’d eventually be overwhelmed.

The openness of DMZ, on the other hand, lets you choose your battles, and it’s that approach that defines Operation Deadbolt. You’ll pick your way across the map to take on strongholds full of computer-controlled mercenary soldiers, or complete small objective-based contracts that can earn you money to spend on perks or weapon upgrades. You generally decide which encounters to take on and when, and only scale the difficulty up when you’re fully prepared by venturing further inland to areas designated with a higher threat level. It gives the whole mode a feeling that you have to make your own fun, choosing the right activities and holding back from anything too difficult until you’re absolutely sure you have the gear to handle it. A lot of time is spent on prep, looting and earning money by repeating easy contracts to power yourself up so you can take on the activities that are actually entertaining.

This slow pace, where it feels like you spend a lot of time not doing much and with little direction, prepping for one or two interesting things to happen later, infests the whole experience, but it does the most damage to Operation Deadbolt’s story. There’s a linear tale to uncover here, but unlike in past Zombies campaigns, it’s apparently not hidden away in puzzles and Easter eggs you need to discover on the map. Instead, it’s all deployed through uninspired, MMO-like mini-objectives. Complete enough objectives and you’ll get to play dedicated story missions, but there’s a lot of boring stuff to get through before you can even see what the story side of Operation Deadbolt is about.

The first batch of objectives are mostly tutorial-focused, sending you to do things like use a Wall Buy station or a Pack-a-Punch machine and then to kill a bunch of zombies with the guns you get from them. Progress on these story quests is slow, but it completely stalled for me when I had to track down a convoy of mercenary trucks that spawn randomly and infrequently on the map. I spent the next couple of sessions just wandering around hoping for this event to happen near me so I could move on to the next thing, doing random activities along the way to kill time. Between the lack of a clear way to advance one objective, and a bunch of other objectives that are mostly busywork, the campaign part of Zombies has been pretty listless so far.

Not all of Operation Deadbolt is slow, though. Like DMZ, there are great moments to be had here as your squad creeps through hostile territory. Running around and looting buildings only to discover too late that one houses a powerful special monster, like the tentacle-sporting Mimic, can be exciting and harrowing. Sweeping a mercenary stronghold room-by-room makes for some thrilling firefights, especially with the knowledge that zombies are likely creeping up behind you as you do. Contracts, which are Zombies-focused spins on similar activities in DMZ, can be fun as the difficulty ramps up, so long as you make the effort to vary your choices frequently to avoid too much repetition.

There seems to be a lot of different things to do on the Urzikstan map, and venturing into the higher-threat areas carries with it an exciting dread as you start to worry about how much more easily a group of undead or an unexpected patrol can overwhelm you.

But then there are the sessions where something goes wrong. I’ve played about eight matches of Operation Deadbolt on the PC version of Modern Warfare 3 so far, and suffered crashes during two of them. In the second crash, I lost all the gear I’d earned, which meant my squad had to waste most of the next session just trying to get me back up to strength to continue our quest of getting deeper into the exclusion zone in order to see Zombies’ more interesting challenges.

Other technical issues can frustrate as well, like stuttering and lag, zombies clipping through walls to reach you when you thought you were safe, or user interface elements from a buy station lingering on the screen after you’ve closed its menu. When enemies are constantly spawning around you to run up and whack you in the back, these little irritations can have annoyingly large consequences.

I’m still making my way through Modern Warfare 3’s Zombies mode, and I’m unsure of what the more difficult regions of the map might hold. So far, though, the combination of Zombies and DMZ hasn’t done either mode any favors. DMZ’s risk-and-reward calculus benefits most from the danger of other players lingering just out of sight; Zombies’ previous adventures through twisting, convoluted maps are made exciting by the pressing danger of an ever-increasing threat. Operation Deadbolt has neither of those things, and at least in its first few hours, it’s worse for the loss of both.

Expect IGN’s complete review of Modern Warfare 3’s Zombies mode next week.

This is our multiplayer review in progress for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3. For our thoughts on the campaign, check out the single-player campaign review.

Update – November 10, 2023:

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 officially launched yesterday, and it isn’t surprising that not a lot has changed about its multiplayer since the last beta (which you can read my previous impressions of down below). While I still have a lot more to see since I’ve only been able to play a few hours on the live servers, so far I’m not impressed by a sequel that basically feels like little more than Modern Warfare 2 with new maps.

The biggest improvement I noticed from the beta was the sharper graphics, as the environments no longer look blurred and washed out. Once I was able to turn off motion blur and remove the film grain filter, my previous complaints about everything looking soft and out of focus were suddenly completely solved. However, I’m still not a fan of how oddly dated the UI looks – the XP pop ups, objective markers, and alerts are all very retro Modern Warfare, with only slight changes from Modern Warfare 2. That part in particular may be nitpicking, but I expected at least some changes given this is a full sequel (though it was reportedly meant to be an expansion initially), and instead everything just looks the same.

All your weapons carry over from Modern Warfare 2 as well, and you can even use your older weapon blueprints, though a message will warn you that weapons specific to Modern Warfare 3 are recommended. I did try out some older weapons, like my beloved Fennec SMG, and unfortunately that warning is justified as the older weapons just can’t keep up with the newer one in terms of power.

The classic playlists with all the expected game modes are here, along with a new game mode called Cutthroat that I actually really enjoyed. I love any sort of competitive mode, and this one puts three squads of three on one map against each other with the goal to simply eliminate all other enemies, similar to Gunfight. Cutthroat is a very pleasant surprise that I really enjoyed thanks to the pressure only having one life in each round put on me and my team. It feels like there’s real threat, and having to move around more carefully so we didn’t get merked by two other squads was thrilling. Strategy in a Call of Duty multiplayer mode? I’m in for that, and right now it means I want to play Cutthroat more than any other mode.

The classic modes like Team Deathmatch, Domination, and Kill Confirmed hold up just as well as they did last year, but I genuinely could not stomach more than one match every hour or so of Ground War. The huge 32v32 game mode could not be more boring if it tried. It’s definitely attempting to pull in Battlefield players who want large-scale fights in a Call of Duty game, but it fails to bring the variety of chaos that Battlefield can. It’s entirely too open, too few vehicles spawn in, the spawn points are awful, and it’s just so dull without any interesting events happening throughout the match to keep it engaging. Ground War isn’t the main draw of Multiplayer, but the attempts to expand Call of Duty’s player counts have not gone well here.

Another thing that is definitely not going well is the awful menus in the recent Modern Warfare games. It’s not an issue unique to Modern Warfare 3, but the update to make all Call of Duty games live in a single launcher was an awful decision. The playlists for Multiplayer constantly shift so that the latest one you clicked on is at the front of the list, so if you try to back out and quickly click an option you just saw, it may have frustratingly shifted somewhere else. And every time you do click out to the menu, you’ll get a pop-up notifying you that you can purchase the battle pass. Post-match reports also show you what you could have unlocked with each level up if you did own the battle pass, and that constant, forceful pushing of it is extremely obnoxious.

Beyond that my impressions from the beta further down largely hold up, which means the only thing holding Modern Warfare 3 together is that it’s still Call of Duty. Its FPS mechanics are impressively tight as usual, and the moment-to-moment action of its more successful modes is entertaining – but none of what makes it fun feels new, and there are so few changes from its predecessor that it hardly feels like the full-blown sequel it’s supposed to be.

I even went back to play Modern Warfare 2’s multiplayer for comparison, and they look and feel exactly the same, just on different maps. And while those new maps are fine, they’re also missing a layer or two within their environments. I have my graphics settings at either high or ultra across the board on a very good PC that can definitely handle it, but Modern Warfare 3 looks bland regardless. Compare that to the jump between 2019’s Modern Warfare and Black Ops Cold War, which had graphics-pushing maps and vibrant, varied locales, and the lack of evolution here is seriously disappointing.

I get the appeal of wanting to recreate old maps for nostalgia’s sake, but this sequel’s multiplayer comes off more like a glorified DLC pack when they’ve been touched up as little as they have here. Modern Warfare 2 brought back nostalgic stages of its own, but those at least looked shiny and new – like Shipment suddenly being an incredibly rainy and wet map that looked gorgeous during all the chaos of a firefight. Meanwhile Modern Warfare 3’s returning maps are pretty much just how I remembered them, leaving them still fun to run around but far less impressive overall.

That’s what’s so tricky about Modern Warfare 3: Modern Warfare 2 was a good game, but if the admittedly entertaining new Cutthroat mode and a few extra maps had simply been added to that instead, it would be essentially the same as what we have here. I’ll be playing a lot more through the weekend, and I’ll have a more thorough final review next week once I’ve really dug in – so far I’m still enjoying my time with Modern Warfare 3’s multiplayer, but I also find myself wondering why this sequel exists at all.

Original Open Beta Impressions – October 11, 2023:

Call of Duty is a known quantity in many ways at this point. The era, specific weapons, and flavor-of-the-year gimmicks might change, but as we round out two decades of annual iterations, it’s not hard to guess what the next one will bring. So it’s no surprise that after playing in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3’s multiplayer open beta on PlayStation 5 for a good chunk of the weekend, the feeling I came away with was largely, “oh yeah, this is just more Call of Duty.” That doesn’t mean I didn’t have fun, and I still have a whole lot more left to see in the final version, but so far it feels modern in name alone.

The first thing I noticed when booting up Modern Warfare 3’s multiplayer was how washed out everything looked. I thought maybe it was my monitor settings, but the actual game colors are just dull in a way that’s glaring compared to the vibrant styles of so many of its FPS rivals nowadays. Everything seemed to have an extremely soft and grey filter over it, which became a real problem mid-match. I was often unable to spot enemies as well as I normally can since they blend into the environment, at least on the four beta maps (Skidrow, Favela, Estate, and Rust).

Look, I get that these are supposed to be soldiers wearing camo in the middle of a battlefield, but I’m pretty sure my opponents and allies shouldn’t be roughly the same color as the graffitied wall behind them, too. If that contrast between environment and enemy isn’t balanced out, or if players aren’t highlighted or represented through HUD markings in a clearer way, then that’s a problem beyond style alone.

On top of that, with Call of Duty implementing so many different skins now that wildly vary in their colors and designs, Modern Warfare 3 could strangely end up favoring the people in drab, default clothing. Skins weren’t available in the beta, but if someone wants to use their Nicki Minaj skin transferred over from Modern Warfare 2 at launch, it seems like it would be a huge disadvantage since you’d stick out prominently on the maps we’ve seen so far.

The gunplay at least felt good, with an assortment of different guns that were largely fun to use – though the time-to-kill (TTK) felt a bit off and inconsistent between them, going back and forth from being incredibly fast to a few seconds too long. The SMGs in particular seemed very strong in this first beta round, since my assault rifles could take a few bullets longer to down an enemy, making them my go-to right now.

The TTK definitely rewards the person who shoots first overall, which isn’t a shock given Call of Duty’s traditionally fast action, but I’ve run into situations where I would shoot first while using an assault rifle only to be out damaged by an enemy SMG even though I had put three bullets into them before they even started shooting. That inconsistent TTK wasn’t so terrible that it outright ruined any of the matches I played, but it could sometimes be incredibly frustrating. Sniping, on the other hand, felt great on Estate and Skidrow, but all four of this weekend’s maps had such a quick flow to them that I’d often just want an automatic weapon out while running around. Matches seemed to go very fast on the whole, with a classic Call of Duty breakneck pace as you kill, aid the objective, die, respawn, repeat.

It was pretty fun to take on Modern Warfare 3’s objective-based modes with a team, especially when playing Domination on Skidrow or Hardpoint on Favela since those smaller maps would increase the amount of chaos in a given fight. A lot of fights would turn into grenade barrages followed by frantic gunfire around corners, which was really fun to rush into the middle of.

But while I loved the central game modes, the Ground War mode just isn’t doing anything for me so far. Ground War is Call of Duty’s big team mode where two 32-player groups face off against each other on an expansive map. While this mode may be a draw to anyone coming from something like the larger encounters of the Battlefield series, it just felt like too many players on one map for me to enjoy it. And although sniping can be entertaining, it’s often paradoxically hard to find any of those players out in the open because the map is just so big.

Ground War matches can also be particularly frustrating since 32 players are incredibly difficult to try and coordinate, making it extremely hard to focus on one objective over another. The layout of the map operates like Battlefield with different zones to capture and the ability to spawn either on them or fellow teammates. But when you’re on the losing end of a match, you often have no choice but to spawn all the way on your team’s base and run a long distance to any action.

The gunfights you actually have during Ground War feel extremely sparse, too, since a lot of the time you’re trying to run to different points to see if there are even enemies there as you reclaim a zone. Most times you end up running somewhere and getting taken out by enemies simply camping in the zone – then you have to spawn back and do the whole dance again.

While this beta doesn’t give a full picture of what the final game will be like, it has already solidified to me that Modern Warfare 3 is certainly more Call of Duty, with all the good and the bad that entails. I had fun with its multiplayer this weekend, but it seems to lack anything to make this new iteration special or unique. The graphics of the maps and UI seem relatively unchanged from Modern Warfare 2 last year, leaving them fairly unimpressive as a result. And while the gunplay feels as solid as you’d expect from Call of Duty, I’m not finding myself wow-ed by any specific guns or additions this time.

We’ll be back with a full review of Call Duty’s multiplayer closer to launch, but until then I did still enjoy my time with the beta. That said, it also left me curious if there’s anything new hiding in the full version, as well as anxious to see how Modern Warfare 3 feels on PC and if there are any graphical updates there.