Although these past few weeks have been jam-packed with a plethora of top-notch titles, the world has had their sights on two games in particular - Battlefield 3 and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3. EA has made it their priority to do their best to top the highest grossing franchise of all time, and the fanbases of both franchises have been taking shots at each other, claiming their favorite game is the better. Now that both games have hit the shelves and virtual battlefields have been the littered with bullet shells and bodies, it's time to get to the nitty gritty and discuss which game takes the throne of the FPS release of the year. I'm going to look at Modern Warfare 3, and examine the 3 key components of the game - campaign, co-op, and mulitplayer - to show why I believe it is the better of the two.

 

 

Campaign

 

Modern Warfare 3's campaign plays out just the way you would expect it to, with the adrenaline running at all times without ever stopping for a breather, lots of destruction and mayhem awaiting every corner, and you just happen to be in the middle of this mess. From shooting down lots and lots of enemies running around in the streets to taking control of a machine gun on a helicopter, the campaign offers plenty of variety in which you accomplish your objectives, though not a lot of it is really new to the series. 

 

Many people will be able to play through the campaign in about 5-6 hours. While that may make you feel a bit uneasy about the length of it, you do a whole lot in order throughout the game, making those hours feel a bit longer than they normally would. The story this time around is much more concise, seeing how the entire focus is on Makarov and there aren't diverging storylines that somehow tie in with each other at the end. You do jump from character to character, but they are all intertwined with the plot in much better fashion than in Modern Warfare 2.

 

Battlefield 3's campaign, in comparison, feels a bit more stale. A lot of that has to do with their previous success in Battlefield: Bad Company 2 in which I felt DICE did a really fine job with the campaign in that game. Their latest effort doesn't pack a punch, neither in story nor gameplay. Vehicles in the game have been limited to tanks, for the most part, missing an opportunity to really use other vehicles a bit more to add variety. And the story is very derivative, with the threat of nuclear strikes being prevented by an American soldier who also has to recall his stories as he is the only one with some intel on the enemy. It's really nothing out of the ordinary. Neither is Modern Warfare 3, but the insane action does help to give the plot a little bit of weight to it.