Thanks, in part, to my having gotten all E3 hyped about Battlefield 3 vs Modern Warfare 3, I have played through the campaigns of three of the more popular real world FPS games that are out there over this past week or so.
This is quite unusual for me, as it's rare these days that I finish any game, but that's getting besides the point.
The Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 campaign was fun as hell. The engine may be showing signs of being a little dated these days, but bear in mind, this is a game that's actually about a year and a half old now. I think it's fair to say that, as was said about them during E3, these Modern Warfare games are akin to being in the middle of a Hollywood blockbuster. Everything is designed to be going on around you, and whether or not that makes for a truly accurate depiction of warfare is largely irrelevant, as the goal is to entertain the player. This is something it pulls off very, very well.
I will say, however, that if you choose to play the game on the hardened difficulty setting (as I did), you may experience some frustration. I fully completed the campaign in hardened mode, but there were many areas in which I died repeatedly before being able to progress, and they felt somewhat cheap. Of course, in real warfare where it would take pretty much one bullet to incapacitate you, there may very well be times where your demise is unavoidable nomatter what you do, if just because of how much the odds can be so stacked against you.
The Call of Duty: Black Ops campaign I did not enjoy nearly as much. While there will be others that disagree, Black Ops having one of the lowest metacritic ratings of any of the Call of Duty games on pc would certainly seem to suggest that many others feel the same way. It's not a bad game, I mean, it's still 80+, but there were times, for example, where the interactivity really wasn't well done. It will have cinematic moments that require you to be at precisely a certain point, so if you get there early, the game places an invisible wall up to prevent further movement until the moment is ready to start. That sort of thing comes across as being positively amateurish.
I would also have to admit that Black Ops didn't visually impress as much as Modern Warfare 2, despite being released a year later. That and, I really wasn't the least bit interested in the story. What do the numbers mean? Who cares! I'll be honest, I wasn't playing through out of enjoyment, but just because I wanted to see him finally get out of that damned chair.
This isn't a rant against Black Ops though, and I want to make it clear that this game is so much more than just the quality of its campaign. It also has the zombie mode and full multiplayer practice with bots, something I've always been very fond of. Single player gamers have so much more they can do outside of the Black Ops campaign, which of course, is really my only criticism of Battlefield 3 right now.
Anyway, that's getting a bit off-topic, so...
Medal of Honor was the most surprising of the three. At first I thought the engine was DICE's Frostbite, but then, actually learned that it's Unreal 3 technology. That said, it came as a pleasant change from what I'm so used to with the Call of Duty titles. Among other improvements, I really, really like the hit recognition, like when you're shooting, you can see where the bullets are landing. Awesome stuff. You're also made well aware of when bullets are striking the area around you (including different sounds for them striking different types of surfaces), and I've always been really big on that one.
As has been noted, the Medal of Honor campaign is a little short. I finished it in about a day or so, which is saying a lot because I typically only play for a couple of hours at a time. I'll admit that I thought the voice acting was a bit of a letdown; it was satisfactory, you might say, but there were times where I felt there should have been more emotion in the lines.
I did like the setting though, I mean, Afghanistan, bring it. The story was, for me, tenfold better than that with Black Ops. I didn't get into it hugely, or anything like that, but it didn't bore me either.
I am redownloading my copy of Battlefield: Bad Company 2 via Steam, and I'm going to force myself right through the campaign this time, whether I like it or not. I've tried a couple of times over the months following its release, having actually bought the game back around the time it was first released (which is unusual for me), but I couldn't bring myself to do it both times.
This time I will though, and I will be paying a lot of attention to the quality of the engine, which of course, is Frostbite 1.5. For EA's sake, I would hope that it compares very favourably to the abovementioned titles, because Frostbite 2.0 is the only incentive for me to buy Battlefield 3 over Modern Warfare 3 at the end of the year.
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