Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III (2023) continued the previous entry of the rebooted trilogy and brought a controversially short campaign built around so-called Open Combat Missions – larger missions with more freedom of approach, in which Task Force 141 once again clashes with Vladimir Makarov, who escapes captivity at the outset and sets off on the trail of a chemical weapon. The game shares weapons, operators, and a link with the battle royale Warzone, and it also brought back more than twenty fan-favorite maps from Modern Warfare 2 (2009), reworked for the new multiplayer engine, which was one of the main draws for longtime fans of the series.

The PlayStation 5 version runs at a higher and more stable resolution than the PS4 edition, offers ray-traced shadows and reflections on selected surfaces, and thanks to the fast SSD drive it significantly shortens the loading of missions and multiplayer matches with a high player count. The game makes full use of the DualSense controller – adaptive triggers simulate the resistance of individual weapons when firing and reloading, and haptic feedback responds to explosions, footsteps, and the type of surface the character is walking on – and the soundtrack benefits from the Tempest 3D spatial audio engine for more precise localization of enemies in space, which is completely absent on the older PS4 console.

In terms of content, the PS5 version is identical to the PS4, Xbox, and PC releases – the same short campaign, the same multiplayer with reused maps, and the same link to Warzone – the difference lies purely in the technical execution, where the next-gen edition offers smoother performance, higher resolution, and a richer visual and haptic side of the game compared to the version for older consoles. As with the previous entry, the faster storage mainly showed in significantly shorter waits between individual multiplayer matches and smoother transitions between the campaign and Warzone without long loading screens, which matters more for a shared battle royale than for a purely campaign-driven game.

Why play it: The short campaign and recycled maps remain the same weakness as elsewhere, but the PS5 version offsets it with smoother performance, higher resolution, and significantly shorter waits between matches thanks to the link with Warzone.