Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3 came out earlier this month. Grossing over 400 million dollars on the its first day, it is the biggest entertainment launch of all time.

The first thing I noticed about Modern Warfare 3 is how similar it is to Modern Warfare 2. The guns are similar and the gameplay is nearly the same. I don’t think this is necessarily a bad thing, because COD MW2  was a very good game, hindered by only a few flaws.  Modern Warfare 3 fixes these flaws and adds a new gametype, “Kill confirmed,” in which the players pick up dogtags dropped by killed enemies, as well as a new survival mode.

What is different about MW3 are the maps. In MW2 there was a good balance between large and small maps. Long distance fighting happened fairly often. The new maps for MW3 all seem to have tight corners, which lead to fast close combat. That being said, this makes the sub-machine guns the best class of guns in the game. When I was playing, nine of out ten times a sub-machine gun was the right gun to use.

A big issue in MW2 was the balance between guns. Some guns had absolutely no recoil, while others had insane power over the other guns. It seemed Infinity Ward and Sledgehammer Games fixed most of those issues. Almost every gun has some kind of recoil, and now the guns have similar power. Though, there are still guns which are superior to the others. What I like the most is the best guns come with some hefty recoil to balance them out.

Another big thing Infinity Ward and Sledgehammer Games did was make the shotguns a primary weapon again like they were in the original Modern Warfare. However, the shotguns aren’t as good as they were in MW2. Limited range and power seriously hinder their capabilities.

Overall MW3 is a good game, and has a lot of potential. It feels like Sledgehammer made the necessary improvements to make one of the best shooting games ever even better.