Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 comes to Game Pass this week

Starting Wednesday July 24, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 will hit Microsoft's Game Pass service, including PC Game Pass. It'll be the second big Activision Blizzard game to hit the service since Diablo 4 earlier this year. It's the full game, including the singleplayer campaign, multiplayer mode, and the cooperative PvE zombies mode—which comes in extraction shooting flavor for Modern Warfare 3.

We've known that this year's Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 would hit Game Pass immediately, but the addition of Modern Warfare 3 to Game Pass was just announced on the Xbox website earlier today.

Game Pass has been in the news this month after a $2 price hike on PC was announced for September, along with a reorganization of how it's structured for console players—which most people agreed was a change for the worse. The American Federal Trade Commission pretty much immediately called it out as a degraded version of the same service for more money, to which Microsoft responded with some relatively eloquent nonsense.

I can't say it's that surprising as a relatively stealthy drop, because Modern Warfare 3 was pretty poorly received. In a 43% PC Gamer review, writer Morgan Park called it an "unessential" game that did little to justify itself or dispel the impression that it had been made too quickly, and should probably just be skipped.

"It's plain to see that this disjointed, vaporous vision of Modern Warfare 3 was not the product of years of meticulous planning. It was a pivot driven by tradition and the hubris of executives puppeteering the fleet of tireless Call of Duty creators who collaborate to do the impossible every year," Morgan said.

The time since release has done little to dim the impression of Modern Warfare 3 as a game produced to keep up the never ending cycle of brand tie-ins. We got King Kong, Godzilla, Nicki Minaj, and Warhammer 40,000, immediately followed by Cheech and Chong and then, uh, Godzilla again.

But still, if you've already got Game Pass and have the time for it, a Call of Duty campaign is always a lavishly-produced thing to enjoy for a while—even if this one's below par.