Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 Liberation & Piazza Map Pack Review

The way Activision is marketing Modern Warfare 3’s DLC doesn’t exactly fit in with our regular reviewing format, but we’re slapping a ‘BUY’ on these two new maps simply because they’re both really good – better than any included in the main game, definitely. 

How and when you buy them and whether they’re worth whatever the asking price turns out to be is a rather more complicated matter.

They’re not priced in this review because you can’t buy them as a standalone pair. At the time of writing, you can only get them if you’ve paid for an Elite Premium subscription, but as we understand it, they’ll also form part of a bundle of content released at a later date.

Now, if you could buy them individually for a couple of hundred Points each, then we’d recommend them both without reservation because they’re so good.

But when you consider that if you buy them now, you don’t know exactly what else you’re getting for your money, they seem almost too good.

Liberation and Piazza are so clearly superior to any map in the main game that it’s difficult not to smell a rat. Is it possible that the main game’s maps are mostly mediocre and samey in order to make the premium content more appealing? And is it possible that the very best maps have been chosen for the first month of the DLC season in order to promote Elite Premium?

This little square is about as open as Piazza gets, but it’s surrounded by cover and hiding places.

We can’t be sure, but both are certainly possibilities. If it is as deliberate as it looks, then it’s not Activision being evil; it’s just a marketing strategy.

Still, it’s worth bearing in mind that the remaining DLC might not all be as good as these two maps. And it’s worth asking yourself if you really want to pay for a bunch of content before you even know exactly what it is, or how good it is.

These two maps, though, in and of themselves, are great. Where the stock maps largely consist of uniform grids of buildings, alleyways, corridors and stairwells, with an open area here or there, Liberation and Piazza are both way more interesting. They’re totally different to any of the main game maps and totally different to each other.

Liberation is set in New York’s Central Park, or at least part of it. It’s more open than any other map in Modern Warfare 3, but thanks to its undulating terrain and some carefully placed scenery, it never feels wide open.

There’s a lot of freedom of movement and points from which you can get a good view of the battle and make use of long-range weapons, but there’s no part of the map open enough to make you feel totally exposed just by setting foot in it.

Everything’s so curvy that there are very few long, straight lines of sight, so no one can just sit at one end of a long corridor, picking off anyone appearing at the other.

The central area of the map is particularly well-designed – a dry river bed with a bridge at either end and a hatch leading down to an underground maintenance room in the middle.

Be warned: this trellis will not protect you against an air strike of any kind.

The maintenance room is a great place to dig in and defend, and the bridges make excellent vantage points, so fierce battles inevitably break out over control of these key areas, and you don’t get everyone just hovering around the edges like you do in many other maps.

If Liberation is about curves, Piazza is about criss-crossing diagonals. It’s also a much more vertical map than any other seen in Modern Warfare 3 so far.

There are steep slopes and staircases and several points where bridges cross over streets – and not just at boring 90-degree angles. It’s a manic, fast-paced map with a lot of corners that can, and often do, have trouble waiting around them.

As with Liberation, the lack of long, straight corridors means there aren’t any obvious vantage points, so you’re forced either to react quickly to sighted enemies before they disappear around corners, under bridges or behind pillars, or else be prepared for sudden, close-range gunfights.