Modern Combat 5 eSports FPS’s singleplayer campaign is good

Gameloft’s Modern Combat franchise has been one of the top mobile games in the first-person shooter category for years. It’s amassed a huge following of fans who want to play fast-paced, competitive shooters on their smartphones and tablets that don’t compromise on graphics, audio, or gameplay. Modern Combat has always reliably delivered on all these fronts, so it’s no surprise that the 5th game in this series–Modern Combat 5 eSports FPS–garnered a rather loyal esports community that regularly pumps out fresh new content daily.

That’s quite impressive for a game that’s more than 6 years old by now. And yet, players still flock to matchmake online and compete for kills and XP. Part of this can definitely be attributed to the game’s price, which is free, but a bigger reason why players still come back to Modern Combat 5 is that it’s just a very polished game. Controls work surprisingly well for being touch-based, with plenty of on-screen button customization and smooth gyroscopic aiming that greatly improves upon its predecessors. Online latency is also very well managed, with the feeling of lag almost imperceptible to many players.

But while that’s all well and good for those who enjoy playing online in ranked matches against other human players, how about the largely unrepresented group of primarily solo players who prefer to not partake in the PvP bloodbaths? Well, there’s very good news for these lone wolves: Modern Combat 5’s singleplayer campaign is better than ever before.

Albeit quite short, the impressively done campaign is very sweet. In fact, in terms of graphical quality, it’s even better-looking than the game’s online multiplayer modes. This is because Gameloft designed Modern Combat 5’s online mode to prioritize gameplay performance rather than graphics, in order to ensure that players with more powerful phones wouldn’t necessarily have an advantage over those with weaker devices that might not be able to render frames as quickly.

No Friends? Try Single-Player Mode

In singleplayer mode, there’s no need to worry about other players at all, so the developers decided to show off what their game engine is really capable of. And boy is it a treat! The campaign has you going out on missions in exotic locations from Venice to Tokyo, and the environments all look stunning for a mobile game. Then, when the action kicks in and the guns start blazing, the dynamic lighting and smoke effects really punctuate the immersion even more.

It also helps that, in this version of Modern Combat, the campaign missions are chopped up into shorter, tighter segments that serve to contain the action into very manageable bite-sized sessions. You don’t need to dedicate much time at all to progress in the story, which involves a terrorist plot to steal chemical weapons. It’s not Shakespeare, but it’s good enough to give players a reason to play through. It’s even fully voice-acted!

Perhaps the best part about the singleplayer campaign is that XP earned while playing through it is persistent across all gameplay modes. This means that if a solo player ever did want to jump into multiplayer or vice versa, they wouldn’t have to start from scratch. All of the character progression and unlocks they earned playing in one mode is carried over to the other.

Hopefully, this gives you a reason to try out Modern Combat 5 eSports FPS’s campaign mode. Just because the game literally has “eSports” in the title doesn’t mean its campaign isn’t worth a shot. And since XP progression is shared, there’s no downside to dipping in!