It was hard to know how to feel heading into Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4. Ignoring the hilarious full-circle moment of it being almost 20 years since the original Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare came out, this new entry is arriving at a time where the franchise has seen far more misses than hits over the past few years.
The 2019 Modern Warfare reimagining reinvigorated a franchise suffering diminishing returns at the time. Unfortunately, that brief reversal of fortunes collided with the realities of keeping the annual assembly line going. 2023’s Modern Warfare III, quickly changed from planned premium DLC to a full priced sequel which became the franchise’s worst game ever at launch. 2024’s Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 marked a major rebound of this era, with a 4-year development cycle credited for its success. Which explains why last year’s Call of Duty: Black Ops 7, made by the same team, tumbled in quality.
With main development duties returning to Infinity Ward after they last worked on 2022′s Modern Warfare II, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 has a lot to prove. Its predecessor’s campaign squandered the fresh start of the 2019 reboot by rehashing past glories (something Modern Warfare III only made worse). Its multiplayer struggled to balance accessibility with the needs of its hardcore players, while the underbaked DMZ extraction mode never left beta and was quickly abandoned and its promising Spec Ops coop mode was left severely underserved.
Having now been given the time that made Black Ops 6 a success, does Infinity Ward pull all the stops to reverse the fortunes of the now troubled Modern Warfare sublabel?
Campaign : “Was it Worth It?”
Set immediately after Modern Warfare III’s post-credit ending, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 follows series’ mainstay Captain John Price as he goes on the run after assassinating General Shepherd in the wake of Soap MacTavish’s death at the hands of Vladimir Makarov. Spanning five days, the story chronicles Price’s quest for revenge against Makarov and his Russian benefactor, The Archer (played by Mads Mikkelsen), and how Price’s reckless actions allows The Archer to orchestrate a North Korean invasion of South Korea. The Korean conflict unfolds through the eyes of Private Park (played by Young Mazino), with the story jumping between the war in Korea and the events that lead up to it all resulting from Price’s pursuit of vengeance.
The Modern Warfare II and Modern Warfare III campaigns left this sublabel in an unfortunate place, turning the initial promise of a fresh take on Modern Warfare into a protracted retelling of the 2007-2011 trilogy, done worse and with a diminished sense of scale. Despite the rocky way to get here, Infinity Ward brings this story to the best possible conclusion under these circumstances. While Modern Warfare 4 doesn’t fully break new ground in the shadow of 20 years of Call of Duty campaigns, and doesn’t match the mission variety that defined 2024’s Call of Duty: Black Ops 6, what it does is deliver the most consistently entertaining back-to-basics Call of Duty campaign in years.
If anything, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 expertly recaptures the balance of “boots on the ground” warfare and special ops missions that defined the original 2007 game. By moving past the rehashed Makarov threat and focusing on The Archer and the Korean conflict, the campaign recovers a sense of freshness that helps carry the now well-worn Call of Duty formula. It also avoids the pretentious “ripped from the headlines” approach that bogged down the 2019 reboot, instead providing a relentless and harrowing conflict without constantly trying to force an emotional response. By reclaiming a sense of normalcy, this more grounded approach makes the traditional military missions in Korea way more effective, which serve as great contrast and balance to Price’s outlandish, Fast and Furious-style missions.
From the two gameplay fronts, Price’s side is the shorter and more high-octane of the two. His intro mission is one of the best missions in Call of Duty history, a John Wick-style nightclub shootout as he swiftly deals with the Makarov threat. It’s the first of many times this campaign abruptly closes the book on so many characters and threads established in the previous entries. Price’s missions are a mix of high adrenaline shootouts, high speed car chase sequences, and military escapes. While these sequences borrow heavily from similar missions across the Call of Duty franchise, they are confidently executed, well-paced, and designed, avoiding the frustrating trial-and-error that plagued Infinity Ward’s last game. Where the problems do lie in this side of the story is in the narrative.
As ruthless as Price’s revenge tale ends up being, the story told splits its focus between the “lets close the book on everything” and setting up the Archer threat. It definitely has an air of a new creative team that despised where the story went previously and decided to clean house. This wouldn’t be much of a problem if the story didn’t try to split its focus between this and the happenings with Park within the Korean conflict in the span of 6-8 hours. This is the one area where you really feel the brunt of the previous two Modern Warfare entries wasting so much time rehashing its past glories instead of staying the course on a fresh new direction. Had the Archer been properly setup back then, he would have emerged as one of the better Call of Duty antagonists beyond the gravitas and charisma of Mads Mikkelsen’s performance, where he taps back into his Le Chiffre playbook from his legendary performance in Casino Royale. The narrative overall is still solid, but it could have been so much more.
The Korean conflict may be less explosively cinematic, but its easily the meatiest and freshest part of the campaign. By effectively putting you boots in the ground at the very beginning of invasion, the campaign effectively captures the human toll of a society suddenly thrust into war. Considering the Call of Duty franchise never directly tackled the Korean War of the 1950’s, this fictional take on the conflict managed to offer a compelling alternative. When you think its been well over a decade since a Call of Duty campaign truly returned to actual trench warfare, this is where Modern Warfare 4 truly shines even if the gameplay itself doesn’t break much new ground beyond its setting.
Not fully breaking new ground is ultimately what’s going to hold back Modern Warfare 4 from entering the upper echelon of the best campaigns in the series. It’s definitely one of the most consistently entertaining and better executed campaigns in recent years, letting Call of Duty’s pristine top tier gunplay and presentation shine better than most of the post-reboot era. Unfortunately, because the series has already done so much in so many different styles for more than two decades, its harder for individual elements to standout. I don’t think Modern Warfare 4 has that many truly iconic moments that standout beyond the initial Price nightclub mission and the best execution of an open world mission to date. But in the context of recent campaign efforts, where some were cobbled together modes from other games (looking at you, Modern Warfare III and Black Ops 7), I’ll definitely take the consistency and mostly satisfying conclusion as a tradeoff.
If I were to score the campaign alone, it would be an 8 out of 10
DMZ – Exfils and Heartbreaks
The Call of Duty bread and butter has always been its multiplayer offerings, and like always, depending on which developer is manning the ship, the experiences tend to vary from entry to entry. Now that Infinity Ward is back at the helm, it’s time to see how they learned the painful lessons that made people quickly move on from their last entry. Excising the Spec Ops co-op mode this time, Modern Warfare 4’s multiplayer package now consists of the traditional multiplayer experience and the return of DMZ. Since it unlocked three days earlier than the rest of the multiplayer package, lets start with DMZ.
The DMZ experiment back in 2022 was a noble failure, trying to jump into the space mostly occupied by the early access of Escape from Tarkov back then. Considering Warzone was the hot new thing dominating Call of Duty PVP, Infinity Ward changed the feel and speed of almost the entire game to accommodate the DMZ mode, on top of trying to tie some of its multiplayer progression unlockables into a mode that was in an embryonic state with little meat in the bone and a confusing gameplay loop. Ultimately, DMZ failed to catch on like Warzone did, and it was abandoned in its beta form, even though the damage it left in its wake was felt in that entire entry.
Modern Warfare 4 DMZ now arrives with clear lessons learned and the advantage that extraction shooters have now become more commonplace in the market beyond with recent releases like Arc Raiders and Marathon. And while there is still a very hardcore slant to the idea of extraction shooters in general, I feel Modern Warfare 4 managed to strike a nice balance of having a better onboarding process to its multitude of interlocking systems, even when work still has to be done at nailing particular little details for it to be the best it can be.
The best thing I can say about this version of DMZ is that you can tell that more thought and care has been put into it with how it handles its PvPvE balance. The mode does a nice job building from the events of the campaign in way that complements it without feeling obligatory. It also explains why Infinity Ward didn’t make a Spec Ops mode this time around. Initially I was very disappointed this game wouldn’t include Spec Ops as that was the aspect of their last Call of Duty entry that I universally loved, and wished it was given way more support instead of being fully abandoned.
I should have given Infinity Ward a little bit more credit as its clear they studied some of the ways Arc Raiders handled its PvE missions, and what they did was basically make Spec Ops into the missions of this version of DMZ. It allows Call of Duty’s high octane gameplay to shine within this mode, allowing it to embrace the idea of extraction with the slickness of Call of Duty’s presentation for some really exciting missions. If this is their way to continually add more support down the line instead of abandoning the mode, I like where Infinity Ward’s head is at.
While the game expertly doles out more and more systems as you level up within the DMZ mode, I feel some of the interlocking systems have a few too many steps that can be confusing. My biggest sticking point right now is the way it handles 3D printing, crafting, and resource gathering. Most of the things you need to craft in this 3D printer have a very obtuse UI that is not helpful for when you are down in the field. It can make things you are meant to track almost too confusing even when you’re tracking a recipe. The resources required to craft certain items the game requires for some missions are higher than they should be, and I feel a better medium would be for the initial crafting requirements for the first printing to be high for the first time, and way less once you’ve built them. There’s a certain imbalance that I feel will turn a lot of players off.
Besides those little problems, I feel the game nails the satisfaction of an exfil and the crushing pain of losing all of your gear in one fell swoop. You can feel that tension escalate specially in the middle of missions, and I certainly felt the satisfaction of taking care of a team that was camping the exfil extraction point of a mission objective as I was wheeling off a Korean General out of the hospital. The emergent gameplay possibilities of this new DMZ are quite high, and I hope the mode is able to have more sticking power and they are able to expand it with more maps relatively soon. Unlike last time where I didn’t care, I do care and look forward to playing more DMZ in the future, which I find quite a success so far.
If I were to score the DMZ Mode, it would be an 8.5 out of 10
Multiplayer – Shy of Greatness
The last piece of the Modern Warfare 4 package is the actual bread and butter of the whole thing. And boy is there a lot to unpack about this one.
I do not envy Infinity Ward, Treyarch, and Sledgehammer Games when its their turn at the wheel for the competitive side of Call of Duty. In this current era of the franchise starting from the 2019 Modern Warfare reboot, there certainly is a splintered confusion about exactly what the fanbase wants out of the PvP aspects, and the constant back and forth revisionist history that plagues the discourse surrounding each entry makes it even harder to parse what is the ideal version people want. Modern Warfare 4, more than any other recent entries, feels the most at conflict with itself trying to please everyone, hitting the spot in a few areas, while missing other, fundamental aspects.
Fast movement gameplay unfortunately has come to define Call of Duty PvP ever since Warzone showed people the extent of the new mechanics introduced with the 2019 reboot. Whereas the actual intended pace of the normal PvP was meant to be slower and methodical, baked into the game were mechanics that made the thing faster, sweatier and more competitive. Infinity Ward tried tamping down on this by killing slide cancelling in Modern Warfare II, and where casual audiences enjoyed the return of a slightly more even playing field, the hardcore audience revolted and left, which led to its return in Modern Warfare III. This kind of fast movement was built upon with the introduction of Omnimovement in Call of Duty: Black Ops 6, a big headline feature so initially praised as a great step forward…before it made playing the game relentlessly sweaty and ridiculous. Black Ops 7 tamped down slightly on Omnimovement without eliminating it completely, and now with Modern Warfare 4, its basically gone.
As much as that may feel like a massive step backwards, it was a very necessary change. I don’t think the Call of Duty experience needs to be a John Woo movie, especially amongst the fanbases’ most try-hard players. And its not like Infinity Ward has eliminated sliding and slide-cancelling completely. It’s still ever present in a way that’s not as fast and swift like the over-correction of Modern Warfare III, but still present for the tryhard bros to keep slipping and sliding. I’ll take welcome steps in that direction even though the overindulgence in that mechanic has changed the dynamics of PvP play for the worse as time has gone by.
If anything, what strikes me the most about Modern Warfare 4 is the conflicting design of the whole thing. This is better exemplified with a change that happened halfway through the beta and remained here. Tactical Sprint is a big culprit to the change of pace towards sweaty fast gameplay, and Black Ops 7 in its attempt to hit that balance, removed Tactical Sprint from the basic toolkit and made it a perk. But if you equipped the perk, your general movement would slow down to make up for those that wanted it, and everyone else had basic fast movement, a nice counterbalance that would allow you to build your class in other ways and not feel at a disadvantage.
Not so much here. The way the maps are designed and the way you spawn throughout them, especially given their size, it is very clear you need Tactical Sprint enabled at all times, since there isn’t even a visible penalty to not having the Blood Rush perk. I don’t think Infinity Ward thought this one through when they made that change. It comes off as a tiny band-aid that wasn’t as well considered as last year’s game.
On the topic, Modern Warfare 4 unfortunately doesn’t make a great impression when it comes to maps. While not all of them are terrible beyond just a very few exceptions, I wouldn’t call them memorable either. The ones that are real bad have unfortunately become a camper nightmare that makes me always want to quit them when I see they win the vote selection (pointing the finger straight to Coal, Nautical, and Sentry). The ones that I like ironically were all the ones featured in the beta, which explains a lot why they were included in the first place. The one non-beta map that I’ve grown to like is the Mumbai map, as I feel it better exemplifies the balance of size and tightness they should have strived for.
While I’ve certainly taken a negative slant towards the multiplayer side of things (and this is without even getting into the topic of SBMM), I want to highlight the things that it does well. Having gone back to try the previous entries prior to this review, I do feel the gunplay here does feel the best when it comes to weapon handling, quickback, and the time to kill. The addition of the Gunny system that can quickly get your weapon ready for a specific gameplay style based on your weapon unlocks allows for quick versatility to change your play style mid match that wasn’t there before, and can help you adapt against the try-hards.
I want to call out the new modes that make up the bulk of the playlist amongst the usual TDM, Domination, Hardpoint, and the like. The returning modes feel the same as they ever did, but I want to give a shout out to Kill Block, Frontline, Collateral, and Inflation.
Kill Block was one of the headline modes heading into the game’s release, and its gimmick of the map changing its layout dynamically after every match actually works better than I expected. It means its the one mode no one will have map knowledge advantage and keeps dynamic play alive. Right now, a 10v10 Gunfight mode is the only thing available for it, but more settings will be introduced which makes me excited to keep playing it.
Frontline is basically another variation of TDM. However, it’s notable for making sure your spawn points remain consistently in one place and provides spawn protection briefly, thus preventing the opposing team from spawn camping and killing you. Considering spawn points in this game are currently a major sticking point, this mode at least provides a solution in case the spawn problem is never improved.
Collateral is the game’s version of Counter Strike. The fundamentals are sound even though most teams would rather just go hunt and kill rather than plant the bomb.
My personal favorite mode is Inflation, a variation of Kill Confirmed that’s all about collecting money from enemies you kill. It is a chaotic tug o’ war that has led to the most satisfying last second wins. It’s the one mode I feel I have fun in almost all the maps.
Overall, despite plenty of problems, there are good things about the PvP side of things for Modern Warfare 4 where I enjoyed my time with it, even though it’s the weakest part of the package. But the problems are not so fully baked into the cake where a couple tweaks could get this thing into fighting shape. Heck, if a badly received game like Modern Warfare III got revitalized after a full year of support where now people think is the best Call of Duty PvP of this modern era (something that leaves me speechless, but that’s a conversation for another time), I can’t imagine Modern Warfare 4 doesn’t get there. For now, I can still find the fun in this multiplayer amongst the other stronger sides of the package, but overall I liked the PvP in last year’s game slightly better.
If I were to score the multiplayer, it would be a 7 out of 10
After last year’s entry left Call of Duty on shaky ground yet again after previously righting the ship, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 puts the series back on track. Knowing the time needed to get one of these entries right, and confirmation from Activision we’ll never get those back-to-back sub-titled entries again, I hope the lessons have been learned to keep this now more than 20-year-old franchise going strong for years to come.
While I wish the multiplayer side of things debuted far better, I’m glad the campaign and DMZ came in strong. Infinity Ward managed to pull off a solid ending out of an inconsistent series, and DMZ now feels like a legit contender in the growing extraction genre. Even with some stumbles, some 20 years later, Modern Warfare 4 shows Call of Duty is still in fighting shape.
