Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 Review

Call of Duty hasn’t had the most consistent track record over the last few years. A dedicated fan might argue that the franchise has always had the occasional off year, but they’re probably feeling more like Star Trek fans these days, dreading the odd-numbered years of MW3 and BO7, and praying for the evens. Well, good news, because this is an even numbered year, and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 is right up there.

The campaign is always my main reason for coming to a Call of Duty game, and this one excels at being a pretty great encapsulation of everything you’d expect from a polished shooter story. Modern Warfare 4 drops you into two different perspectives over the course of its 16 mission campaign. You play as a unit of South Korean soldiers caught in the middle of a surprise invasion by North Korea, but you’ll also dive into the boots of series mainstay Cpt. Price, following his activities in the days just before that North Korean invasion. He’s on the hunt for a Russian agent pulling the strings behind the scenes, which Price and his squad have been tracking, but it’s clear that this same mysterious target is a key figure in causing the Korean crisis you’ll be fighting through in the other half of the campaign.

That split perspective does a lot for the campaign. For one, it creates an amazing sense of tension. Each of Price’s missions counts down each day before the North Korean invasion, adding this bubbling dread underneath each moment of his side of the story because you know exactly where things are headed. The split perspective also injects an incredible sense of variety into the campaign.

The missions set during the North Korean invasion are classic military set-piece action, throwing you against waves of enemy soldiers and jaw-dropping scale as you storm enemy frontlines or defend a collapsing bridge with blind-fired mortars. Meanwhile, Price is going on a globe-trotting adventure that delivers more spy-thriller, Hollywood action hero vibes. One mission has you fist-fighting through a neon New York City nightclub before chasing good ol’ Makarov across rooftops, while another mission will have you driving an armoured truck through the streets of Paris.

The stand-out mission of the entire campaign, by a mile, is Stranded. I remembered feeling like every mission in 2024’s Black Ops 6 practically felt like a different game, with some being stealth tailing missions while others were semi open-world base capturing epics. Every mission in Modern Warfare 4 is pretty similar in length and linearity, but then Stranded hits you like a truck, sticking you alone behind enemy lines in occupied South Korea. What ensues is an open-ended resource gathering experience across a huge map with a base to return to, equipment to repair and upgrade, and plenty of side objectives that could keep you playing just this one mission for practically five hours.

It’s a very bite-sized alternative to the kind of extraction gameplay of the new DMZ mode, but it importantly doesn’t feel like a shoe-horned asset flip in the way that the open sections of Modern Warfare III and Black Ops 7 felt. Stranded is a purpose-built single-player experience that is packed full of content and gameplay opportunities, and the fact that it’s just one mission in an already massive campaign is both bewildering and incredible.

The counterpart to Stranded is that DMZ mode, the third component for this year’s Call of Duty. It’s an extraction shooter sort of thing, which Call of Duty has tried a couple times – the time-limited DMZ mode for Warzone in 2022, and the barebones Endgame mode for Black Ops 7. Where those previous efforts lacked juice, DMZ in Modern Warfare 4 taps into the same kind of risk-reward intensity I’ve come to love from extraction shooters like Synduality Echo of Ada or ARC Raiders.

You drop into a massive, battle-royal sized map, you gather items and gear from downed enemies or rival players, and you either make it to an extraction point that lets you return home with everything you gathered or you die and lose it all in the field. The biggest thing for me is that what you collect really matters. As you explore the massive Hajin region, you’ll find seemingly random bits of stripped tech and discarded medicine and loose cash. These don’t convert to upgrade currency, but are needed as resources for 3D Printer recipes that you can use once back at home base. You’ll learn that the particularly useful equipment requires even rarer materials, and then you fall into the loop of learning what each part of the region contains in terms of resource drops, enemy encounters, and more.

DMZ comes across as a most PvE experience, and there’s you can really rampage through the map until you get to higher difficulty zones. But beware, because though they might be rare, there are other players out there hunting for the same rare items as you, and they show up just often enough that it always puts a pit in my stomach when I see their mics light up on proximity chat or feel their gunfire graze across my screen.

Very often, those players will kill me. Thankfully, it’s never unfairly punishing to encounter death in DMZ. Losing gear can be a pain unless you’ve insured your weapons, and when you die you’ll lose your chosen Operator in the field, and their unlocked perk upgrades as well. You can pay a fee to rescue them, though, and even though that fee goes up the more perks your character has, it never felt detrimental to my progress to cough up the money for my Operator to come back home. Of course, if you don’t have the money, you can still play. You have multiple Operator slots, and can dismiss one if needed, plus you’re offered a free loadout of gear to deploy with in the event that you run out of your own or just don’t want to risk using the good stuff.

What I also love about DMZ is that you can either approach it with a specific resource focus and goal, or you can just kinda drop in and do whatever. Every time you deploy, you’re given a randomised Operation that tasks you with completing a few objectives on the map that usually take anywhere between five or fifteen minutes. Completing it rewards you with a care package drop and plenty of time to locate an extraction point, get back to your base, and maybe drop right back in! It’s a really arcade-y, smart system that I don’t think I’ve seen any other extraction shooter implement, and it helps make the mode even easier to approach as a fun, one-more-run type experience to dive into with pals.

And of course, then there’s the classic multiplayer. This is a bit of a back to basics year, in some ways. Omnimovement is out, as is the wall-jumping from BO7, but Infinity Ward has still worked to make everything smooth and fluid, and there’s more ways to clamber around with mantling, pipe climbing, and supine sliding. It’s still a very run-and-gun experience in a lot of modes, though.

You’ve got your regulars like Team Deathmatch, Kill Confirmed, Search and Destroy, but then there’s also new and remixed ideas. Inflation takes Kill Confirmed and has players dropping cash bundles when they die, which can be claimed (and lost) by others, all while High Value Targets are thrown in for good measure. Hijack has teams fight over a single data spike and then deliver it to detonate the opposing comm station (so it’s like S&D meets one flag CTF). Gunfight returns in a 3v3 mode, and a new bulked up 10v10 version, as well, and is currently the sole home of the shifting, reconfiguring Kill Block map, which switches between hundreds of training facility layouts each time you load in – a clever twist which will be extended to more modes in future.

And you’ve then got acres of progression to work through, with a long sequence of unlocks for both your profile and the individual weapons you’re using – the Gunny system helps with some quick builds that skew weapons to a particular role with a mix of attachments, so you don’t have to. Add the new Apex Attachments into the mix as a final reward for playing sufficiently with a single gun, and there’s plenty to work towards. What does help is that the M4 and Han 86 assault rifles are both available right away, and they’re some of the best and most flexible guns in the game.

All in all, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 is a great return to form for the franchise after a particularly rough patch. The campaign is full of variety without feeling too scattershot, multiplayer gets its fundamentals right alongside some good new options, and the new DMZ mode is a genuine delight that feels like the best blend of arcade-y co-op fun and tense extraction gameplay I’ve seen in a shooter. If you’ve been ground down by the off years and wondering if it’s worth giving this year another shot, I can confidently recommend hopping back in with this one.