Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 review: blockbuster gaming at its best

You could be forgiven for having reservations going into Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4. After all, both last year’s instalment, the much-derided Black Ops 7, and this game’s direct predecessor, Modern Warfare III, were clearly rushed and displayed a level of sloppiness that suggested the first-person shooter franchise had reached its breaking point.

Thankfully, it’s now apparent that these were merely temporary hiccups, and Modern Warfare 4 sees developer Infinity Ward successfully bring Call of Duty back from the brink with a fresh and exciting instalment that represents the absolute pinnacle of what the series has to offer.

The brilliant single-player story campaign delivers blockbuster thrills, there’s a stellar extraction shooter component filled with tense encounters in DMZ, and the core multiplayer experience is wonderfully crafted. It’s a package that you shouldn’t miss, and if it represents the trajectory of future installments, I’m confident that we’re in good hands.

Boots on the ground

Activision

Activision

Activision

Activision

The Modern Warfare 4 campaign is simply superb and sets a new benchmark for the series’ cinematic storytelling. It truly feels like the culmination of the last decade of the Call of Duty series – and not just the Modern Warfare games.

It all kicks off in the fictional city of Hajin, South Korea, where you play as the lowly Private Park. An unwilling conscript in the country’s mandatory service program, he and his squadmates are suddenly thrust onto the front lines when a routine patrol is interrupted by the start of a full-scale invasion by North Korea. There are some genuinely shocking scenes in the opening as your team pushes through a rapidly crumbling city, dodging artillery strikes and witnessing widespread civilian casualties.

The early death of a squadmate hammers home the high stakes, and the decision to focus on newcomers rather than the established Modern Warfare cast makes it clear that there’s no plot armor here. You genuinely start to care about these new arrivals, with each member bringing a distinct and memorable personality to the squad’s dynamic. Dunn, a US Marine embedded in the local unit, is a particular highlight. His cultural cluelessness and overconfident swagger are frequently played for laughs, stopping the otherwise bleak tone from becoming too unrelentingly miserable.

It’s a big departure from the almost Marvel-movie-like silliness of the recent Call of Duty games (I’m looking at you, giant Harper mission from Black Ops 7), and the focus on a ground invasion makes for a grittier story that’s more in line with the events of the original Modern Warfare trilogy. Despite this more constrained focus, there are still plenty of memorable set-piece moments, such as an invigorating sequence that has you rapidly switching between different team members spread out across an air base, working together to fend off waves of North Korean troops.

Activision

Activision

Activision

Activision

There’s even one massive, open-world mission that unfolds similarly to a Far Cry game. It’s far more in-depth than the disappointing open-zone levels of 2023’s Modern Warfare III, with resources to scavenge, outposts to clear, and even a few puzzles to crack. It took me a few hours to clear, and since I didn’t see everything, I really appreciate being able to return to it later from the mission select screen and pick up where I left off.

Park’s story plays out mostly linearly, but it's interspersed with missions that detail the exploits of the fan-favorite Captain Price in the lead-up to the invasion. Set a few years after the events of the previous game, which, spoiler alert, ends with Price executing his long-term adversary, General Shepherd, in the middle of the Pentagon, the former SAS soldier is now on the run and travels between global locations hunting the members of a sinister cabal.

Price’s segments offer all the bombastic Mission: Impossible action that made the recent Black Ops 6 campaign so great. One minute you're infiltrating a New York nightclub, and the next you’re speeding through Paris, hanging out the side of a car chased by legions of heavily armed gangsters. Vladimir Makarov, a terrorist Price pursued throughout the previous game, is unceremoniously killed off in just the second mission, paving the way for the introduction of Archer, a new foe portrayed by Mads Mikkelsen. Unlike Makarov, he’s a compelling villain with coherent motivations and, importantly, enough screen time to appear like more than an afterthought, as his predecessor unfortunately did.

While Park’s journey sees the recruit come face to face with the horrors of war but emerge victorious thanks to camaraderie and teamwork, Price’s is all about the dangers of abandoning your morals and sacrificing those close to you in pursuit of revenge. They contrast excellently and, while the messaging certainly isn’t subtle, the way both gradually converge for a unified conclusion is nevertheless highly satisfying.

Off the books

(Image credit: Activision)

The events of the campaign lead directly into the new DMZ extraction shooter mode, which sees mercenaries returning to the crumbling ruins of Hajin to find and extract abandoned military tech left over from the war. It plays like a simplified version of titles such as Arena Breakout: Infinite or Escape from Tarkov, with your chosen operator dropping in to the map from an upgradable field base.

This serves as a little hub world that you return to in between runs, offering limited storage for your scavenged gear, a 3D printer to forge new equipment with collected resources, a vendor for spending extracted cash, and intelligence detailing the non-player character (NPC) foes and most dangerous players active in the zone. While most extraction shooter games include base-building elements, it’s rare to see your home as a physical 3D space you can actually explore, and it makes the experience feel much more immersive.

You have three options when deploying into Hajin: Story Missions, Dynamic Ops, and Free Roam. Free Roam is the most basic: it drops you into the massive map with a few other players to pursue your own goals, whether that means finding good weapons to extract or trying to complete DMZ Orders, little challenges that guide your experience. Dynamic Ops is more guided, feeding you a stream of multi-stage objectives with increasing rewards for each that you manage to complete.

(Image credit: Activision)

They’re assigned at random, with a good variety of options in the mission pool that range from taking out key NPC targets to taking over military camps and collecting stashed bombs to destroy marked vehicles. Story Missions, meanwhile, offer a more linear experience that feels much closer to the campaign.

One early highlight had my team of three taking on guards at an abandoned hospital, pushing our way up to the intensive care unit and wheeling a sedated enemy general to a rooftop extraction point under heavy fire. It was genuinely exhilarating, and became even more exciting when a squad of enemy players turned up to disrupt our mission.

Other players can appear regardless of your chosen mode, leading to tense PvP situations where one wrong move can mean the difference between a successful escape and losing your current operator and all of their equipment. Not every encounter has to end in a fight, though, as you can work together with enemy teams (and even opt to join them) if they’re willing to cooperate, leading to some fun emergent play.

I entered one story mission and quickly discovered that my team of randoms was absolutely terrible, with no apparent interest in actually completing our tasks, so I beelined to a nearby enemy squad shouting “friendly” until they sent me the invite to join them. I quickly led my new friends right back to my useless former teammates, and took great pleasure in helping mow them down to steal all their gear.

No two games feel the same, and if that wasn’t reason enough to keep coming back, Hajin itself is a treat to explore. It’s big, beautiful, and filled with a variety of aesthetically distinct zones ranging from freezing cold, abandoned North Korean villages to the rusty ruins of the South Korean city and even some of the barren outskirts of Russia. Even when you’ve seen it all, the dynamic weather effects can still take you by surprise, introducing challenging conditions like dense fog or heavy rainstorms that make it more difficult to navigate and spot foes.

DMZ would be a strong offering as a standalone extraction shooter game, so it represents incredible value when bundled in alongside the rest of the Modern Warfare 4 package. This is a mode that I’m going to be coming back to time and time again in the weeks and months ahead.

A fresh start

(Image credit: Activision)

Of course, no Call of Duty game is complete without a robust suite of core multiplayer modes, and Modern Warfare 4 delivers a truly superb experience across the board in this regard. The pacing of matches is perfect: noticeably snappier than the comparatively pedestrian battles of Modern Warfare II but not as overwhelmingly rapid as the wall-jumping, hip-firing action of Black Ops 7.

Fast movement helps you navigate the smaller maps of classic modes like Team Deathmatch or Kill Confirmed quickly so you’re always encountering new enemies to fight, keeping the excitement high. Focusing on tactical positioning is still rewarded, thanks to a finely tuned TTK (time to kill) that gives the player who lands the first hit an advantage, but not a guaranteed victory against particularly skilled opponents. New traversal mechanics like a ledge grab that lets you hang off the side of buildings and objects are seamlessly implemented too, opening up new exciting opportunities on every battlefield.

As I noted in my impressions of the Modern Warfare 4 beta, the overhauled ballistic system is far more than a marketing bullet point and genuinely impacts how you engage with weapons by accurately simulating the trajectory of bullets based on the position of your muzzle. In practical terms, it means being able to reliably hit shots when quickly shooting from the hip, which gives you a chance against players that slide around corners with SMGs at breakneck speeds to try and catch you off guard.

(Image credit: Activision)

The guns themselves are all fantastic to use, with best-in-class model fidelity, impactful sound effects, and slick animations. There’s a great variety in the arsenal to boot, which spans from modern assault rifles to the antique WWII gear used by the real-world North Korean military. GUNNY, a new automated helper smartly built into the gunsmith system, makes it easier than ever to tweak your attachments for that perfect build. While I will always prefer poring over the detailed stats, giving newcomers the ability to automatically create good attachment setups based on their specific playstyles helps keep the playing field even.

As for the maps, they’re some of the best that we’ve had in recent years. They’re definitely on the smaller side unless you dive into the massive Ground War: Combat Outpost mode (which plays almost like a Battlefield match), though none of them stand out as suffering from poorly balanced spawn points or unfair sightlines. They’re visually stunning. Those taking place in South Korea, such as Silkworm, stand out particularly with their lavishly detailed streets, while little animated intros grant each arena a distinct visual identity.

Wrap all of this up in a slick UI that finally doesn’t look like the Netflix home screen, and it’s hard not to come to the conclusion that Modern Warfare 4 is going to reshape the direction of the long-running series going forward. If I had to truly nitpick, I would fault the lack of faction divisions in the operator lineup – being able to tell at a glance which team a player is on without having to rely on the red enemy indicator would help readability.

For something this insignificant to be my only complaint is a testament to how strong the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 package is

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Accessibility features

As with most modern Call of Duty games, there is an expansive selection of accessibility settings. This includes a wide selection of visual presets designed to enhance readability, as well as an assortment of subtitle options for the campaign.

The controls are also highly customizable, with full remapping supported whether you’re using a keyboard and mouse or a controller. You can also tweak aim assist settings and enable presets designed to reduce motor strain.

How I reviewed Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4

I played more than 25 hours of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 for the purpose of this review. This included a full playthrough of the campaign, multiple DMZ sessions both solo and with a friend, and plenty of multiplayer. I also drew on my experience playing more than ten hours of the game’s beta, and some extra hands-on time in a studio visit earlier this year.

I tested everything on PC using a 5070 Ti-powered model by retailer Sca with a compact Corsair 2000d RGB Airflow case, Asus ROG Strix B860-I Gaming Wifi motherboard, Intel Core Ultra 7 265K CPU, a 2TB WD Black SN770 SSD, 32GB of DDR5 Corsair Vengeance RAM, and an Nvidia 5070 Ti manufactured by Asus. This setup lets me play smoothly on custom graphics settings at 1080p with most options set to High.

For peripherals, I used the new Logitech G Pro X2 Rapid keyboard and Logitech G Pro X3 SuperStrike mouse throughout my time with the game.

First reviewed October 2026