I kind of gave my opinions away already about Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 by saying that the opening scene of the outbreak of war between North Korea and South Korea was one of the best openings ever. Then I said the campaign was one of the best experiences ever.
I suppose I should really go back and check past years, but I’ve played every single Call of Duty that has come out, ever. Last year’s Black Ops 7 wasn’t so good. But I can confidently say, with this full review, that Call of Duty is back. The full game, with the campaign, DMZ extraction, and multiplayer launches now. And it exceeded my expectations — by returning to form.
For Activision (and its parent Activision Blizzard and its parent Xbox and its parent Microsoft), this is great news. Call of Duty is a pillar of gaming, with more than 500 million copies sold as of 2024, and more than $30 billion in lifetime revenue since 2022. Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 was great in 2024 with the biggest launch in franchise history, but Black Ops 7 was a dud. It’s not unusual for a Call of Duty game to hit $1 billion in 10 days.
But can Modern Warfare 4 bring back the lapsed players, and can it do it before they get obsessed with Grand Theft Auto VI?
We’ll find out. But meanwhile, I’m very happy about the overall quality of Modern Warfare 4 because it went back to what made the series great. While The Last of Us games are my favorite of all time, Call of Duty is my favorite ongoing series. And it’s at its best when it isn’t simply trying to outdo the craziness of the previous game. Now the devs are remembering what made the game great.
For our coverage, check out our interview and review of the campaign, our interview and review of DMZ.
A memorable campaign
I refer back to my review of the campaign, which focuses on Captain Price fighting enemies in the shadows and a squad of South Korean and American soldiers fighting on the front lines of the war with North Korea. There’s also an excellent subplot within the inner circle of the leadership of North Korea, where brutality toward enemies of the state is the norm.
The game takes a whole seven minutes (an eternity in Call of Duty) to introduce you to the South Korea squad, which has both veterans and raw recruits. That sequence in the beginning is so memorable itself. Spectacular cinematics capture the invasion in its early moments, and those spectacular cinematics are peppered throughout the entire game.
In the first minutes of the war, this band of soldiers has to bond and grow up real fast. I kept thinking of the BTS pop stars serving in the South Korean army because conscription is mandatory. The motivations of each soldier who’s present in the squad, including the Americans, is different. The bravery of the small South Korean unit with Americans embedded in it is a fresh story, and it’s the best narrative in the game.
The characters and plot of the campaign are grounded in boots-on-the-ground combat, not hallucinogenic fantasies that plagued last year’s Black Ops 7. It’s nice the Infinity Ward team figured out that the chaos of war, the terrifying brutality of the battlefield, and the terror of a dictatorial regime are enough to make a great backdrop for a Call of Duty game. While the scenery of South Korea is fresh, split between the countryside and the urban jungle, the clandestine part of the campaign takes you into Paris, Mumbai and New York.
Modern Warfare 4 pretty much strips away the excess that Treyarch has dug itself into with the Black Ops series. The missions are mostly linear, with the exception of an open world part in the middle of the campaign. The open world is fun and it gives you a taste of the DMZ open world, but it distracts you from the pure drama and intensity of the intriguing story. I played the whole campaign in almost one sitting across a dozen-plus hours, but I recommend taking a break. I also think you should explore the open world more, and not rely much on fast travel. You should savor that part, and not be in a rush.
You follow the different story threads of the South Korean squad at war, the hidden war with Price, and the intrigue in the palace of North Korea. The common thread throughout the story and combat is that it all feels authentic, and wrapped around the theme of where the line is — how far will you go to become what you hate when everything is at stake. Will you be more brutal than your enemy? When will you stop? This is where the narrative threads come together. And the Infinity Ward team manages to take the storylines to a logical conclusion.
It’s also rare and brave for the studio, which is the lead studio of a dozen Call of Duty studios, to take the risk of angering fans. It follows the logical conclusion of Price’s decision to defy his superiors, including killing a rogue American general in the previous game. Price famously said that the special ops soldiers have to “draw the line wherever you need it to be,” and they had to “get dirty so the world stays clean.” That meant allying himself with enemies of the state like the cartel leader Valeria. On the other side, enemies like the terrorist Makarov aren’t so different.
When this game kills off some of its characters, it’s a haunting thing. It means perhaps that this might every well be one of the last Modern Warfare games we’ll see — before the franchise moves on to an altogether different storyline. It feels like the game developers went charging into this game, taking no prisoners and knowing it might get some very bad reactions.
Hey, I don’t like the idea of change coming to my Modern Warfare series. Indeed, it’s been around so long that I view it as an owner. I’m a fan, and this franchise belongs to me. But I love the risk taking here and I’m going to stay along for the ride. The result is the best campaign in many years. I had to rush through it on Normal mode, but I want to play it again on Hardened. I almost never replay Call of Duty campaigns, but this one breaks new ground.
The best missions
One of the best missions is the one where you go into a nuclear reactor to free civilians and stop a meltdown. You’re deceived from the outset that your bombers have put the North Koreans on the defensive as you try to retake the facility. But the North Koreans are dug into snow-covered trenches, and fighting to get through them is brutal.
Once you do that, you shift into an armored gun troop carrier, and you get to mow down the enemy soldiers with your heavy weapons. But once you’re done with that, you have to fight a grueling battle with an enemy BMP, where the tables are turned. Then you have to go into the hell of the radioactive and failing nuclear reactor, where time is of the essence. The closing scenes of that mission is one of the most impressive of the whole campaign.
There’s also an offensive attack on Hajin City that starts with foot soldiers and tanks on the beach. You clean up the streets and go into a big hotel and battle upward, floor by floor. You have to pull off a Rainbow Six style breach and clear a room, and then at the top, you start raining down heavy ordinance on the ants below. The variety of that one mission is intense and you have to fight relentlessly.
Fighting in the DMZ
The fresh part of multiplayer is DMZ, which is Infinity Ward’s new extraction shooter, a living world with unpredictable enemy encounters, built into the multiplayer mode of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4.
Dynamic world systems respond to every action. Vehicle convoys move across the roadways, air traffic fills the skies, and hostile forces constantly reposition WMDs and strategic assets. With enemy factions and rival human squads battling for control of key locations, every operation can evolve in unexpected ways.
I had a chance to play it at Infinity Ward’s headquarters in Los Angeles and in each round it felt like I was entering a dangerous world of DMZ’s Hajin exclusion zone, where I felt the pressing need to fight, loot and run for the exit. I haven’t been drawn to a lot of extraction games, except ARC Raiders. And this extraction mode has a lot going for it.
It’s set in the Hajin exclusion zone, an area that has been affected by a war-caused meltdown at a nuclear power plant. The radiation zone starts out small and then expands over time. By the time your 45-minute match is over, the radiation is everywhere.
Operating as a shadow CIA asset, you are deployed behind enemy lines and tasked with
securing the various weapons and technology left behind before they fall into enemy hands. This setup has a nice connection to the single-player campaign.
You deploy via helicopter into the zone and you just appear in the world, after you’ve presumably exited your helicopter. There’s no more trying to land at a given spot in the map. You make decisions about pushing deep into danger zones — rated from mild to critical — where there are different levels of enemies.
The NPCs can be dangerous if they surround you, or they’re heavily armored with good guns. That means you can’t dilly dally on your missions. You have to go in, fight, grab loot and then extract at a number of helicopter pickup points around the map. If you run into other human teams, it’s anything goes.
This is a reimagined and non-compromised redo of the DMZ that the team launched too early in November 2022. Joe Cecot, multiplayer creative director, acknowledged that it wasn’t the kind of experience the team really wanted back then. Now they’re proud of how polished DMZ is at the outset here.
As I noted before, the dynamic world of DMZ is full of enemies who appear in different places, even at the gas stations where you have to gas up your stolen vehicle. There’s shifting weather, from sunny days to sideways rain. And you’re motivated to fulfill contracts and take risks inside the DMZ to boost your progression from match to match.
The key for your co-op squad is to be deliberate, not distracted. You can explore, but don’t waste too much time in one place or the North Koreans, the non-player characters, will call for reinforcements that are increasingly dangerous.
You earn a bunch of faux money each time you extract, and if you lose one of your characters, you can buy that character back. You can also 3D print equipment like replacement guns and attachments in your Forward Operating Base (FOB).
Of course, there are many temptations for taking risks. You can try to challenge big bosses, like helicopter-borne Lieutenants or a big nasty tank. But you run the risk of getting killed. You can try to do a lot of missions but perhaps run out of time to extract. And you can keep finding loot at various places but the NPCs can overwhelm you. If you go in with others, it’s good to have a good driver and have someone who knows the map. Cecot was my sherpa and he knew where everything was. And you don’t want someone who will wander too far away.
His counsel was patience. If you’re brand new to the game, don’t wander into the areas that are dubbed “critical threats,” like the military base. If you’re killed, you lose your character, who may have traits that are quite leveled up. But worse, if you have a good gun with a lot of attachments, you’ll spend a lot of money to replace it. If you have to spend $100,000 to get all of your gear back, you’ll be out of money with one or two deaths.
In one match, all of us died. In the half-dozen times I played, the match times varied. We could get in and out as early as 15 minutes if we extracted early. But if we waited until the very end — or sometimes too long, the match could last more than 40 minutes. Cecot showed us how to find a key in a police station where you could unlock special storage rooms. He took us through a mission where we had to extract a wounded North Korean officer in a hospital. It was a crazy firefight while we were being shot at while rolling a hospital bed through a corridor, into an elevator, and then to exfil.
Cecot showed us a tank graveyard, a toxic cesspool with treasures underwater, places where heavily armored soldiers guarded places, and missile silos where you could go inside an underground bunker and find good loot.
And he noted that hospitals are a kind of haven for players as North Korean NPCs won’t attack you inside — though human players might as they pursue the healing loot that could save players from death.
You can spend a lot of time in the big map of the Hajin exclusion zone and never really discover everything that’s hidden in buildings, terrain and underground bunkers. I think it’s great and fresh achievement that could make multiplayer stickier than in the past. I think it’s also going to give other extraction games a run for their money.
Multiplayer combat
Modern Warfare 4 multiplayer delivers grounded, precise combat where fluid movement,
player choice, and greater control define engagements. Your skill at shooting matters a lot, but you get a lot of help from precise guns and the smoothness and speed of movement.
You’re no longer held back (at least for lesser skilled players like me) by omnimovement, which gave expert players an advantage in the last couple of years. You could round a corner and your enemy could be doing a bunny hop, or be jumping high, or sliding low or diving sideways with a gun pointed straight at you. It was very hard to master.
Instead, you get the basics of that kind of movement without having to press a lot of buttons at the same time. In shooting, bullets go where you aim them, rather than scattering randomly. Targets are more visible, even when you’re aiming down the sight. Now you can mantle an object and aim at the same time.
The force of concussions can also knock you down if a mortar round or aircraft bomb or just a grenade goes off near you. It makes the experience scary.
The weapons are also good. The assault rifles are deadly once you level them up, and the sniper rifles can take out a lot of soldiers with one shot — but not if they’re packing a lot of armor. (This makes sniping harder in DMZ and any other maps where you can armor up). Those with aiming skill will benefit from this, and that’s fair.
There’s a part of the game that benefits from AI, where the artificial intelligence can recommend the best loadout for you based on the level you’re at and the weapons and attachments that you carry. This Gunny system brings a Gunnery Sergeant’s eye weapon customization, helping players quickly assemble effective builds based on their preferred playstyle and unlocked attachments.
Modern Warfare 4 introduces greater player choice through two Prestige paths: Classic Prestige and Regular Prestige. Classic Prestige delivers the traditional reset experience, relocking Create-a-Class progression in exchange for increased XP earn rates and access to exclusive Prestige rewards.
On day one, there are 12 new core six-versus-six human player maps set in distinct locations around the world. I had a chance to play a lot of them, and to try many different modes. I love the usual Team Deathmatch, Domination, Hardpoint and Ground War maps (though the latter seems like a bit too many players in too small a space). Search and Destroy is slower and it’s really appealing to the skillful.
The best map in my opinion is Transit 213, a collection of derelict buses all parked in one area that makes for a tight map like Nuketown or Shipment. It’s a nonstop splatterfest, but one where conniving players can get the upper hand. Rooftops is a good map atop the roof of a New York Hotel, and Mumbai has a lot of pretty colors amid a deadly battlefield in a dense residential district. I also got used to the sniper alleys of Silkworm, set in an urban area of South Korea.
Nautical takes place on a yacht, but a much bigger one than we’ve seen before. You can also fight inside a nuclear reactor, a munitions factory, a coal plant, a South Korean fishing village, a Russian military base and more.
Like much of the rest of the game, multiplayer is a good return to form.
The novelty of Kill Block
One of the new things is a multiplayer map dubbed Kill Block, where the landscape changes with every round of a multiplayer match. This new mode really tests your skill with a variety of weapons.
Each round begins with all operators equipped with the same randomized primary and secondary weapons, tactical and lethal equipment, ensuring every player starts on equal footing. There are no custom loadouts to rely on, placing the emphasis squarely on teamwork, weapon proficiency, and tactical decision making. If neither team is eliminated before the round
timer expires, an Overtime Flag deploys into the combat zone, forcing both teams to converge on it. Capture this Flag to claim victory or fight to maintain the health advantage if time runs out.
During Kill Block Gunfight matches, teams swap sides after the first round. After the second round ends, the three slabs change to a new Combo (map), a new random loadout is equipped, and the match continues. Combos continue to change every two rounds until one of the teams wins six rounds. There are hundreds of possible combinations.
In the game, players fight it out in team duels in a place where the facility’s massive modular slabs move into place, changing with each round and providing new tactical opportunities in the environment where players encounter it fresh. That means there’s no advantage to the player who has memorized maps and figured out the best places to ambush players.
Instead, the Kill Block map brings out the best skill in players who have to outthink and outshoot their opponents in real time.
Kill Block is an adaptive live-fire training environment where players can square off in multiplayer matches of Gunfight mode, where three human players square off against three others (3v3) or in 10v10 battles.
It’s very difficult for a semi-skilled player like me. And it would take me a long time to level up my skill to be able to start winning. But like much of the rest of the game, it’s fresh.
The Verdict
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 succeeds because it understands that Call of Duty doesn’t have to jump on the trends that make it into some kind of crazy game. It just needs to be the best version of itself. That game does that.
The campaign delivers memorable set pieces, convincing new and old characters, strong pacing, and an emotional conclusion to the rebooted Modern Warfare story. I didn’t know that this was really what I was waiting for as a Call of Duty fan.
Will I play this or Grand Theft Auto VI? Why, both, of course.
I give the game a score of 4.5 out of 5.
I played the game on the PC with an Xbox controller. You can also play it on the PC on Steam or Battle.net, on Xbox Series X/S and on PlayStation 5. The game is also available on the Nintendo Switch 2, marking Call of Duty’s return to a Nintendo platform since 2013 with Call of Duty: Ghosts.
Disclosure: Activision paid my way to an event where I played the full game. This story is the sole responsibility of GamesBeat.