Modern Warfare 4 on Switch 2 isn't the disaster you might think

Modern Warfare 4 is the first Call of Duty game since 2013 to be released on a Nintendo console. We played the campaign on Switch 2 and were amazed at how well it performed.

Since 2013, Call of Duty: Ghosts has been the first mainline COD game to appear on a Nintendo console, launching on the Wii U. Modern Warfare 4 2026 will break this 14-year dry spell when it releases on Switch 2, and I got to play a few missions from the campaign to see how it works. I'm not going to lie, my expectations were low - Call of Duty has always been on the cutting edge in terms of graphics and performance, and Nintendo's latest version wasn't purposely built for that. And yet, I was pleasantly surprised by what Digital Legends, Activision's studio dedicated to this version of MW4, achieved from a technical standpoint.

For a full review of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4, I played on PC, which seems like a useful benchmark for the most ideal version of the game. Of course, you'll immediately notice the difference when you're next to the Switch 2 version - it looks stunning on PC, as you'd expect, and runs like a dream. But, the transition to Switch 2 didn't hurt my eyes as much as I feared. Admittedly, the textures are by no means detailed, with flat surfaces and faces flattened to give the impression of plastic versions of campaign characters. It's not obvious by any means, but given the lower power that Nintendo's latest console is running on, gameplay itself was smooth, running at 30fps in 4K in docked mode. The campaign is locked at 30, while the multiplayer is targeting 60.

The campaign's framerate also remained consistent, with no stuttering or stuttering during some of the story's most explosive moments - I deliberately made sure to capture a portion of a mission that featured one of its most confusing sequences to test it out. You can check out the gameplay for yourself in the video above, but I'm impressed that a game that would normally demand the hardware it runs on runs so well on the Switch 2. And if you're just a Nintendo owner who's been out of Call of Duty for over a decade, you're getting a version of Modern Warfare 4 that feels just as good as the series usually does, even if it's a little darker than Nintendo's own crisp visuals.

Simon Cardy is a senior editor at IGN who can mostly be found engrossed in open-world gaming, engrossed in Korean cinema, or despairing over the state of Tottenham Hotspur and the New York Jets. Follow him on Bluesky at @cardy.bsky.social.