Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 Review: A Campaign You Shouldn't Miss

A failed and entertaining campaign that benefits from hindsight.

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I just got back from a three-day Modern Warfare 4 review event in Los Angeles. While 24 hours of playtime in the campaign, multiplayer and DMZ was a useful start, you'll never know how a Call of Duty ranks until you're in front of the public. As such, I won't rate this until after launch. In the meantime, below are my thoughts on the campaign and I'll be back early next week for DMZ impressions.

As I watched Modern Warfare 4's campaign roll, a sobering thought crept in: I've been playing Call of Duty for over 20 years—two-thirds of my life. While I think of it primarily as a multiplayer game these days, what I loved about Call of Duty all along was its campaigns. In 2006, as a shy fourth grader at a new school, I made my first friend because we both played Call of Duty 3 on the Wii and spent a week at lunch retelling the cool moments of the campaign. By 2007 (the year of Modern Warfare, of course), our dinner table was going nuts over the episode where Captain Price pulls the pistol on you as he dies (as we thought at the time).

As memorable as that sequence was, it marked the moment when Call of Duty became world-hopping. Superhuman, super-serious operatives preventing World War III before breakfast. It was bad enough at the time, but what they gained in the kind of spectacle that makes a great Sunday Night Football commercial, they lost in relatability.

Sure, those early World War II campaigns were funny riffs on the movies, but they starred regular guys who mostly wanted to get home — scruffy sergeants and green privates humorously guarding the helpless. They depict large-scale attacks achieved by smaller contributions. It's that energy that Infinity Ward is trying to recapture in Modern Warfare 4. Sometimes, it works perfectly.

It's the most fun I've had with a Call of Duty campaign in years, lending itself mostly to its new, non-elite faces. More than half of the 6-hour campaign revolves around a crew of young South Korean marines (plus a few Americans) who are running out the clock on their conscription when North Korea suddenly attacks. The guys themselves are familiar archetypes—a serious man, an audience member who doesn't talk much, an American who fills every silence with a joke—but basically they're so charming that I bothered to remember their names.

I like the idea, even if this recent "cut-from-the-headlines" premise of a North Korean attack continues Infinity Ward's streak of flattening complex foreign conflicts through a typically American lens (while conveniently turning the CIA dogs into the good guys). You'll never guess which global superpower is really pulling the strings this time, yes.

Here for the first time Call of Duty: The Modern Warfare 4 beta will have a campaign mission and Warzone stuff.

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Gears in the Machine reopens Modern Warfare 4's most iconic missions, many of which remind me of the best days of the series. "Mehem" and "Lost Earth" follow a futile attempt to hold the fictional city of Hejin against a decisive invasion. They're noisy, chaotic fights where your characters are noticeably scared of what's going on (a rarity in a post-price world) and your side is constantly outnumbered. Later, "Counterattack" ups the scale and intensity with a massive assault on the beach that can really only be achieved by throwing around some stupid money. It's certainly a better use of resources than the overly deceptive Warzone-y campaigns of recent Black Ops sequels.

Even when the action gets smaller, Private Park (no relationship) and Friends are just plain fun. "Stranded" opens with the platoon dropped behind enemy lines in North Korea, and Infinity Ward's best swing at a sandbox level to date. This multi-hour mission creates three non-linear objectives, side missions, and a hideout where you can craft better armor, weapons, and camouflage. It's a relatively quiet and isolated mission compared to the ones before it - almost like playing micro Far Cry in the middle of a CoD campaign. It was a little confusing at first, but it ended up being a highlight.

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I was worried that this would be another example of Warzone being turned into single player, since this mission uses the DMZ loot system, but I was told that the map was only made for the campaign, which is fine.

Infinity Ward could have built an entire campaign around Team Park, and I'm still not sure why they didn't. Instead, their story parallels the isolated adventures of Captain Price, now a fugitive wanted for a Modern Warfare 3 business that most people haven't seen (the game confirms this by playing a lengthy synopsis video).

Modern Warfare 4 tries to explore darker fare during replays – a car chase with gunfire, a foot chase with a jump, a cinematic knife fight – but these sequences left my head as quickly as they were over. It's strange how different and less interesting this part of the game is, especially considering Price basically drops out of the story for the back half and never crosses paths with the actual heroes.

As off, the Infiniti checks the boxes for people who are waiting for something on the price when they desperately want to do something else. It was announced as a conclusion to the Modern Warfare story that began in 2019, but in practice, it's more like a sprint to get through it all. It's a shame that Mads Mikkelsen was dragged into the bad parts of this one - he could have been a menacing presence in a campaign that actually had time to use him.

It shows the quality of the series being produced lately, producing a regular campaign with exotic cutscenes, lavish cinematography and basically great gunplay is a huge win. Without the influence of Warzone or Zombies, this is the first time in a long time that Call of Duty's campaign doesn't feel like it.

Morgan has been writing for PC Gamer since 2018, first as a freelancer and now as a staff writer. He has also appeared on Polygon, Kotaku, Fanbyte, and PCGamesN. Before freelancing, he spent most of high school and all of college writing for small gaming sites that didn't pay him. He is very happy now that he has a real job. Morgan is a beat writer who follows the latest and greatest shooters and the communities that play them. He also writes general news, reviews, features, the occasional guide, and bad jokes on Slack. Twist his arm, and he'll even write about a boring strategy game. However, please do not do this.

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