Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 - Campaign Review

Modern Warfare 4 may not have enough to rank among the best Call of Duty campaigns, but if it's going to be the end of this particular saga, it at least ranks high.

These are our impressions of the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 campaign. DMZ and multiplayer review will follow.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4's campaign is an unenviable task: complete a seven-year story arc that I would politely describe as "rough." To its credit, it rises to the challenge well, offering a truly exciting set of missions that excel when they focus on something new rather than being bogged down in the past. It's the best Modern Warfare has been by a long shot since its 2019 reboot, and a reminder of just how good Call of Duty can be when the people making it are given time to cook.

This set of blockbuster sequences, clearly built from the ground up as a single-player experience, is in stark contrast to Modern Warfare 3's dreary 2023 campaign, which is arguably the weak point of the entire series. A mix of multiplayer maps interspersed with almost incomprehensible bits of story, I wouldn't envy Infinity Ward having to pick up where it left off. The studio has done almost as well as possible, thanks to a clever structure that splits the two halves of the story until they inevitably collide, offering variety in mission design and tone.

Captain Price has been at the center of modern warfare history, and that doesn't change much here. After the disastrous ending of MW3, he's now on the run, playing the role of a lone wolf being hunted by the people he used to work for. One half of the story is initially tied into knots that even Alfred Borden had trouble with. Infinity Ward's answer? Hit a lot of it and kill every character that was introduced in the last two games and deemed unnecessary. It's almost an admission of guilt that these guys have been treated badly in the past, but it ends this seemingly epic season.

Price's story is a tale of tightrope walkers and warmongers set over the five days leading up to North Korea's invasion of South Korea (more on that in a moment). The former SAS captain blinks for his nemesis Makarov and whoever his boss is. It's fair to say that the Russian terrorist is nowhere near the threat Modern Warfare 2 developed, as it seems like a wasted opportunity to revive a well-known villain. He will be replaced by Mads Mikkelsen's The Archer.

For the most part, the chapters in Price's story play out like a gang movie, filled with parkour escapes, car chases, and secret infiltrations. Mikkelsen's casting only reinforces that feeling, and while he's classically uneasy in his performance, his character was never given enough screen time for me to connect with. As such, while the missions that make up Pryce's side of the story are fun, it feels like the weaker half. Infinity Ward clearly wants Price to be the player's strongest emotional connection and his personal vendettas to make us feel like our own, but in truth, many missions are devoted to the Korean conflict. By the way, this is where I found more interesting stories.

Simon Cardy's Top 10 Call of Duty Campaigns

MW4's 16 missions took me around the world as well as back and forth in time. The Korean invasion takes place in "present day" as I follow a platoon of soldiers from the moment the war starts to its end, while we return to Price every now and then as he hunts down whoever was behind the plot the previous week. These time changes also allow for a clever mix between traditional military missions and ingenuity behind enemy lines. For example, when Price does his best John Wick impression early on, he forces you into a fistfight in a New York nightclub. Next, you'll have paratroopers on the streets of Seoul armed with mortars. While the Korean segments are generally louder and more traditional in their approach than the boots-on-the-ground "Call of Duty," it was somewhat surprising to me that it managed to make such a strong connection to its playable character.

Park Hyun Joon, Young Mazino, has a lovely nature. Just as Farah did in the 2019 reboot, he gives the story an emotional anchor that nicely offsets the violent military tropes. The same can be said for his entire team, a mix of Korean and American soldiers whose well-balanced mix of naivety and seriousness in their bonds kept me rooted in the events and actually caring what happened to them in the end. Overall, I found the Korean side of things more compelling and ended up caring more about people like Park, his friend Jae, and their northern counterpart Koo. While Mikkelsen's The Archer could come off as a mustachioed, nuke-wielding caricature, MW4 actually does a good job of deepening the North Korean threat rather than showing its individual leaders and people following their orders in an evil shadow.

Stranded embraces freedom of approach like few other missions.

The overall direction of the story may not surprise you, but there are some interesting character moments that the previous two Modern Warfare installments have sorely lacked. One such moment occurs in one of the campaign's standout missions: Stranded. As it stands these days, Call of Duty is now an interconnected beast, so this particular mission actually gives you a taste of MW4's DMZ mining mode as it takes you deep into enemy lines. Because of your wandering nature, you'll have to go out into the wild and look for ways to rebuild your arsenal by raiding outposts or going to mysterious markers on the map, then return to your underground hideout to craft new equipment. What could easily be seen as a glorified and bogus tutorial actually plays with the larger story. In interesting ways.

With three main objectives to complete in any order you choose across a large snowy map, Stranded embraces a freedom of approach like few other missions. You can fast travel between three key locations and continue the story at your own pace, or spend hours unlocking each of the snow-covered mysteries, from exotic weapons to keyboard-based puzzles. It's an evolution of Black Ops 6's Phantom Pain-inspired open-area mission, trading in the sand for a much cooler climate that I enjoyed skulking around with my thermal scoped sniper rifle. It's also beautifully integrated into the campaign, making any chosen mechanic feel narrative while still being a lot of fun to play through.

This sprawling chapter was the standout mission during the roughly seven hours it took to complete the campaign, alongside Korea's answer to D-Day - opening with a beach landing from hell where Infinity Ward's superb sound design shines - and an airport escape where you can dynamically switch characters at will to stop your attackers. The latter contains a great sense of spectacle that feels like pure Call of Duty at its core. These large-scale operations are often outstanding, with the amount of moving parts sometimes simply staggering. It's a full campaign designed to play like a game, not a collection of other modes where the story is held together with sticky glue. A sweet relief compared to what it was three years ago. That said, while the quality of the missions is consistently very good, there's no real full-timer here to compete with the likes of All Ghillied Up or Clean House.

This consistency only falters once or twice, usually when you're forced into unforgiving stealth sections or asked to participate in its precise counter-based melee system. First-person shooting can be confusing at the best of times, and it doesn't do well here. This is made all the more frustrating by the fact that it often rears its head at some key story moment, meaning that having to re-enact these fights lessens the impact of the emotional hammer blows. Rest assured, though, these are rare. For the most part, I enjoyed mixing new ideas with old Call of Duty pieces. Helicopter gunnery attacks, night vision ambushes, and explosive tank divisions. They all still got hit. Especially when it's soundtracked with incredibly emphatic music at times - the Korean battles in particular are laced with some adrenaline-pumping electronic orchestration.

This review is based on my playthrough on PC, but I got to try a few missions on the Switch 2 as well. Obviously, it doesn't look graphically impressive at all on a Nintendo console, but I was pleasantly surprised by how smoothly it performed. You can read more about it here.

The gunplay has been refined, and it packs the punch we've come to expect from Infinity Ward, but it still shouldn't be taken for granted. The movement is smooth, able to transition from a sprint to a slide, before riding a pillar and looking around the corner to pop a head out of cover. No, the enemy AI might not be the smartest, but that doesn't mean you have to play them for fools. Even on normal difficulty, get a little cocky and take a run-and-gun approach and your health bar won't last long. Managing your ammo, armor plates, and cover is required, especially in the later missions of the campaign. Enemy variety may be limited, but a few heavily armored ones gave me trouble as I tried to avoid their gun blasts in some tough underground tunnels. Although a few explosive bullets stolen from me won't solve anything in the end.

Modern Warfare 4 made me feel for the series again. A solid set of missions, it manages to successfully cope with a bloated cast, saying goodbye to familiar faces while making some impressive connections with new faces. Its sprawling mission behind enemy lines, which borrows most of its ideas from DMZ mode, is a real highlight, as is whenever its blockbuster ambitions are met and full-throttle battles begin. It might not be enough to rank among the best Call of Duty campaigns, but if it's going to be the end of this particular saga, at least Modern Warfare ranks high.