I can barely believe it myself, but it’s already that time of year again. A new Call of Duty is upon us once more, and this time, it’s Infinity Ward’s turn to deliver us our annual dose of gaming warfare with the popular multiplayer first-person shooter.
A staple of the gaming landscape for the past 23 years, with a yearly title releasing every year since Call of Duty 2 back in 2005, Modern Warfare 4 is a return to the famous sub–series reboot. Treyarch has held the reins for the past couple of years with Black Ops 6 and Black Ops 7, with the former being a strong entry and the latter being one of the much weaker ones, multiplayer aside.
Infinity Ward didn’t exactly leave the Modern Warfare sub–series on the best note with Modern Warfare 3 in 2023 before its break. Modern Warfare (2019) and Modern Warfare 2 (2021) were pretty strong, but Modern Warfare 3 fell a bit short in comparison.
However, by going back to what has historically made Call of Duty games so fun and enjoyable to play, Modern Warfare 4 is not only a return to form for this sub–series, but crucially for Call of Duty as a whole. Read below for my full review.
'Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4'
Why we love it
- Great campaign
- Strong core multiplayer modes
- DMZ is engaging
- Gunplay is incredibly satisfying
Take note
- Newer multiplayer modes don't stand up to the classics
- Nothing hugely innovative
‘Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4’ campaign
The campaign for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 is split between a conflict between North Korea and South Korea, and a globetrotting adventure following Captain John Price, who has gone rogue. The two threads initially feel very separate, but then actually cleverly intertwine as the story goes on.
North Korea launches a devastating attack on South Korea as the North looks to invade following the death of its Supreme Leader. South Korea and its allies, including the US, of course, attempt to push back and fight the invasion.
Meanwhile, Captain Price has gone rogue after killing General Shepherd at the end of 2023’s Modern Warfare 3. He is after a new target and will stop at nothing to take that new enemy down – even if it means working with some very unlikely people and groups.
It tells a fairly compelling story with some great mission variety. That’s because the infantry missions are covered by the Korea conflict, and the James Bond-style missions are conveyed through Captain Price, whose antics take him through a tailing mission in New York City, high-speed car chases through Paris, and avoiding raids through the streets of Mumbai. The level of violence portrayed in some of the missions doesn’t hold anything back.
There’s an open-world style mission which actually makes sense to the story and is integrated well, avoiding the feeling of it being shoehorned in. It feels like a DMZ mission, as you have to find resources, take down enemies, discover world intel, and slowly build an arsenal of weapons to take down more difficult targets and groups.
It’s not forced non you either; if you don’t want to do this and would rather progress the story, you can fast travel to the points of the map where the key missions take place, and easily back to base to upgrade weapons and manage inventory in between. Although it may seem like a small feature, it’s crucial for making it feel as though it caters to all kinds of players in this regard. There’s also the option to carry on your progress in this mission after completing the campaign if you wish to.
Aside from that, while the missions aren’t particularly innovative or bring anything new to Call of Duty or the first-person shooter genre, they’re all absolutely solid and deliver different challenges throughout the whole playthrough. I never felt as though I was doing the same thing over and over again and there’s a lot to be said for that in a first-person shooter. A handful of sections actually require some quite precise hand-to-hand combat actions; although this isn’t what I play Call of Duty for, it did help to keep me on my toes as to what was going to be asked of me next.
Back to the story, and without giving too much away, there’s a satisfying ending that really makes it feel as though this is the conclusion of the Modern Warfare sub–series reboot. After the damp squib of the campaign of Black Ops 7, I really enjoyed playing through Modern Warfare 4’s offering.
The graphics, performance and audio in the campaign are all strong. I did encounter a few assets rendering in real time before me in the open world mission, but that’s the only thing of note I found against otherwise rock–solid, consistent performance.
‘Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4’ multiplayer
Multiplayer is arguably the most crucial mode of all in a Call of Duty game, and Modern Warfare 4‘s is very solid if unspectacular. One welcome tweak across the board compared to the past couple of Call of Duty: Black Ops games is that movement is much more grounded, with omnimovement, wall jumps and the like making way for the feeling of something that feels a bit more true to life.
Interestingly, despite that, the TTK (time to kill) has usually been quicker in Modern Warfare titles compared to Black Ops – but that’s not the case in Modern Warfare 4. The TTK feels longer in Modern Warfare 4 than the most recent Black Ops games, but that places more emphasis on actual tactical gameplay rather than it being the case of who can aim down sights the quickest to get the kill.
A lot of the maps feel they have more open sections rather than just corridors to run and gun down too, so this slightly different gameplay approach complements the map designs really well. I found it so much more engaging now that the emphasis on movement has been heavily reduced, and actual better gunplay is more rewarded, which for me should be the case in a first-person shooter that focuses on warfare.
Moving onto modes, there are all the core modes you’d expect, such as Team Deathmatch, Domination, Hardpoint, etc, with a few new ones thrown in, such as Inflation, Hijack, and Combat Outpost: Ground War. Those classic Call of Duty modes are as strong as they have been in a decent enough selection of launch maps.
There are some good maps to be found without anything being groundbreaking – with the exception of Kill Block, but that’s only available in Gunfight. That mode itself has been around for a while in Infinity Ward’s Call of Duty games, as it’s a one life round–based 3v3 or 10v10 Deathmatch mode, but it’s arguably never been better than in Kill Block.
That’s because it’s a map that constantly evolves and changes ahead of each round with subtle variations made, and it never fails to feel fresh. That map is the most successful innovative addition to Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4.
However, the new modes don’t really stand up to the strong core ones. They feel like they take inspiration from other first-person shooters, but are not delivered in the same engaging way.
An example of this is Combat Outpost: Ground War. It’s a take on Battlefield’s renowned Conquest mode in that players have to capture objectives and defend them on bigger maps with larger team sizes – but as Call of Duty is a lot more arcade in feel whereas Battlefield places a bit more of an emphasis on tactical gunplay, precision, and realism, the mode doesn’t translate quite as well.
Then there’s Frontline, which is like Team Deathmatch but with fixed spawn points, which turns into spawn-kill fests – both for and against you. Other modes also focus on different objectives, but players usually just try and kill each other without focusing on what they’re asked to do anyway.
That’s why the core modes feel fun and are engaging to play whereas the newer ones just don’t land in the same way. There’s a lot of variety here, and Infinity Ward has obviously tried to cater to a lot of different kinds of players, but by almost having too much, the content has been spread a bit too thinly – again only across the newer modes. I’ll be spending a lot of time playing the core modes.
‘Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4’ DMZ
DMZ is an extraction mode which returns to the series after a four-year hiatus. It launched in Modern Warfare 2 but faced a very mixed reception from players before being abandoned.
Since then, there’s been a bit of an extraction shooter boom. Infinity Ward and Activision have gone back to the drawing board with its own take on it and have now managed to deliver an engaging mode which crucially will keep you coming back after the first few games.
If you’ve played an extraction shooter before, such as Escape from Tarkov, ARC Raiders or Marathon, then you’ll have a good idea of what to expect here. Players create a loadout they take into a match and have to put it all on the line with the carrot of obtaining stronger loot and equipment – but if you do not successfully exfil, you lose everything you’ve found to that point, and everything you took into that match with you (except for cash).
That usually makes extraction shooters feel like very high stakes affairs during every match – do you go with a weaker loadout to minimise what you might lose, or do you take a stronger loadout to maximise what you could come back with? That’s the beauty of an extraction shooter and Modern Warfare 4’s take mostly delivers.
Each squad in DMZ has up to three players and up to 20 squads can be deployed in the brilliant Hajin map. It’s set on the North Korean, South Korean and Russian border, and it’s incredibly varied with mountainous climes and villages where there are lots of buildings to loot – and more enemies patrolling. It’s the biggest Call of Duty map ever outside of Warzone, and it’s beautiful to boot.
Players have objectives to complete, loot to find, and exploration to do before extracting. You earn rewards, level up separately to multiplayer, and earn skill points to upgrade your operator. As you go on, you can 3D print more items to use in matches, use cash to upgrade and craft, and earn access to a gunsmith and vendor.
As someone that’s played a fair bit of ARC Raiders and Marathon, this extraction mode feels quite easy in some ways. As it’s naturally a PvPvE (player versus player versus environment) mode, in the aforementioned games, the PvE element is incredibly intense as AI enemies have the ability to pose a real challenge – but that does not feel the case all the time in DMZ.
That’s because if your squad works and sticks together, then fairly small groups of AI enemies can usually be taken down with relative ease. Add in a self-revive every player has from the start and it feels very much catered to a wider audience to make it more accessible than a hardcore extraction shooter, but it loses some of that intensity in the process – however, that intensity is ramped up when you come across a rival squad and the PvP element kicks in.
Squads can actually choose to work together instead of taking each other out, but that scarcely happens in DMZ. Instead, they turn into Warzone-esque shootouts with the added tension of losing everything you have on you if you do not emerge victorious.
This for me is when DMZ comes alive. When you come across another squad, it’s almost certain no mercy will be shown. But as it’s an extraction shooter, you’re not always guaranteed to come across a rival squad on a run.
DMZ in Modern Warfare 4 doesn't necessarily reinvent the wheel. But it’s still a good extraction shooter mode I’ve had a great time with so far and can see myself putting a lot more hours into as I continue to achieve objectives while upgrading my operator and equipment.
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Should you buy ‘Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4’?
It feels as though Infinity Ward and Activision have done a bit of soul-searching, listened to the community, and have delivered a game in Modern Warfare 4 that is incredibly solid across the board; that is a foundation that shouldn’t go unnoticed following the relative disappointment of Black Ops 7. The campaign is great, the core Call of Duty multiplayer modes are incredibly fun, and DMZ is crucially engaging past the first few rounds.
Having said that, there isn’t anything that massively pushes forward the series or the genre in terms of innovation. Some of the new modes in multiplayer aren’t the strongest to take me away from my favourites either.
But by returning to what’s made past Call of Duty games so good to play and by listening to player feedback, Infinity Ward has delivered a strong entry in the series which will keep players coming back for more hour after hour. This is a strong first-person shooter to have on your radar.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 is out now on PS5, Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch 2 and PC.
How I tested ‘Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4’
A review code was provided by the publisher, and I played Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 on a PS5 Pro. When checking out games, there are three main things I always focus on:
Why you can trust IndyBest reviews
Jake Brigstock is The Independent’s gaming correspondent. He has spent countless hours putting a full spectrum of consoles (he got a first look at the Nintendo Switch 2) and games through their paces, so he is well-placed to bring you his verdict on Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4.
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