Nearly 13 years since Nintendo gamers last had the chance to answer the Call of Duty (2013’s Ghosts on Wii U, RIP), Activision has finally redeployed this storied series on Nintendo platforms.
Given the technical gulf between Switch 2 and competition, not to mention PC, the cynical among us might have read Microsoft’s agreement to bring the series to a Nintendo console day-and-date with other platforms and expected a compromised, box-ticking Switch port. Something patched up and pushed out with reduced player counts and missing modes, technically running on the handheld, but barely.
Having played Campaign to completion on Switch 2, I can confirm…it isn’t that at all.
What about multiplayer, though? You’ll have to wait for impressions of that and the DMZ extraction mode, but anyone who pre-ordered today gets early access to the full campaign ahead of its 23rd October general launch. So, I’m free to share impressions on that part of this chunky CoD package.
Previously on Call of Duty…
If you haven’t been keeping up with the rebooted Modern Warfare trilogy elsewhere, a recap brings you up to speed on the exploits of Captain John Price, what remains of Task Force 141, and the general state of the world. Price is living off-grid following the events of Modern Warfare 3 in which, er…well, the recap covers the spoilers, but honestly it doesn’t matter.
For Switch 2 players coming at this totally fresh, or lapsed fans worried about starting at #4, you absolutely don’t need to catch up on the previous entries. The recap is a brisk two minutes and includes some barely relevant details and people who don’t really factor into this one at all.
Think of it like this: Mission Impossible 2 is not required viewing for Ghost Protocol or any of the other Cruise vehicles, and this doesn’t come with homework either. By all accounts, you’ve dodged a bullet if you didn’t play the last one.
‘Gruffbeard McBritish has a very particular set of skills and is out for revenge’ is ample setup, and Infinity Ward does a good job of throwing in just enough narrative to lubricate the rollercoaster, as CIA Station Chief not-Robin Wright puts the Cap on the trail of the villainous Makarov from the previous game. As a 360 Modern Warfare veteran, I was surprised how quickly I took to this version of Price. He’s still not my Captain, but I’ll follow (read: absolutely leg it after) him through NYC, Paris, and around the globe.
The other end of the narrative thread has South Korean soldiers under attack from a mysterious weapon, and familial differences within the neighbouring North Korean regime when the death of the country’s leader produces a clash of ideologies between his son and daughter. With all the different people and perspectives, IW threads the needle well, making you care about the characters – Private Park became a favourite. There’s all the ‘oorah’ banter you could ask for, and the baddies are eminently hissable.
As for the big bad, Mads Mikkelsen turns up doing his finest Le Chiffre. It would be easy to dismiss his villainous turn as an easy paycheck, but he nails the rollicking tone and brings the appropriate Hollywood star power. Gotta love him.
Narratively, the pace is maintained across 16 missions of a well-written, time-hopping, globe-trotting thriller, with enough morally challenged characters, variety, and straight-up popcorn moments to keep you engaged for the runtime. I burned through it in around eight hours, although that included some tech faff, a lot of poking around environments admiring the production values, and countless instances of dogs ripping my throat out.
On that note, the sheer brutality of the beatings and dismemberments is worth flagging for the squeamish, pushing much further than the seat-of-your-pants action flicks IW is otherwise channelling. One early face-smashy scene, in particular, had me wincing.
I’ll come back to the missions themselves in a moment, but first, the questions all Switch 2 players will be asking.
Caveats of Duty
Cutting to the chase with Switch 2 performance, it’s impressive work from Barcelona-based Digital Legends who handled this version. However, not wishing to crack out the standard ‘mileage may vary’, your impressions will absolutely depend on your angle of approach.
As with nearly all Switch versions of a large-scale multiplatform game, if you go in expecting frame rates and resolutions to rival more powerful hardware, you will come away disappointed. It’s never going to fare well in direct comparison, so going from the PC version to this, of course, the difference will be stark.
With expectations set appropriately, though — as they really should be for anyone who’s been playing Switch games for nearly a decade — this is a thoroughly serviceable and enjoyable way to experience MW4’s campaign. I didn’t notice any big frame-rate dips from what seems to be a locked 30fps target, and the lighting in particular looks great when you’re actually playing the thing. It feels like the full package, handheld and docked.
There’s some sleight of hand going on as gameplay switches to pre-rendered cutscene video, and it’s all fairly seamless beyond the noticeable fidelity switch with characters’ faces. The hair looks a bit naff in places. Fire effects can be oddly pixelated. Suboptimal, perhaps, but nothing unexpected, and nothing that got in the way of enjoying the ride.
The Switch 2 build I played also had two upscaling options: Filmic SMAA 2TX and Nvidia’s DLSS. Beyond the basics (the former is the team’s in-house anti-aliasing tech, the latter the console’s built-in AI upscaling solution), more testing will be needed to really see the (dis)advantages of each.
Not sure what any of that means? Glad you asked…
Filmic SMAA 2TX and Nvidia DLSS – What’s the difference?
The dev team said they wanted to provide options for personal preference, but didn’t go into specifics. For anyone unsure how these options might affect your visual experience on Switch 2, I reached out to Tom Morgan over at Digital Foundry for a brief explainer.
Note. Please bear in mind this very early comparison is based on my limited capture from the review event – DF will have their own deep-dive analysis coming in due course. Over to Tom:
“On Switch 2, the Nvidia DLSS option appears to be interpreting the same pixel data — the same resolution — as the Filmic SMAA option, but it has two advantages.
First, Nvidia’s approach has better edge treatment that smooths out stair-stepping by more intelligently reconstructing that detail from accumulated frame data. Expect cleaner lines, essentially, once the frame settles.
And secondly, there’s the handling of busier, less uniform detail like textures, where that technique is able to sharpen their definition. Door decals, and foliage both benefit as a result.
There are a few questions still to answer of course. The fact that there’s an option on Switch 2 at all strongly suggests the developer sees a trade-off between the options. Perhaps there’s a frame-rate hit incurred by using DLSS, or perhaps certain artefacts appear when combining Switch 2’s variant of DLSS with the IW Engine. We’ll have to see the final build in full motion — rather than static shots — to get a proper grasp of the pros and cons, but the DLSS results look very positive already.”
Thanks, Tom – much obliged. From a player’s perspective, though, how does this translate when actually playing the thing?
Personally, I struggled to perceive much of a difference as I switched between the two, and in hectic scenes it was even more challenging. I used SMAA for the vast majority, so I’ll be intrigued to try DLSS and see what difference it makes to the docked and handheld experience.
The devs were keen to highlight cross-progression and the ability to, for instance, continue on Switch 2 when you leave your PC at home.
And there’s no arguing that cross-save/progression/play is great news (especially for the other modes – watch this space), but practically speaking, how many people are buying MW4 on two platforms? I don’t see it being a huge number, and if that’s the case, most people playing on the portable won’t experience any jarring transition between versions.
There’s an element of blissful ignorance, sure, but the reality is that this is an eminently playable version of the most triple-A of video games. I came away impressed.
tl;dr: Objectively, of course, some texture pop-in, level-of-detail compromises, and a lower frame rate can’t rival the presentation on other platforms, but anybody with a Switch is used to those caveats after a decade of ports. Playing through the campaign, I didn’t feel I was getting a ‘lesser’ or ‘lite’ version on Switch 2, and Digital Legends have done great work on this fully-featured version of MW4 on hardware the size of a paperback.
Rootin’ tootin’ chutin’
Back to the campaign itself, the mocap, audio, and vocal performances are so uniformly impeccable, it almost doesn’t register as you slide from one mission to the next. A few repeated line reads in firefights aside, the script and set pieces are executed near-flawlessly. Given the dev’s pedigree and history, it’ll come as no surprise if you’ve played every single CoD campaign over the years. If you’ve never ridden one of these campaigns, though, it’s quite something.
Mission-wise, you’re barreling between Mission Impossible-worthy sequences with nary a moment to catch your breath. Storming a beach Spielberg-style? Check. Parisian car chase? Cruisin’. Underwater breath-hold-y bit? Have it. Kitchen stealth section as if you’re trapped on Isla Nublar? Get in.
Somebody at IW has a checklist of iconic movie scenes to CoD-ify, and they’ve had fun ticking off a bunch here.
The missions do a great job of keeping your heart rate elevated, though I would have liked a tad more ‘quiet time’ in the playlist – another couple with a slower pace to relish the rich detail. There’s so much you just sprint past.
Then again, stepping just a few meters off the critical path results in RETURN TO MISSION AREA flashing onscreen, reminding you to keep your hands and arms inside the car. Beyond the alarmingly orange ‘YOU’RE GOING THE WRONG WAY!!!’ message, IW otherwise points you in the right direction fairly subtly.
Frantic parkour sequences can get repetitive, too, becoming ‘click stick to sprint and make a massive jump, then repeat’, and you start wondering how much you’re controlling. Fist fights are a simple system of blocking with ‘ZL’ and then countering with ‘ZR’, but for all the production values and framing, it still boils down to a fancy Quick-Time Event at times. And I’ll be damned if I could get the knife timing right with the dogs. (Unless I missed some doggy-biscuit pickup, non-engagement is rarely an option, pooch-lovers.)
Obviously, the traditional rollercoaster versus the sandbox is a core question at the heart of modern CoD. One mission, however, opens things up for exploration.
Stranded
‘Stranded’ comes around two-thirds into the game and sees your team isolated in snowbound enemy territory, tasked with three critical objectives before you can move on. For old-school Nintendo FPS fans, imagine finding yourself fox-holed in Severnaya after 30 years of open-world evolution and you’re not far off.
You can tackle the main tasks in any order, with huts, vehicles, caches, supply boxes, and the like all over the map, used to repair equipment and gear up in your makeshift basecamp. You could spend hours pootling around this one ‘level’, and it was only the need to crack through the Campaign which pushed me onwards. Progress is saved, however, so you can come back after your inevitable showdown with Mads.
Nowhere is the tension between open-world potential and on-rails funnelling more evident, though, than when your perspective suddenly shifts to another character and a conversation with three dialogue options, one very clearly the ‘correct’ answer to keep the villain happy. As is my wont, I immediately tried the other two options, both resulting in a swift bullet to the head and a ‘Try Again’.
The alternate responses are there, presumably, to show your character’s inner moral struggle, but why bother if you’re just going to shoot me in the face and say, “Nope, no branches here, pal”? Coming directly after the open-world Stranded mission, it felt like a slap in the face.
But that dissonance aside, I had a great time with Modern Warfare 4’s ‘popcorn game’ campaign, old-fashioned approach and all. It doesn’t so much integrate open-world and on-rails design as surgically separate them, but sometimes a little old-fashioned is just the ticket. And for Nintendo gamers, it’s been a while.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 launches for Switch 2 on 23rd October, although the full campaign is playable now if you pre-ordered or pre-purchase the game. These impressions were written following a review event hosted by Activision. Travel and accommodation were provided by the publisher.
Look out for our full review in due course, and let us know your own thoughts below if you’ve played the campaign.
