Ever since becoming an annual release more than 20 years ago, Call of Duty has seen its share of ups and downs. While 2023’s Modern Warfare III was arguably the low point of the series, you could certainly make a case that last year’s Black Ops 7 was the biggest disappointment. A rushed development cycle did the game no favors, and the always-online campaign told a convoluted story that didn’t connect with fans.
Those issues were magnified by the launch of Battlefield 6, COD’s chief rival, which received a far more positive response by critics and gamers, and went on to outsell Black Ops 7 in the US. That confluence of events put a big spotlight on Activision’s juggernaut for 2026, which was in the hands of developer Infinity Ward. With that in mind, it’s time to dive in and find out if Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 can get the franchise back on track.
As with pretty much every recent COD release, MW4 is broken into three sections: campaign, multiplayer, and DMZ. Let’s start with the last one. DMZ is the game’s PvPvE extraction mode, dropping you and other players into a massive map to scrounge for items, complete story missions, eliminate rival squads, and more. Completing missions will level up your character and grant access to a FOB where you’ll tweak your loadout, risking gear when you reenter DMZ.
It’s a fine mode, but to be honest, I have played so much ARC Raiders and Marathon in 2026 that the lure of sinking more hours into another extraction shooter doesn’t appeal to me. I played enough to get a taste of things, and while what’s there is perfectly competent, it didn’t click with me the way those other titles did. This is a situation where your mileage will vary, but it should, at a minimum, be considered added value to the overall product—for what it’s worth, I enjoyed it more than the opaque Zombies mode in Treyarch’s installments.
Moving on to the campaign, Modern Warfare 4 looks to tie up all the loose threads that have cropped over the three previous installments in the series. Given what a mess MW3 was, it was a tall order. While it feels rushed in spots (Makarov) and doesn’t always hit the mark, Infinity Ward deserves credit for at least providing definitive endpoints for the sprawling cast of characters introduced over the years.
MW4’s campaign feels very much on par with the top single-player stories we’ve seen from the franchise in that it’s a globetrotting adventure with a relatively diverse array of activities. Here, the story is split between Captain Price’s desperate gambit to locate the mysterious Archer and Pfc. Park Hyun-Jun and his squad fighting against a North Korean invasion of South Korea. A couple of other missions take place from the North Korean POV as well.
Price’s half of the campaign takes you all over the world and casts the former leader of Task Force 141 as a combination of John Wick and James Bond. His one-man army stuff is a lot of fun, highlighted by the opening mission that takes place in a New York City nightclub. Chronologically, Price’s missions take place ahead of the invasion, so you’re jumping back and forth between the present with Park’s squad and the past with Price.
While the Price sections hold more narrative weight for fans of the series, the Park missions are more in line with classic Call of Duty campaigns in terms of action. It’s here that you’ll regroup and fight off invaders in the aftermath of an EMP strike, go into the lion’s den on a mission to take out some surface-to-air missiles, and eventually stage a D-Day—style landing in an effort to retake the peninsula. It’s tried-and-true COD action, and I was glad to have it back.
Most of the campaign is handled in focused missions, but there is one section that essentially serves as an introduction to DMZ. Called “Stranded,” it follows Park and his team after they get trapped behind enemy lines. Once there, you have access to an open world where you can choose to explore and find weapons and equipment or go straight to a trio of story missions—though if you do that, you may find yourself underpowered.
I’m typically not a fan of this type of cross-pollinating between game modes, but this is handled well in that it makes some narrative sense and doesn’t require you to dive into the open world if you’d prefer to move the story along. It’s also just one mission in an otherwise focused campaign, as opposed to something that feels included to simply pad out the run time.
Coming off Black Ops 7’s heavily criticized campaign, Modern Warfare 4 delivers something that feels like it belongs with what we saw in the first two MW titles. The campaign checks off all the boxes for classic COD campaigns—breach and clear, firefights, on-rails vehicle sections, aircraft gunner—and does a solid job of putting a bow on this long-running storyline.
Visually, things are impressive, though you can absolutely tell the difference in quality between the Stranded mission and everything else in the campaign. The audio offers good voice acting from returning cast members and newcomers, such as Mads Mikkelsen, who plays the Archer. The overall in-game presentation doesn’t quite match some of the other games I’ve reviewed this year, but the cutscenes are crisp, and the performance holds steady.
As ever, multiplayer is where the series lives and dies. I thoroughly enjoyed Black Ops 6 in that regard, logging more hours with it than any COD in years. Black Ops 7 was too similar for me, however, and I played it the least. I was ready for something different. To achieve that, Infinity Ward has taken a step backwards, eliminating the “Omnimovement” system that was at the heart of those two Black Ops releases.
How you feel about that decision will go a long way to dictating how you feel about MW4’s competitive multiplayer as a whole. For me, it was a welcome change. My tenure with online COD stretches all the way back to Call of Duty III, and I’ve long preferred a more deliberate style of play. MW4 doesn’t wind the clock back that far, as you’ll see plenty of sprinting and sliding, but the more absurd parkour elements brought about by Omnimovement are gone.
Gunplay is tight and responsive, as it has been for more than two decades, though there looks to have been a conscious decision to make everyone a bit more bullet-resistant than in recent years as the time to kill feels a beat or two longer. It’s another good decision that results in more actual firefights and fewer situations in which whoever spots the other person first wins.
All the classic COD modes return—Team Deathmatch, Kill Confirmed, Domination, etc.—along with some new entries. Among the newcomers, the standouts are Kill Block and Inflation. Inflation works very much like Kill Confirmed except that defeated players drop money, which you can then pick up, adding to your total. When you’re killed, you lose a portion of that, and so on. It’s unique in that games can swing wildly in the end if you can kill players carrying a lot of money and add it to your side’s total.
Kill Block is more unique, taking you to a location that’s randomly generated every few rounds from a set number of sections. Since launch, the standard mode for it has been 10 versus 10 Gunfight, in which everyone is spawned with the same loadout and the round continues until all players on one side have been killed or the flag has been captured.
On the opposite side of the spectrum is Frontline. This is essentially Team Deathmatch with the wrinkle that each team always deploys from their home base. Anyone familiar with COD can probably already see the issue just from reading that last sentence. They may as well have called the new mode Spawnkill. Not fun.
Lastly, it’s the maps. Unfortunately, this is one of MW4’s most disappointing aspects. The suite of new locations lacks personality. Even as someone that’s been playing hours each night since launch, I’d be hard-pressed to name a particularly strong map. To be fair, that goes both ways. I haven’t felt anything was so bad that I wanted to vote to avoid it. The maps are all just sort of there.
Final Score (8/10)
Activision needed Infinity Ward to deliver after last year’s misstep, and by and large it has done so. The campaign delivers eight or so hours of varied action, and the multiplayer offers a more grounded PvP experience with the usual exceptional gunplay and a couple fun new modes. If the poor reception to Black Ops 7 scared you off, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 offers plenty of reasons to get boots on the ground once again.
Related: ‘Gears of War: E-Day’ Review: Relentless Combat with Stunning Visuals
