Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 - Campaign Review

These are our impressions of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4’s campaign. Reviews of DMZ and multiplayer will follow.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4's campaign has been set an unenviable task: tie the bow on a seven-year-long series of stories I’d politely describe as “uneven.” To its credit, it handles this challenge well, delivering a genuinely exciting string of missions that are great when they focus on what is new, rather than getting bogged down in the past. It’s the best Modern Warfare has been since its 2019 reboot by quite some distance, and a reminder of how good Call of Duty can be when the people making it are given time to cook.

This collection of blockbuster sequences that has clearly been built from the ground up as a single-player experience is in stark contrast when compared to 2023’s woeful Modern Warfare 3 campaign, arguably the low point of the entire series. A mishmash of multiplayer maps mixed with slivers of near-incomprehensible story, I don’t envy Infinity Ward having to pick up from where it left off. The studio has done about as good a job as it could, though, thanks to a smart structure which splits the two halves of this story until they inevitably collide, providing both variety in mission design and tone.

Captain Price has been at the centre of the Modern Warfare plot, and that doesn’t change too much here. Following the disastrous finale of MW3, he’s now on the run, acting as a lone wolf, wanted by the very people he used to work for. His half of the story is initially tied up in knots so twisted even Alfred Borden would have trouble with them. Infinity Ward’s answer? Take a machete to much of it and kill off any characters introduced in the past two games that it deems superfluous. It’s almost an admission of guilt over how poorly these people were handled in the past, but it does give a sense of finality to this seemingly saga-ending chapter.

A tale of string-pullers and warmongers, Price’s story takes place over the course of five days in the run-up to the North Korean invasion of South Korea (plenty more on that in a moment). The former SAS captain has the blinkers on for his nemesis Makarov and whoever his boss may be. It’s fair to say that the Russian terrorist is not close to being the well-developed threat from the original Modern Warfare 2, which feels like a wasted opportunity to revive a famous villain. In his place steps Mads Mikkelsen’s The Archer.

For the most part, Price’s chapters of the story play like a Bond movie, packed full of parkour escapes, car chases, and stealthy infiltrations. Mikkelsen’s casting only reinforces this feeling, and while he’s classically unsettling in his performance, his character was never given quite enough screen time for me to grow a connection with him. As such, while the missions that make up Price’s side of the story are fun, it comes across as the weaker half. Infinity Ward clearly wants Price to be the strongest emotional bond to the player and for his personal vendettas to feel like our own, but, in truth, many more of the missions are dedicated to the Korean conflict. Incidentally, this is also where I found a lot more of the engaging storytelling to be found.

MW4’s 16 missions took me around the world as well as back and forth in time. The Korean invasion takes place in the “present day” as I followed a squad of soldiers from the moment war is sparked to its conclusion, while we switch back to Price every now and then as he hunts for whoever is behind the plot in the preceding week. These time shifts also allow for a clever mixture between traditional military missions and behind-enemy-lines ingenuity. For example, an early level has you fistfighting and gun-fu-ing your way through a New York nightclub as Price puts on his best John Wick impression. The next, you’ll be holding off paratroopers on the streets of Seoul armed with a mortar. While the Korean sections are generally louder and more traditional boots-on-the-ground “Call of Duty” in their approach, it came somewhat as a surprise to me that it managed to build such a strong connection to its playable character.

There’s an endearing nature to Young Mazino's Park Hyun Jun. Just as Farah did in 2019’s reboot, he gives an emotional anchor to the story that offsets the gruff military types nicely. The same can be said for his whole squad, a mixture of Korean and US soldiers who maintain a well-balanced mixture of levity and seriousness. Their bonds rooted me in its events well, and I actually cared what happened to them by the end. In general, I found the Korean side of things much more compelling and ended up caring about the likes of Park, his friend Jae, and their northern counterpart, Ko, a lot more. While Mikkelsen’s The Archer can come across as a moustache-twirling, nuclear weapon-wielding caricature at times, MW4 actually does a good job of bringing depth to the North Korean threat instead of painting each and every one of its leaders and people following their orders in one shade of evil.

The general direction of the story may not surprise you, but there are some engaging character moments that the past couple of Modern Warfare installments have desperately lacked. One such moment happens during one of the campaign’s standout missions: Stranded. As is the way these days, Call of Duty is now an interconnected beast, so this particular mission actually gives you a taste of MW4’s DMZ extraction mode as it takes you deep behind enemy lines. Due to your stranded nature, you have to go out into the wild and forage for ways to rebuild your arsenal by raiding outposts or heading to mystery markers on the map, then head back to the safety of your basement hideout to craft new equipment. What could so easily come across as a glorified, crowbarred tutorial does actually fit in and play around with the larger story in interesting ways.

Tasked with three main objectives to complete in any order you choose across a large snowy map, Stranded embraces freedom of approach as few other missions do. You could fast travel between the three key locations and move on with the story quickly if you’d like, or spend a couple of hours unlocking each of its snow-covered secrets, ranging from exotic weaponry to keypad-based puzzles to solve. It’s an evolution of Black Ops 6’s Phantom Pain-inspired open zone mission, trading in the sand for a much cooler climate that I enjoyed skulking around with my thermal-scoped sniper rifle. It’s elegantly folded into the campaign, too, making each of its chosen mechanics make narrative sense while also being very fun to play through.

This expansive chapter was the standout mission across the roughly seven hours it took me to complete the campaign, alongside Korea’s answer to D-Day – opening with a beach landing from hell where Infinity Ward’s phenomenal sound design gets to shine – and an airfield escape in which you can dynamically switch characters at will to hold off your attackers. The latter contains a great sense of spectacle that felt like pure Call of Duty at its core. These huge-scale operations are often the highlight, with the amount of moving parts at times simply astonishing. It’s a full-blown campaign crafted to be played like one, not a hodgepodge of other modes where the story feels held together with sticky tape. A sweet relief when compared to what preceded it three years prior. That being said, while the quality of the missions is consistently very good, there isn’t a genuine all-timer here to rival the likes of All Ghillied Up or Clean House, either.

That consistency only stumbles once or twice, usually when forcing you into some unforgiving stealth segments or asking you to engage in its imprecise counter-based melee system. First-person thumping can be disorienting at the best of times, and it's not done particularly well here. This is made even more frustrating by the fact that it often rears its head during some of the story’s key moments, meaning having to retry these brawls lessens the impact of what should feel like emotional hammer blows. Rest assured, these are rare occasions, though. For the most part, I enjoyed the mixture of new ideas being blended with age-old Call of Duty staples. Chopper gunner raids, night vision ambushes, and explosive tank sections. They all still hit the mark. Especially when soundtracked by some fantastically emphatic music at times — the Korean battles in particular are scored with some adrenaline-fuelled electronic orchestrations.

The gunplay is refined, packing the sort of punch we’ve come to expect from Infinity Ward, but still shouldn’t be taken for granted. Movement is slick, being able to transition from a sprint into a slide, before mounting onto a pillar and peeking around the corner to pop a head peeking out of cover. No, enemy AI may not be the smartest, but that doesn’t mean you should play them for fools. Even on regular difficulty, get a little cocky and opt for the run-and-gun approach and your health bar won’t last too long. Managing your ammo, armour plates, and cover is needed, especially towards the campaign’s latter missions. Enemy variety may be limited, but a few heavily armoured brutes caused me quite a bit of trouble when trying to stay out of the blast of their shotguns in some tight underground tunnels. Nothing a few stolen explosive shells of my own couldn’t eventually sort out, though.

Modern Warfare 4 made me feel something for the series again. A consistently strong set of missions manages to juggle a bloated cast successfully, saying goodbye to familiar faces while building impressive bonds with new ones. Its expansive behind-enemy-lines mission that borrows most of its ideas from the DMZ mode is a real highlight, as is whenever its blockbuster ambitions are fulfilled and full-throttle battles break out. It may not have quite enough to be considered amongst the very best Call of Duty campaigns, but if it’s to be the end of this particular saga, then at least Modern Warfare is going out on a high note.