Call Of Duty Modern Warfare 4 review: a raucous return to form

Hitting ‘New game’ on Modern Warfare 4’s campaign and realising it’s about North Korea is a bit like hearing your elderly relative give their take on youth unemployment. Is some nuance, perhaps, going to be lost in the depiction? Absolutely. Will there be swearing and flying debris within minutes? There will. And while the general factual accuracy may sometimes be called into question, it’s certainly worth watching the spectacle unfold.

Which is more than could be said for last year’s fractured and half-cooked entry. Back on form, Modern Warfare 4 brings a campaign that remembers what a COD campaign should be, the usual assortment of polished and infuriating multiplayer modes, and a revamped take on its DMZ extraction shooter that first featured in 2022’s Modern Warfare II. It might not have reinvented anything, but it feels nice to aim down its trusty ironsights again and see the thought and effort evident throughout.

So, then: what should a COD campaign be? The series has asked itself that numerous times in recent years, fluctuating wildly on the silliness spectrum. One minute it’s asked us to take its shady espionage plots incredibly seriously, the next we’re chatting up a senator’s wife to get into the cloakroom at a Bill Clinton rally.

Infinity Ward has controlled that tonal fishtailing this time. The campaign in Modern Warfare 4 – not to be confused with 2007’s Call Of Duty 4: Modern Warfare – focuses on a fictional present day conflict between North and South Korea, and the warmongers, puppet masters and beardy punchy men in the shadows who broker its events.

It uses the devices that have served the series best over the years, switching your perspective between sides, placing you in uncomfortable positions and employing a Pixies-esque, quiet-quiet-LOUD dynamism to its mission pacing.

In this way, it feels connected to the aforementioned 2007 classic, and the better moments of the series since then. Your perspective shifts between a South Korean soldier fulfilling his national service, hirsute CIA assassin gone rogue Captain Price, and a North Korean soldier ordered to abuse and murder civilians. The latter would be a truly shocking sequence, if COD hadn’t done it so many times since that infamous ‘No Russian’ mission.

It does feel that the narrative is trying to fit itself around a bunch of fun mission concepts, rather than vice versa, but that doesn’t mean it can’t also be enjoyable. Star turns from the likes of Mads Mikkelsen show you how much the game cares about telling its story, and that’s admirable. It still comes across like a WWE Network war movie a lot of the time, but it’s sufficient to keep you marching forwards into the next fray.

If COD turned you off years ago, Modern Warfare 4 does nothing to force a reappraisal

And when you’re ready to decouple from that story, DMZ and multiplayer await. There’s a lot of new stuff to get to grips with in the latter: five new modes, 12 maps, and tweaks to gun behaviour and customisation. They do come with some teething troubles like spawn locations that leave you wide open to being insta-killed on respawn, but the modes in particular are impressive.

They run the gamut from Counter-Strike and Valorant-style tactical experiences with Hijack and Counter Attack to more whimsical or warmup play with Gun Game (which is also a riff on a Counter-Strike mode, ironically). Warming up with a round or two of Gun Game – in which you’re equipped with a different gun after each kill and must work through the roster to win – before a serious session in Hijack has become an evening routine that we don’t intend to break for the foreseeable.

What makes all these modes more enjoyable than recent CODs though is that the mechanics place the skill back on aiming and shooting. The absurd parkour has been tamed to the odd kneeslide, and weapon behaviour is much more predictable and input-based, so you’re controlling recoil manually rather than simply grinding for better weapon attachments.

Speaking of epic grinds: over in DMZ, the PvPvE component, there’s about a million different progression trackers, unlockables and ways to level up. It’s overwhelming at first, but over time it becomes compelling. This is essentially Escape From Tarkov with COD guns, in the same way that the series also swallowed PUBG in 2020 and assimilated it into Warzone. Zero points for ingenuity, but nobody makes firing a weapon quite as enjoyable as Infinity Ward.

For anyone unfamiliar with extraction shooters, you drop into occupied Korea with your squad and… well, it’s up to you what happens next. There are objectives to complete. There’s loot to find. And there are computer-controlled and human enemies on the map. Dying during a mission means you lose the gear you were carrying and need to retrieve your operator, so the stakes are much higher than usual.

It’s encouraging to see such an upswing in quality from the series

But while recent genre hits like Arc Raiders force you to be considered and tactical about how and when you engage with even the lowest-level AI enemy, DMZ is far more forgiving. You’ll shoot down dozens of AI soldiers in a typical mission and find useful loot in most buildings. It’s only when another human squad turns up that you’re truly tested.

Some players are requesting a purely PvE mode, as they always do in extraction shooters and battle royales, but with a danger of fragmenting the community and making matchmaking times longer for PvPvE players, it’s unlikely it’ll happen.

If COD turned you off years ago, Modern Warfare 4 does nothing to force a reappraisal. If, however, you can tolerate some profoundly silly storytelling with your mechanically immaculate shooter, this is a return to form that pays its dues to classic campaigns, takes some creative risks in multiplayer and offers admirable value with that substantial – if grindy – DMZ mode.

It’s encouraging to see such an upswing in quality from the series. Now, more than ever, we need the big names in the industry to show the difference that care, creativity and effort make.