Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 Campaign Review – A New King Is Crowned

It doesn’t matter which Call Of Duty mode you prefer, single-player, multiplayer or even Zombies; one fact remains: there isn’t a living Call of Duty fan who doesn’t appreciate the Modern Warfare campaigns, and by Modern Warfare I mean all of them, the old ones and the new ones. However, the rebooted storyline that began with Modern Warfare in 2019 is a player favourite; that’s a proven fact.

Ask any Call of Duty fan, and you’ll get the same answer: apart from the first two Black Ops games (and Call of Duty Black Ops 6, whose campaign was one of the best too) and, of course, the original Modern Warfare trilogy, the 2019 Modern Warfare reboot has the best story of them all. Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 and Modern Warfare 3 were a completely different story: too many attempts to squeeze in the old storyline made them predictable and blunt, and Activision Blizzard, along with all the studios in charge of the Modern Warfare titles, was very well aware of this.

It’s true that Modern Warfare 3 left the story unfinished, with a huge cliffhanger at its end, and at some point it was obvious that Activision would turn to its golden goose again. Still, I must be honest: I didn’t expect it to be this year, and I didn’t expect anything spectacular from the story, because the reboot had been in free fall since the first game. And because my expectations were so low, this campaign hit me so hard that it took me two full days to recover once the credits rolled. So here’s my official statement: the Call of Duty Modern Warfare 4 campaign is, hands down, the best story and the best campaign Call of Duty has ever produced, and I can’t imagine what could knock it off the throne.

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Seen through Private Park’s eyes, the invasion of South Korea gives the reboot saga the fresh start it badly needed after two nostalgia-heavy sequels.

Story – War Comes to the Peninsula

The Modern Warfare 4 story? I’m amazed beyond words. So much quality, such a big spectacle; no superlative I could give it would be enough to describe this masterpiece. The focus in this instalment shifts east, all the way to the Far East, where North Korea invades South Korea after its president dies and his young son takes over the country.

At the same time, Captain Price is a wanted man for killing General Shepherd, but he’s still in contact with Kate Laswell, the CIA officer who feeds him intel and uses him as a hitman to tie up old loose ends. This is how the story opens, and from the very beginning, the game throws you in head-first. Action beyond anything you’ve experienced so far, espionage, betrayals, old acquaintances, enemies turned friends and friends turned enemies, jaw-dropping moments; all this and much, much more awaits you in this amazing story.

The story is told through 16 chapters, in which you’ll play as South Korean soldier Private Park, Captain Price, protagonists from North Korea and many more, whom I won’t talk about to avoid spoilers.

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Laswell is still the one pulling the strings, and her briefings are where the campaign’s web of betrayals starts to tighten.

As before, high-quality cutscenes tell a big chunk of the story, and they’re some of the best ever made, with a level of quality many Hollywood blockbusters lack and mocap and voice acting worthy of Oscar nominations. And you know what’s even better? Once the cutscenes transition into in-game action, the drop in presentation quality is barely noticeable. The cutscenes are better, sure, but the in-engine sequences are only a couple of notches down.

If you’re familiar with the previous games in the series, you know that Activision doesn’t shy away from drastic and dramatic turns. Here, everything is elevated even higher. Expect shocking discoveries, emotional moments that will bring tears to your eyes, and some deaths that will hit you right in the soul. This is a Call of Duty game, after all, and such moments are well known to us fans.

I simply can’t talk about the story without mentioning its main villain, and as you might already know, it’s the Archer, mocapped and voiced by one of the best actors in Hollywood right now, Mads Mikkelsen. He’s another level of amazing. Before him, we had Kevin Spacey in Advanced Warfare, and he was on a similar level, but what Mikkelsen does here is mind-blowing. I knew he was one of the best, but the way he portrays a proper Russian, a cold-hearted ultranationalist whose every move is calculated to bring him closer to his main goal, left me speechless. No amount of money would be too much for this role. Of course, Captain Price, Gaz, Ghost and the new Korean characters are amazing too, but Mikkelsen is on another level.

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Mikkelsen needs only a quiet line and a long stare to make the Archer the most unsettling villain the reboot has produced.

Gameplay – If It Ain’t Broke

When it comes to gameplay, Infinity Ward played it really safe with Modern Warfare 4, and if you ask me, that’s for the best. This is still a classic Call of Duty campaign focused on shooting and shooting alone; no RPG elements, no needless upgrades or anything similar. We want the feeling of war in Call of Duty, and that’s exactly what you get.

The weapons are as reliable as ever. You carry two guns at any given time, and either can be swapped for any other gun lying around. You have lethal and tactical grenades, plus the now well-established armour plate system. Your comrades or nearby BMPs usually carry ammo caches for you to replenish from, so you won’t have to toss a weapon you like because you can’t find ammo for it, which was the case in earlier titles.

The only new addition to the combat system is the hand-to-hand sections, and those are probably my only complaint about the game. Even though these brawls are a real visual spectacle, the parry windows are extremely tight, and I replayed one knife-fight section so many times I lost count, until I realised I shouldn’t parry at all, but rather block and strike when an opening presents itself. A slightly confusing mechanic, and a really minor complaint.

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Away from the brawls, Modern Warfare 4 leans on the slow, tense room, clearing the reboot made its signature back in 2019.

The levels are also designed in the traditional Call of Duty style, though without the hand-holding of earlier games. The areas are now a bit bigger, and you’ll have to look for the objective yourself. In one level, for example, you have to dive underwater to turn on a generator; you can see it behind a fence, but it’s up to you to figure out how to reach it. In the same level, you’re tasked with collecting explosives inside a big flooded warehouse, where you’ll have to find the crates on your own, without an objective marker.

There’s also one huge open-world level, with a map and the freedom to explore it from start to finish. This is something we already saw in Black Ops 6, and it’s a great change of pace compared to the other levels. Here, you collect resources for repairing weapons, find clues for solving puzzles and opening coded doors, discover hidden caches and much more. The area features three main objectives you can tackle in any order, and once you complete all three, the game asks whether you want to proceed with the final mission or keep exploring. If you decide to proceed, the game tells you that you can return later through chapter select and finish everything you left undone. This level feels like a small game within the game, and it’s brilliantly designed.

Speaking of level design, you’ll visit many places, from a New York club with a high-adrenaline chase sequence to levels in Paris, Mumbai, Hajin City and the North Korean wilderness, and each level is designed differently, with its own set of challenging environments. In Paris, for example, you’ll fight your way through a train yard while trains move left and right, creating plenty of obstacles and cover. Some levels use lighting that will disorient you. North Korea is covered in snow, and you’ll fight in very low visibility the whole time. Seriously, the levels are so varied that I never felt anything repeating right up to the end, which is a huge feat for a genre that tends to be very repetitive.

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Price’s work as a hired gun takes him to a train yard where the layout keeps shifting around you, one of many levels built around its own idea.

The game also doesn’t feature the collectibles previous games had. You’ll find notes with some additional info and yellow crates, but those are exclusive to the aforementioned open-world level. I was quite happy with this decision, because in earlier games I’d get sidetracked trying to find all the laptops and whatnot, leaving my teammates waiting in the middle of the action. Now you can explore that one level for as long as you want, and once you’re done, it’s back to pure action, which is a much better approach.

In every area where Modern Warfare 4 is expected to thrive, it thrives even more than you’d expect: unparalleled shooting you won’t experience anywhere else, action and set pieces better than in the best Hollywood movies, varied and fantastic level design, and everything else that keeps you on the edge of your seat the entire time. In terms of raw gameplay, Modern Warfare 4 might just be the best entry in the entire franchise.

Visuals, Sounds and Performance – A Movie You Can Control

Spectacle after spectacle after spectacle; that’s the visual presentation of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 in a nutshell. This isn’t a game; it’s a movie you can control. I could barely pick my jaw up off the floor when I loaded up this visual masterpiece for the first time. Trust me, words aren’t enough here; you have to experience it.

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A quiet street turns into a wall of fire in seconds, and moments like this are where the campaign’s cinematic ambitions hit hardest.

The Call of Duty franchise has always been famous for spectacular visuals, so that’s nothing new. However, they usually shone brightest in weapon and face models, while the environments, textures, foliage and everything else suffered for it. In Modern Warfare 4, everything is brought within inches of perfection.

Weapon models are the best as always, face models are on another level, and the environments are just amazing. And don’t get me started on the explosion effects, Hajin City in all its shiny splendour, the streets of Paris, the light show and colourful rooms inside the New York club, or the snowy New York streets during the chase sequence. Everything looks beautiful and gorgeous, and I’m simply out of words here.

Lighting and shadows show their full potential during the night-time gunfights. Once Hajin City suffers a blackout, everything plunges into pitch-black darkness, and the explosions that light up the sky look unreal. The particle effects, the smoke, the fire; everything looks so lifelike you won’t believe your eyes. The visual presentation drops a notch once you enter the open-world level, as if it was designed with less detail. However, every other level, especially the one inside the North Korean palace, is packed with detail, and once you find yourself there, you’ll think you’re inside a movie.

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The North Korean palace is the campaign’s visual high point, with a level of detail the open-world chapter never quite matches.

Another thing that looks unreal in Modern Warfare 4 is the characters’ facial expressions, and the character models in general. There are so many different characters, each designed with a lot of care and a wide range of facial expressions for every emotion they show. In the North Korean level where you control one of their soldiers, you have a mission to gather civilians in a village. Each of them looks different, and they show fear and anger, even though they’re just random NPCs. A truly remarkable feat.

The sound closely follows the quality of the visual presentation, but again, that’s nothing new for a Call of Duty title. Gunshots, explosions and set pieces are all accompanied by amazing audio, and I highly recommend using a headset if you don’t want to get into a fight with the members of your household, because the shooting is that loud and powerful. The soundtrack is especially good, with plenty of Korean songs and tracks that send the adrenaline through the roof.

When it comes to performance, I played the game on PC (RTX 3080 Ti, Ryzen 9 5900X, 32 GB RAM) and had zero problems. Details were maxed out, with DLSS set to Quality and ray tracing turned off completely, and I was consistently getting around 60 to 80 FPS. When I turned ray tracing on, the frame rate dropped to around 40, which wasn’t something I wanted to work with. My GPU still has some kick, but it’s already two generations behind, and without frame generation support, ray tracing wasn’t an option. Still, the game looked amazing even without it, and I had a blast playing it in every possible way.

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Playing from the North Korean side forces you to watch the war’s civilian cost up close, and every face in the crowd sells it.

Conclusion

I went into Modern Warfare 4 expecting another tired chapter of a reboot that had lost its way, and I came out of it with a campaign I’ll be thinking about for a long time. Infinity Ward didn’t reinvent Call of Duty here; it took everything the series does best, the shooting, the set pieces and the cinematic storytelling, and pushed each of them further than ever before.

The tight parry windows in the hand-to-hand sections and the slight visual dip in the open-world level are the only blemishes I could find, and neither comes close to spoiling the experience. With Mads Mikkelsen delivering one of the best villain performances the series has ever had, levels that never repeat themselves and a story that hits harder than anything Call of Duty has done before, Modern Warfare 4 sets a new benchmark for the franchise’s campaigns.