After 2023’s lackluster Modern Warfare 3, Infinity Ward and nearly a dozen additional studios are attempting to pull the community back with Modern Warfare 4. A shooter that hopes to check all the boxes while moving the series forward. Movement changes, a hybrid kill/score streak system, and new modes pulled me in. And we’re even given a taste of the campaign’s new focus on a conflict on the Korean Peninsula. But in spite of all that’s new and refined, I can’t help but feel like we’ve done all this before.
Tell me if you’ve heard this story before. Call of Duty makes some big changes to its movement system, then a couple of years later returns to the old one. ‘Omni-movement’, wall jumping and running, being left behind in Black Ops 7. Matches are less unhinged, and lobbies are less sweaty, as Modern Warfare 4’s beta reminds me of the 2019 reboot. And while not groundbreaking, the movement system still feels slick.
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Mounting a gun on a wall, peeking around a corner, and rotating while prone are all still here, like having the benefits of omni-movement without overdoing it. Modern Warfare 4 feels like a balanced return to form without forgetting the lessons of Black Ops 7.
Infinity Ward gave us 8 modes to play with. The mainstays of hardpoint, kill confirmed, search and destroy, team deathmatch, and domination are back. One new addition is Inflation, a frantic team hunt for cash, with both sides chasing down the richest opposing players, or high-value targets, to secure the bag.
Another was Hijack, where players capture a data spike then toss, pass, and carry it to an upload beacon, defending it while the data transfers. Both drive players to engage and move instead of holding onto camping their cozy spot.
Infinity Ward is looking to make up for a lackluster MW3, and it just may.
Gunfight’s new Killblock map is a bit fresher. By reconfiguring the map layout, players have to adapt to new routes and can’t get comfortable with the sightlines they’re used to. Infinity Ward is promising 500 combinations of maps at launch in both 3v3 and 10v10 lobbies.
But the maps aren’t the only thing changing, as loadouts are randomized each round. I had one round with sniper rifles, another with shotguns, and finally one with rockets. These updates to gunfight are just enough to keep things from getting stale, without fully abandoning the classic formula.
Missing this weekend was Ground Wars 24v24 large-scale combat mode. When it’s live, it’ll feature the CoD staple of a Stadium map. Players will enjoy scrambling into vehicles, deploying from multiple spawn points, and capturing outposts to push deeper into enemy territory.
These ground war additions feel a little at odds with Call of Duty’s continued choice not to include more extensive destruction. The comparisons to Battlefield are impossible to ignore, but the differences are glaring every time a grenade goes off, and the walls are left intact.
Another mode I’ve been excited to see, but was missing from the beta, was DMZ. After the previous iteration spent its entire life in ‘Beta,’ Modern Warfare 4’s version is getting top billing as a full mode included in the $70 package. I can’t wait to see the missions, loot, and chaos of Call of Duty’s sporadic extraction mode return. But since this is included in the paid release, and no longer a free beta available alongside Warzone, expectations will be a lot higher.
The lights and sounds of Modern Warfare 4 have continued to evolve. But as the first current-gen-only version of the franchise, the graphical delta isn’t mind-blowing. I generally play CoD on my PC, but this year I decided to try the beta on PS5 Pro. Besides the 120hz mode, there wasn’t much in the way of graphic options. If you wanted a graphical showcase, there’s not much to complain about. But I didn’t see anything that felt more than iterative.
Gunsmith returns with the AI addition of Gunny. An assistant that takes your current unlocks and attachments and gives you dead simple options like run-and-gun, balanced, and long range. Once you pick your flavor, Gunny cobbles together a kit for you.
This could be very useful for the player mid-grind. Where you care less about the perfect gun configuration and more about quick upgrades as you work through the unlocks. But I doubt Gunny is going to be stealing any jobs from those content creators customizing and tuning their magnum opus to share online.
The ‘ripped from the headlines’ theme couldn’t be more topical as the Modern Warfare 4 beta surprises with a campaign mission set in South Korea during the early days of a modern invasion. It opens with a mad dash towards the trenches while South Korean and American soldiers jointly engage invading North Korean troops.
Players will toss grenades into foxholes to clear enemy encampments and unload shotguns at point blank to dispatch corner ambushes. As players traverse, the muddy sludge is littered with dismembered soldiers clutching stubs and struggling through tortured death animations. As if developers want you to feel the nightmare of a Cold War turned hot.
Modern Warfare 4 has to meet high expectations, but it just might.
As players emerge from the trenches, they’ll man an APC and enjoy blowing up some of the few destructible buildings in the game. Eventually, an enemy tank enters the fray, shredding an allied APC and turning its passengers into flaming, sputtering gristle as they flail out its charred rear.
Players engage the steel leviathan with a couple of rockets launched from the APC, ending its assault as quickly as it began. The jaunt in the APC ends near the power plant, as an enemy rocket finds purchase in your vehicle, driving the troops out to resume their battle on foot.
Passing through the entrance and into the power plant, civilian nuclear engineers pepper the grounds, and the lucky survivors race to escape. The reactor is in meltdown, and all that can be done is to cool the site to give more people the opportunity to evacuate. Players will swim through irradiated water, pull levers, search computers, and finally clamber and race their way to an anxious helicopter as the facility crumbles.
As the mission concludes and the trailer for the full campaign plays, I realize Infinity Ward is asking us to turn our brains off and enjoy the explosions even more than previous outings. The short single-player mission imagines a world where the US supports South Korea in rebuffing a North Korean attack on civilian nuclear infrastructure.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 is releasing in a new political environment; we’ll have to see if it can still land.
While this level of hoorah, Team America World Police propaganda wouldn’t have been out of place a few years ago, a summer of watching Trump threaten civilian infrastructure and more war on social media sort of breaks the action movie spell. While a belligerent and devil-may-care US, backed by eager vassals against an axis of evil, has been the general tenor of American foreign policy my entire life, the artifice has collapsed in a way that’s difficult to describe.
It all hits differently, crawling through the dirt in Infinity Ward’s beautifully rendered trenches. When actual ‘modern warfare’ is watching our empire in decline fumble against cheap drones from a state we’ve been sanctioning since before I was born, the cognitive dissonance on display becomes overwhelming.
There’s still a lot up in the air about Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4. Will it succeed in pulling in new players and bringing back old ones? Is it enough of a return to form to wash the taste of Modern Warfare 3 out of the community’s mouth? Is the campaign too jarring and out of step with reality? And can players afford another outing in this economy, especially when they’re required to play them on consoles and PCs that only keep getting more expensive? All I know is I had a generally good time, and I hope they can stick the landing.
