REVIEW: ‘Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4’ Campaign Is A Return To Form

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 has some cleaning up to do. The last time the Modern Warfare series had the stage, 2023’s Modern Warfare III shipped a campaign you could finish in about four hours, padded out with Open Combat Missions built on recycled Warzone maps. Two years after Black Ops, Infinity Ward is leading a Call of Duty game for the first time since 2022’s Modern Warfare II, and the Modern Warfare 4 campaign is its shot at proving the last one was a detour.

Published by Activision, the Modern Warfare 4 campaign moves the war to the Korean Peninsula and splits 16 missions between a South Korean conscript and a Captain Price who’s run out of people to answer to. The set pieces are as big as anything the series has done. What sticks, though, is how much time Infinity Ward spends on why these people fight and what happens to the ones who can’t stop.

Private Park Hyun Jun (Young Mazino) is a reluctant conscript who sees combat for the first time when North Korean forces cross the DMZ during a routine patrol. Half a world away, Captain John Price (Barry Sloane) is on the run after assassinating General Shepherd at the end of Modern Warfare III. With his old Task Force 141 crew trying to bring him in, Price goes rogue and tears across the globe hunting Makarov and a mysterious weapon headed for a man known only as the Archer (Mads Mikkelsen).

Private Park Hyun Jun and his squad organically develop throughout the game.

The Korean half of the Modern Warfare 4 campaign is where the game earns its keep, and it starts in a convenience store. Before the invasion, Corporal Dunn, the lone American attached to Park’s patrol, tries to impress a couple of local women by mentioning he’s a Marine. They barely look up. Every man in South Korea serves. Poor guy.

It’s a funny bit, and it sets up the whole story. Park and his squadmates start the war terrified after seeing their city bombed, wearing the uniform because the law says they have to. As they defend Hajin and pull trapped civilians out of the crossfire, that changes. They find a reason to be there, and Infinity Ward takes its time letting it happen. You play as Park throughout the campaign and get to watch that feeling unfold into something nobler, something more grounded in the idea of giving everything to save the innocent and reclaim their country. 

Park might be the main attraction of the unit, but the development of him and his squad would not hit as hard if they didn’t have Dunn to bounce off of. He starts out as the trigger-happy American with a chip on his shoulder, and combat sands his edges down. By the later missions, he’s a steadier, quieter presence next to Lt. West and the Korean soldiers.

Early on, the squad argues over Dunn’s heavy metal versus their hip-hop, with the Wu-Tang Clan as Exhibit A. Yes, it’s a quick bit of banter, but it also does more to make Sierra-1 feel like a real unit than any briefing could, letting them grow organically together.

The squad development lends itself to a well-executed spectacle.

So when you storm the beaches to retake Hajin in “Counter Attack,” the spectacle hits harder. You know the guys stacked up on the door next to you, and you want them to make it. This is the biggest set piece, an exhilarating drive into the thickest action with chaos unfolding all around. But all of that is couched in the more personal approach of Park and his squad needing to reclaim their city and save their people. It’s the game’s D-Day Normandy moment, made much more personal because of what the campaign sets up leading into it.

While Park’s squad comes together, Price falls apart. He sells every step of his manhunt as a necessary evil to keep the Archer’s weapon away from Makarov, and Sloane is great at making you almost buy it. Price’s brutal opening brawl with Makarov is easy enough to chalk up to bad blood. The problem is that the brutality sticks around and becomes his default setting.

By the time he teams up with Valeria and her cartel in Paris, the excuses wear thin. When civilians get caught in their shootout, Price scolds Valeria for putting bystanders in danger, and she throws his own hypocrisy right back at him. The mission comes first, whatever the body count. Price doesn’t stop her.

Modern Warfare 4 forces you to deal with uncomfortable moments.

It gets worse when he finally runs into his old Task Force 141 squadmates. Once he’s standing across from the people who know him best, you can see exactly how far he’s drifted. He’s losing himself in the violence he keeps choosing, and by the time he figures that out, the damage is done.

Modern Warfare has been trying to shock players since “No Russian,” and the Modern Warfare 4 campaign goes there too. In “Following Orders,” you play as a North Korean soldier interrogating captured civilians, and the chapter ends with an execution the game makes you carry out yourself. Price’s missions get just as ugly. In “Hired Gun,” you’re handed a grim choice and forced to pull the trigger with your own hands.

Those scenes are uncomfortable to play, and they’re supposed to be. The longer the campaign goes, the harder it gets to tell the heroes from the people they’re hunting. Allies commit war crimes, and Price’s crusade starts to look a lot like terrorism. Where the war gives Park something worth protecting, Price just loses sight of why he started.

The latest entry sticks to what Call of Duty does best.

The Modern Warfare 4 campaign also fixes Modern Warfare III‘s worst idea. “Stranded” drops the survivors of Sierra-1 behind enemy lines in a big sandbox with objectives you can tackle in any order. Infinity Ward built the map specifically for this mission, and it shows. It feels like a place people lived, which makes poking around worth your time.

I spent way more time in “Stranded” than I needed to, hunting supply crates locked behind environmental puzzles while enemy patrols got thicker and meaner with every objective I cleared. Cracking those locks gets old around the third or fourth crate, but I kept doing it anyway.

Outside that sandbox, the campaign sticks to what Call of Duty does best. The gunplay is punchy and responsive, and the sound design is loud enough to put you right in the middle of every firefight. The one mechanical hiccup is the reworked melee. Countering an enemy’s lunge with a quick-time prompt feels great when you nail it, but the timing window changes from fight to fight. As for the score, it mostly fades into the background. The squad’s Wu-Tang argument stuck with me more than any track did.

Modern Warfare 4 leans into blockbuster thrills while still showing the cost of bloodshed.

If the Modern Warfare 4 campaign stumbles anywhere, it’s on the other side of the reticle. Mikkelsen is as magnetic as always in his handful of scenes, especially in “Escape” and a tense finale I won’t spoil. He’s just barely in the game. The Archer never gets enough screen time to feel like the threat the plot keeps telling you he is, and that’s a waste of a casting this big.

North Korea’s new supreme leader is an even stranger miss. The writers try to make him sympathetic, a man struggling under the weight of his father’s legacy and what his country expects of him. They flip this on its head later with a pretty big plot twist, but it still felt weird to introduce him as a sympathetic figure given what his soldiers were doing in his name.

Shaky villains and a couple of predictable late turns aside, the Modern Warfare 4 campaign is what Modern Warfare III should have been three years ago. It has all the ear-ringing spectacle you want from a blockbuster shooter, and it isn’t afraid to show what that spectacle costs the people pulling the triggers.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 is available Oct. 23 on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch 2, and PC. Campaign early access is available now for digital pre-orders.