Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 review: "Delivers a spectacular campaign, all while DMZ mode's tight loop makes it my favorite multiplayer game released this year"

They don't make many games like Call of Duty anymore. Activision's yearly blockbuster has an obscene budget and you can feel the dollars that made Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 at work in every shootout, in every shuffle up and down a pipe, in every cutscene.

Firing guns feels incredible, movement is phenomenal. Traversal has had a big upgrade: it's not Omnimovement – getting around instead feels closer to that seen in 2022's Modern Warfare 2 but there's a level of responsiveness at all times, even when other shooters typically restrict. Often your character will do what you want, as soon as you tell them to do it, with plenty of control even when mantling or sliding.

Gunfights feel responsive, with weapons often being easy to handle, and the impact of every bullet that meets the mark feeling meaningful. Shoot an AI opponent in the leg and they'll fall over and crawl for cover, or roll onto their back and wait for death. Shoot a player and the now-familiar hit sound effects will pile on as you pile on the lead – the feedback helps to stay on target, and popping opponents is almost disturbingly satisfying.

You may not like the way every gun handles in Modern Warfare 4, but you will find a gun that works for you. These fluid and engaging gunfights are the basis of the entire game, a foundation that everything else layers on top. But this year, those layers are also sublime.

Taking to Task Force

The campaign starts with Wu-Tang Clan's C.R.E.A.M. is playing as you wander through the streets of Seoul. People are going about their day, the convenience stores are stocked, and the city feels alive. Then North Korean forces attack, and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 gets down to business. There's a real sense of place even if in classic Call of Duty fashion it's still incongruous, letting you stroll around the convenience store swinging haymakers at the crisps as everyone chatters around you.

It's the start to a campaign that feels authentic in the way that few franchises really manage to pull off. Call of Duty is one of them, when it's on form, and I'm happy to report that Modern Warfare 4 is one of The Good Ones: it looks superb, moves at a relentless pace, and manages to bring years worth of Modern Warfare storytelling to a satisfying conclusion. When special forces soldiers are free to draw the line, who's to decide what's right or wrong?

It manages to do this while simultaneously cleaning the decks of most of the lingering threads from the disappointing Modern Warfare 3 (which we called "underwhelming" in our Modern Warfare 3 review). A lot of this is achieved by killing off a whole bunch of beloved characters, often brutally and without warning. Several times after a shocking death the camera lingers on dead characters to show you they're really dead and won't be returning in some of the post-launch content or a much maligned sequel Infinity Ward isn't responsible for.

Filling the void left by these deaths are a heap of new characters that I quickly gel with. Big bad Mads Mikkelsen is a lot of fun, but the standout is Lanny Joon as Ko who gives a stellar performance. Elsewhere, I squeak with delight when I recognize the voice of Luke Tennie from Apple TV's Shrinking. Most of these characters are lightly sketched out, but you're moving at such a quick pace you won't notice. Exposition is delivered breathlessly as you push from firefight to firefight, whispered in the quiet moments as you scurry around hoovering up ammo and armor plates from vanquished foes.

It's one of the most morally challenging Call of Duty campaigns in recent years, as the game pushes you gleefully to do things that don't fit with the usually narrow worldview of the series. One level has you playing as a North Korean soldier terrorizing a small village as you look for a dissident. How brutal you want to be is up to you but it's an unflinching level, let down slightly by the fact you're scuffling around the place looking for collectibles.

Price to see you

John Price, now on the run after assassinating General Shepherd in Modern Warfare 3, has grown a full beard instead of his ridiculous mustache and has to reckon with his own morality. There a few tough moments here: beating someone to death in an alleyway, facing off against "good guys" during fights through the Parisian streets, and even shooting-to-kill at former squad mates. After years of Price being the most recognizable good guy in the Call of Duty series, he's kind of a dick here, but trying to square that is part of the point.

Modern Warfare 4 has made me struggle with my own morality too, because I really wish it would relax its stance against civilian casualties. It's not a late heel turn for me, but the fact that innocents are in the middle of most of the gunfights and just clipping one results in an instant game over while enemies are unbothered has my ghillies in a twist. Have you ever tried to fire an assault rifle in fully automatic while hanging from the passenger seat of a speeding car without hitting civilians? I have, and it's pretty difficult.

These moments are rare frustrations in Modern Warfare 4's campaign, which is otherwise packed full of some of the series' most bombastic sequences to date. Several of the game's most impressive moments come early, with one highlight seeing you stalk a target through a club before you end up having to blast your way out.

Stranded, meanwhile, will be in 'best campaign mission' debates for years. The mission is an expansive playground that has you dropping in with nothing but a pistol and slowly gathering gear as you roll around the North Korean countryside exploring points of interest on foot and slowly gather yourself an arsenal, before attacking the objectives as you wish.

This is followed up by an amphibious assault on Seoul that feels like a full circle moment for Call of Duty, looking back to its D-Day origins. Call of Duty's campaigns have always been at their best when you're pushing against something impossibly well-defended, whether that's the beaches of Normandy or the cityscape of Seoul.

Unfortunately, the execution here is a little shaky and emblematic of some of Modern Warfare 4's biggest problems: if you stray too far from your commander, you're instantly killed with a tooltip popping up to tell you to follow your squad leader to exit the beach safely. It happens again and again, and after the freedom of Stranded, there's a disconnect when you're strapped back into the rollercoaster's straight line.

It's a shame, as, when Modern Warfare 4's missions hit, I'm reminded why the series' campaigns remain so important in a genre increasingly measured by online success and hours streamed.

It might still be junk food – even if this is a higher quality than limp-burger-like Black Ops 7 or Modern Warfare 3's attempts – but there are glimpses here of how Infinity Ward's modern approach to a military thriller can still push further. If only they'd let me off the leash a little.

Run DMZ

DMZ, Modern Warfare 4's headline addition, puts freedom front and center. Evolving on the mode first introduced in Call of Duty Warzone 2.0, this is a full-blooded extraction shooter taking place in Hajin City, a huge map that stretches between North and South Korea. Hajin City doesn't feel like a real place in the same way as Escape From Tarkov's miserable arenas, but it is expansive and well designed, with impressive verticality.

There are a few standout spots which seem to be tied into story missions that you can approach too. In one, me and my group pull off a daring heist at a casino, while a more frustrating mission sees us attempting to raid a robotics lab full of robocanines. Both missions have raid-like mechanics, and these more scripted experiences feel like they add something a bit different to the traditional extraction shooter experience.

Playing in this pseudo PVE-environment, DMZ could be one of my favorite multiplayer games released this year. You gear up, you drop into the map and prowl around shooting enemies and hoovering up loot until you either achieve the mission you came here to do, get scared and head for an extract, or get brutally murdered by another group of players or the AI.

Progress is rewarding. While your operators will level and be reset as you prestige, everything that gives you XP will also unlock new stations at your FOB – a safe area where you can recuperate between matches, spending currency and crafting recipes to make yourself more powerful.

The rewards are generous, and the end result is that DMZ feels less like an extraction shooter and more like a roguelike, which does take the sting out of getting ganked. Warzone's meteoric rise saw a point when casual players got pushed out in favor of more experienced players, so it remains to be seen how DMZ will evolve in future.

The nature of extraction shooters is such that not everyone will be pushed towards the same climatic conflicts, but the Call of Duty audience tends to favor an aggressive playstyle, and I'd expect this to filter down into DMZ.

Class warfare

Less revolutionary, but no less impressive, is the game's multiplayer. At this point, Call of Duty's multiplayer mode is iterative, more akin to FIFA (erm, I mean, EA Sports FC). This suits everyone fine. There's a new collection of weapons to unlock and upgrade, camouflage to earn and an unending supply daydreaming, clueless players to blast your way through in the name of hitting that prestige button as many times as possible.

Modern Warfare 4 is the best arena shooter on the market right now in terms of how smooth it feels and how engaging it is to play. The arsenal of (fictional, unlicensed) weapons offers up a horde of good choices for a variety of playstyles. I even like the maps this year. Transit 213 feels like one of the franchise's best already, taking the Shipment ideals but updating it for the modern day.

Sadly, the big negatives are largely the same. Killstreaks remain an anti-fun device that rewards players for kill streaks at the expense of the rest of the lobby. I will rally against killstreaks to my dying breath, and I'm not convinced it's even particularly fun for the person that's awarded them. The other thing is that the player base is… not particularly engaged. It's not hard to walk up on players that aren't listening at all, or to play on a team that has no concept of how to pick up objectives at their very feet. People should feel free to play however they want – and it's bound to get sweatier as players drop off – but I can't shake the sense some teammates and enemies alike are second screening Family Guy Funny Moments compilations.

The bigger additions to Modern Warfare 4's multiplayer are hit and miss: I like Inflation, a 6v6 mode where killed players drop cash and you have to scoop it up similar to the game's existing Kill Confirmed mode. The twist is that the amount of cash you drop is a percentage of what you're currently carrying, and the winners are the team holding the most cash when the round times out. This has the fascinating impact that the better players are holding more cash and thus are worth more when you kill them, and suddenly there's a frantic back and forth, a game that isn't over until it's very much over.

Other new modes are a mixed bag. Collateral seems determined to take over the Valorant / Counter-Strike 2 niche, doing away with standard weapon names and perks and offering purchases like "Power Pistol" or "Semi Auto Rifle" for a round-based attack and defend mode. It's confusing primarily because Call of Duty already has a round-based attack and defend mode, Search and Destroy.

Except, here, regenerating health is turned off and in its place there's the overarching economy. This is one of the headline additions to Modern Warfare 4 and I can't help but feel like it's a naked attempt to bring the gameplay of Counter-Strike to console players.

Frontline, meanwhile, is like Team Deathmatch with fixed respawns, which is a miserable exercise in repeating the same kill corridors over and over. Ground War Outpost is equally annoying, with a flood of people shooting you from every treeline, sandbag, or tower. You can't escape combat, but the furious sound of being in a Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 firefight is so intense that you can't really relax into it in the same way as you can in something like Battlefield 6 or Wardogs.

But it doesn't matter. The multiplayer is phenomenal, and if the campaign is junk food, this is closer to an all-you-can-eat buffet inviting you to snack on what works for you and steer clear of the bits that don't. I have a sneaking feeling that I am getting too old for Call of Duty, a feeling Modern Warfare 4 has reinforced. But even if I'm not as fast at the game's multiplayer as I used to be. Even if some of the additions seem meaningless, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 is, surprisingly, one of the best games this year, and it's phenomenal fun. Isn't that supposed to be the whole point?

Answer the call by checking out our best Call of Duty games and best FPS games rankings for more to play next!