I wasn’t sure what to expect from Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4‘s campaign. I hoped that at the very least it would be better than the nonsensical train wreck that was last year’s Black Ops 7 campaign. And I’m happy to report that, yes, MW4 has cleared that low bar and is a much better adventure than what we got a year ago. But what is more impressive is that this might be the best CoD campaign in many years, featuring a mix of boots-on-the-ground action, big flashy set pieces, and a story that mostly feels like a true ending for this era of the franchise.
Technically, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 isn’t out yet. But for players who pre-ordered the game digitally, the campaign is now available to play via early access. And that’s what I checked out using a code from Activision.
Modern Warfare 4 features a tense story pitting friends against each other while showing the invasion of South Korea from the perspective of a small squad of local marines trying to survive. The overall setup for this new campaign is that Captain John Price is now on the run after killing a U.S. general who betrayed him and his team. Now Price is after a man codenamed the Archer, the Defense Minister of Russia, who is determined to create a new Russian empire by any means necessary. To stop him, Price begins working with some folks he’d previously called his enemies, leading to his own men turning on him to try to capture him or, if they have to, take him out. Meanwhile, North Korea is invading South Korea with what appears to be help from a much more powerful country.
You can totally hop into Modern Warfare 4 without playing the previous three games, but some moments hit harder if you’ve spent time with these characters before, especially when the game starts blasting away its cast left and right as it races towards its big climactic ending involving the Archer, played by a wonderfully sinister Mads Mikkelsen. Activision has said that this is the last Modern Warfare game in the rebooted series, and it really does feel that way with how many people are left dead by the time the credits roll.
So I started blasting
But what won me over with this year’s campaign isn’t the story; it’s the action and how everything is paced. MW4 features a revamped, more dynamic combat and movement system that feels more grounded than what was in Black Ops 6 and 7. It also feels like the devs behind MW4 played a lot of bodycam-inspired games and watched a lot of John Wick, with Price’s missions in particular feeling ripped right out of a Wick knockoff, including the legally mandated “gunfight in a cool nightclub” sequence.
The thing is, even if some of these moments aren’t the most original, they’re incredibly well-made and nail the vibes and feel they are going for. Working my way through a club and its back rooms with just a pistol felt fantastic in Modern Warfare 4 because guns hit harder now, characters move around the world more dynamically and realistically, and levels are designed with a lot of care for ramping up the action to a crescendo.
A later fight happens in a train yard where trains and locomotives are slowly moving in various directions, and you can freely hop in and out of them, climb under or over them, or even ride on top of them while pushing forward and taking out enemies. After that, you’re part of a large-scale ground invasion complete with trenches and tanks. And then you take part in a stealth mission using night vision and silencers. Later, you drive a tank through a war zone, and after that you swap on the fly between different soldiers as they hold back a massive army of troops from three different positions.
Modern Warfare 4 understands that the appeal of a big-budget shooter like this isn’t in repetitive, boring hallway fights or pure outlandish nonsense, but instead in offering players a smorgasbord of well-made set pieces and diverse levels, making it hard to put the game down as you constantly want to see what’s next. This is something recent CoDs have failed to provide, but MW4 does it confidently.
Welcome to the open world
In fact, it gets so confident that at one point MW4 sneaks in an open-world mission that plays like a mini–Far Cry campaign, complete with outposts, puzzles, and gear upgrades. This isn’t the first time CoD has dabbled in nonlinear open-world design in a campaign, but it is the most ambitious and most successful attempt.
You can easily spend a lot of time in this wintry North Korean landspace, filled with patrolling vehicles and soldiers, discovering hidden locations and taking out enemy bases. The game even keeps your progress in this mission separate from your overall campaign saves, letting you go back to wrap up everything later if you want. It does feel like a lot of care went into making this one big mission.
And yet, if you really don’t want to screw around with the open-world mechanics, you can just fast-travel to the main objectives and enjoy some linear CoD set-piece missions.
For my part, I did play through the open-world mission as intended and mostly enjoyed the slower, more methodical pacing that takes advantage of the new climbing and mantling controls introduced in MW4. It’s a perfect palate cleanser for the campaign, providing an hour or more of downtime as you scrape by to survive. When the action kicks back into high gear later, it feels even more bombastic after hanging around old, quiet farmhouses looking for a gun while dodging patrols.
It’s also quite interesting that MW4 focuses on non-American forces and soldiers, like Price (from the UK) and the South Korean squad you’re part of during the invasion missions. In fact, most of the named Americans who show up in this game, like the Russians who appear, are not to be trusted. MW4 isn’t trying to tell some radical anti-American story, as there are still plenty of friendly U.S. Marines and handlers who help the good guys win, but it is noteworthy that one of the most popular video game franchises around is dabbling more and more with the idea that perhaps the old empires of the world aren’t always to be trusted.
Ultimately, Modern Warfare 4 doesn’t reinvent the wheel. Instead, it remembers that the wheel was good and fixes it up, getting it working again after past entries completely went off the rails or got bogged down in trying to be more complicated, expansive adventures. Modern Warfare 4 is instead focused on delivering an action-packed eight-hour campaign that’s always providing new ways to blast people away.
It’s not high art, but it is exactly what I want from these massive, multi-million-dollar games, and it’s the kind of thing that few other games can deliver with this level of fidelity and detail. Now, let’s just hope next year’s CoD doesn’t completely go off the rails again.