This is a standalone review that covers only Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4's DMZ mode. You can find our campaign review here, with multiplayer impressions to follow after launch.
Extraction shooters feel a little like a modern trend, with some heavy hitters like Marathon and Arc Raiders shaking the table within the last year or so, but they’ve been a growing experiment in the shooter space for the past decade or so. Call of Duty dabbled in it with the original DMZ back in 2022 (you could argue they were late to the party then), and its return in 2026 is timely. But with so much high quality competition on the market, is it welcome? I’ve only dipped my toe in since its “pay to play on time” launch on Tuesday – about five or so hours of vehicle hijacking, SAM site hacking, and target elimination on my docket so far – but this bigger, better DMZ makes a great first impression.
The PvPvE dynamic of extraction shooters often lives and dies by how well the mission and level design encourages you to explore, rewards you for overcoming challenges, and guides you to interact with others in order to keep those spoils. The fictional Korean Hajin region your exploits take place in is well suited for this. Its dense pockets of urban development – a village in the north, the dangerous main city in the east, an isolated prison out west – are separated by rocky forests concealing all sorts of militarized checkpoints and other points of interest hiding loot to shove into your pockets. Parts of it look a little samey, the consequence of modern urban development where (at least from the outside) most buildings look the same, especially compared to some of DMZ’s big sci-fi competition that go above and beyond to look striking at first glance.
The map is so big that you could spend the entirety of your approximately half-hour runs in only a fraction of it. Battle Royales (like CoD’s own Warzone) move players around by having an encroaching death cloud forcing everyone into a smaller and smaller area. DMZ instead entices squads to adventure with its Dynamic Operations.
Dynamic Ops are spontaneous missions that appear as you travel across the battlefield which come in lots of forms, from securing a package to blowing up a target to escorting a VIP. Many of them are multi-stage affairs that have your fireteam moving from point to point as NPC enemies ramp up a more coordinated defense against you. These all get rewarded by supply drops that grant you loot, the value of which escalates based on how many of them you're successfully completing. I prefer this sort of objective chasing to the more standard task lists in other games like this (which also exist here, in fairness) because it makes for more engaging individual runs. I’ll prepare the best I can beforehand, but can’t be ready for every possible string of operations once I deploy.
There are many actions and events, like aforementioned supply drops, that are broadcast to everyone within earshot, hypothetically to tempt other players to be nosy (and potentially belligerent), but my skirmishes with others have been pretty limited so far. It’s still technically the early access period, so a wave of operators is set to crash against me in the coming days, but I found that most people have opted to mind their own business. It would be a mistake to confuse this passivity with pacifism though – this isn’t the Arc Raiders playerbase, which spent many of the opening months of that game more interested in helping than hurting. Whenever another player was in eye or earshot, it was assumed that a fire fight was to follow. It’s just unclear at this point how much of that was motivated by them wanting what I had versus just coincidentally being in the same place at the same time.
Hajin is also a pretty lively place. Enemy patrols speed down roadways, sometimes as lone jeeps and other times in large caravans. Helicopters and drones streak across the skies looking for interlopers like me, or occasionally other NPCs from rival factions tearing the map apart. A train runs on a schedule, and you can absolutely hitch a ride on it to get from place to place. Squads of enemies could be posted up anywhere. Weird exploding robot dogs can sniff you out as you slink from building to building. There was always at least a base level of tension with every step I took or round I let off, because there was just enough going on around me that any push I made could be the one that knocks over the house of cards I was hiding behind.
Clashes with the NPC denizens of the DMZ start pretty tame, but ramp up as you and your squad make yourself more notorious by killing enemies and completing objectives. As enemy units start to don armor, pull up in more durable vehicles, and use higher grade weaponry to take you down, fire fights can get desperate quickly. There's an instinct for people in pick-up groups to run out on their own, potentially to get first dibs on loot perhaps, and they almost always regret it – it doesn’t take much for enemies to get the drop on you, as you are only where you are and they are potentially anywhere and everywhere else.
Call of Duty’s top tier military shooter gunplay, toeing the line between the lethality of simulations and the snappy speed of arcadey romps, feels at home in DMZ as well. All of the new tweaks, like the way your weapons interact with your surroundings or movement adjustments, feel like it had roaming gunfights in an open world in mind. Being able to cancel out of mantles so you aren’t stuck in an animation when you least want to be feels like the kind of quality of life inclusion that Warzone demonstrated was needed for a long time. That said, the smattering of guns lack much in the way of real identities outside of the normal archetypal framings that have existed in gaming forever (shotgun, assault rifle, sniper, etc.).
You can also drop into story missions, which are quest chains that include more structure, resembling the campaign missions without the more cinematic story elements. These were pretty rowdy and unique, like an escort mission where our squad had to wheel an injured general out of hospital, bed and all, while enduring swarms of enemy combatants. There's a finite number of these and the possible rewards are more limited, with less incentive to explore the places around you and no enemy players to pirate or evade. But they serve as a great tasting platter of the pace Dynamic Ops keep and a good tour of the various locations you'll need to get familiar with on the map.
In between missions, you tend to all of your gear and progression from the safety of your FOB. Weapons, crafting ingredients, and consumables that you procure out in the field can be sorted through here, all of it put at risk when you equip it and redeploy. When you unlock the 3D printer and gunsmith areas, crafting new toys and upgrading weapons becomes the main way you spend your plunder to enhance your chances in Hajin. The value proposition of spending in-game money on upgrades is still hard to parse for me this early on. You can easily blow tens of thousands of won to trick out a weapon, but there hasn't been an obvious benefit to doing so that outweighs the risk of throwing all of that hard earned money down the drain if you die while using it. That’s the kind of knowledge that only comes with reps, I imagine.
Similarly, Operators have individual sets of trait trees that you upgrade with points they earn in the field. These don’t appear to be novel to any individual fighter; there's no Ghost-specific ability where he gets unique buffs while saying something very British. Instead there are pools of passive traits across three categories, all operators have a choice between the same handful of major traits, while the 15 or so minor traits that fill out the trees are randomized. What makes an operator special seems to be limited mostly to how they look and sound, which was a bit of a bummer.
These traits can be pretty meaningful in the field, though. One of the randomized traits I acquired for Valeria, Ammo Scavenger, doubled the ammo I got from ammo packs and made conserving my shots basically a thing of the past. The faster revive speed all operators have access to in their Survivalist tree has been the difference between clutch plays and total wipes on more than one occasion. There's definitely some kind of character building to be had here, but you really can’t know where it’s all leading until the next group of traits to choose from are revealed. And all that is before accounting for the fact that I'm not sure there's a way to reset or reallocate these trait points outside of abandoning the operator all together if you fail to extract with them (as opposed to spending some cash to get them back into the fight).
My first steps into the new Korean War have been intense so far, and I know I’ve only scratched the surface. Hajin is a region brimming with promise, even if most of it has the kind of design you have to live in for awhile to be able to find its unique charms. There are zones I’ve yet to see and some secrets I'm sure to encounter while I stalk, slide, and shoot my way through it. I’m sure it will get rowdier as the general public starts to pile into the servers on launch day, but for now I really dig the emphasis on the E in the PvPvE structure of these runs. Dynamic Operations have kept me moving and earning, while the factions at war in the region buzz around the map, at first dutifully watching their posts and eventually doggedly hunting me down.
I’m just as eager to spend more time out in the field as I am with my nose in the menus of gunsmithing and operator leveling to tease out what nuance there can be found between the battle. I’ll be back with my final, scored review of DMZ once I’ve done a whole lot more of both.