Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 – Review

A spectacular return

Call of Duty has always known how to reinvent itself. It started life as a series of fairly generic World War II shooters. The strategy worked well enough for the first two games, but in 2006 came a shift that would change the face of the franchise. Call of Duty 3 launched exclusively on consoles, with no PC version. And with it came a new formula: drivable vehicles, a single-player campaign focused solely on the Normandy conflicts, and online matches with up to 24 players.

By then, though, we already had far too many WW2 shooters, and behind the scenes things were starting to get stale. Infinity Ward, the creators of the first two games, were sick of the setting, especially as a good few of them had previously worked on Medal of Honor. So for the two years of development they had, one thing was clear: Call of Duty had to leave WW2 behind and move on to something new. The trouble was that the idea of a modern shooter wasn't so clear-cut back then, and it took a tech demo made on the quiet to convince Activision it was the right move. And that's how Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare was born. The franchise reached new heights on the back of that game's success, and the Call of Duty name took on a whole new complexity.

The Modern Warfare series became a turning point for the franchise, and the success the games under that banner enjoyed has rarely been matched since. I remember how groundbreaking COD4 felt when I was a kid, and how, overnight, every FPS on the market was copying it in one way or another. The years rolled by, and in 2019 the Modern Warfare series came back with a full reboot – the only thing it shared with the old games was the name, and a few characters who vaguely resembled those from the originals.

The return to modern platforms marked another reinvention for the series, and Modern Warfare became the spy-and-military-conspiracy drama it had always wanted to be. Only Modern Warfare III failed to live up to expectations, and that took the wind out of the sails a little. Then came last year's Black Ops 7, a game I gave a 4 in my GRIND review. It looked like, for the first time in years, the franchise was heading into a nosedive and a slow death. But after a game rated 4, along came the fourth game in the second Modern Warfare series… and this one. Well, it is by far the best Call of Duty released in the last decade.

The story picks up where the first three games left off, with Captain Price in the middle of an open conflict with an extremely dangerous paramilitary group. But that's only one of the two threads the story follows. The second introduces a new conflict that takes us somewhere the franchise has never been before: Korea. The war is between two neighbouring states that couldn't be more different. North Korea is going through a regime change, and that threatens the peace of the rest of the peninsula. The invasion begins a few days later, and now South Korea has to win back the territory it has lost to its northern adversaries. All told, a playthrough comes to about eight hours, though that can vary quite a bit depending on how much time you sink into the open-world mission around the halfway mark.

I first saw this addition in the excellent Black Ops 6, and here it returns with an approach that's at least as interesting. You have three main missions to complete while you're there, each with its own set of specific requirements. It's the game's way of telling you to go exploring, especially as the map is dotted with hidden weapon caches, assorted secrets to uncover, and plenty of enemies to keep you busy on the roads between locations. I think it's a great twist for an FPS like this, especially as you're encouraged to hang around and clear everything the map has to offer, and for me it's one of the high points of Modern Warfare 4's story. It blends elements of games like Far Cry and Skyrim into something that feels apart from the main game, and somehow better than the base material.

Towards the end the two threads converge, and we get a showdown between evil and slightly worse evil, because the forces of good sit in a very grey area in Modern Warfare 4's story. Still, the way the action is staged, and actors like Mads Mikkelsen bringing the characters to life, make this a very solid release when it comes to storytelling and presentation.

On the gameplay front there are no massive changes, and the most important tweak is to the pace of the game. In previous instalments the characters moved far too arcade-like, so the whole game has been slowed down a touch here. For a shooter that wants to be accessible, I think that's a perfect change. And while we're on the subject of accessibility, Modern Warfare 4 feels like the first Call of Duty in ages where the guns actually have recoil rather than firing like laser pointers. The attachment system is as dense as ever and lets you build all sorts of combinations. That pays off best in multiplayer, where I found the most balanced experience in a long time.

Unfortunately, classic multiplayer is still governed by skill-based matchmaking, which supposedly drops you into the arena with players as good (or as bad) as you. This is where I spent the most time, and the selection of maps and weapons is varied enough that I always had something new to do. On top of that, they've brought back Shipment 24/7 on the famous map from Call of Duty 4, a perfect spot for levelling up and raising your weapon levels. The biggest focus in online multiplayer, however, falls on the DMZ mode. It combines extraction-shooter elements with a kind of campaign, which guarantees plenty of hours of gameplay.

You're dropped onto a huge map – solo or in a squad of up to three – and you're free to do whatever you like. There are missions called DMZ Orders, plus random events across the map, and all of them reward you with XP and gear. But the point isn't just to collect stuff and survive while you do it… that would be too easy, wouldn't it? So there are bots hunting you across the map, and the challenge ramps up once you factor in the other players. The dash to an extraction point, which lets you bank everything you've gathered in a round to your Stash, becomes far more dangerous. The idea behind it is good, and so is the execution, and even though I'm not a big fan of these "extraction" games, I can appreciate what Infinity Ward has done here. It suits the game and gives it an interesting dynamic.

Usually, when we got to graphics and optimisation, things were in good shape in the Call of Duty camp. But I don't know what they've done with this year's release, because Modern Warfare 4 is anything but well optimised. On top of its needlessly huge install size, as usual, the game runs far worse than you'd expect. Ray tracing is badly implemented, which leads to all sorts of daft situations. For example, if I enable advanced lighting I can't use DLSS or Ray Reconstruction, while AMD's alternatives work fine. That doesn't cut it in 2026 with Microsoft's budget behind it. It's a disgrace for the series, and it mustn't happen again, because it deprives most players of what should be the optimal Call of Duty experience. I can't tell you what the console experience is like, as I played on PC, but judging by how it runs here without ray tracing, I'd expect things to be fine. Sadly, the PC version did enough damage to put off some gamers who judged the release by how it ran in the first few days – or even a week or more after launch.

Ignore the technical problems and Call of Duty Modern Warfare 4 looks stunning. The locations are beautifully built, you're taken through big cities like Paris and can see legendary landmarks such as the Eiffel Tower, and in certain cutscenes the characters all but break the photorealism barrier. The audio is at least as good: gunfights, explosions and the engines of all sorts of military vehicles make a glorious racket that drops you into the atmosphere of war, and the sound design in the story moments is superbly executed. The music fits like a glove, so do the voices, and the voice actors' performances are impeccable.

Call of Duty Modern Warfare 4 is a true masterpiece, and for art's sake I'm going to overlook the technical shortcomings, and I'd urge you to turn off ray tracing and do the same. I simply can't let something as daft as corporate greed (the apparently exclusive tie-up with AMD) spoil a game this good. From me it gets a big white ball, and I'm delighted that after last year's disappointment I can finally say: Call of Duty is back!

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Played on: PC
Release date: 23 October 2026
Developer: Infinity Ward, Beenox, Digital Legends, Activision Shanghai, Raven Software, Treyarch, Sledgehammer Games, High Moon Studios
Publisher: Activision