Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 (Full Game) review for PC, PS5, Xbox Series X, Switch 2

Another year, another Call of Duty. Depending on who you are, that can be a phrase expressible as either a positive or negative. But make no mistake; for me, it’s absolutely a positive. I have long been a fan of the Call of Duty franchise, and while even I have had my ups and downs with it over the years… I still know that no matter what, it’s going to be a hell of a time with Multiplayer. Say what you will about any of the releases of the past, but nothing beats Call of Duty’s multiplayer in the area it encompasses. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 keeps that streak alive and well, and, as ever, continues to give a wow factor at just how good the visuals are. Call of Duty might not always be the ones to press the envelope and do crazy out there things, but they are the ones that will make it into a pristine package that makes you question why you’d play the other options.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4, in case the opening paragraph there wasn’t indicative enough, is excellent in my opinion. Call of Duty as a series sees its bouncing between developers, and they all have their strong suits. But we always know when it comes back around to Infinity Ward’s turn, we’re going to get a game that looks gorgeous and has a lot of weight. Major details carry a shine that is apparent at all times; not only in texture work, but even in the models beneath. Characters’ faces pop out as a notably excellent visual, giving a glimpse into what feels like a future, but is sitting right in front of you on your own computer. Guns carry a strong punchiness with animations lovingly crafted and/or guided by IW’s very own legendary Ranon Sarono at the reigns. Detail is the name of the game when Infinity Ward puts their hands in the mix.

I’m going to save much commentary on the Campaign in particular in this article, as I have a dedicated review article for only it that you can catch here. But suffice it to say, this year’s story is a strong contender for at least top 3 in the franchise’s history, and arguably the best in the past decade. Globe-trotting adventure inlaid with a showcase of brutality both in spectacle and in shock, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 is a campaign that you should try and actually find time to play. One week’s worth of early access hopefully gave more people than usual a chance and/or excuse to actually give it a go, but even coming in late, you need to find yourself an excuse to take a break from multiplayer and get through. At a mere 6-10 hours (Wide variability depending on your participation in a wide mission you’re allowed to skip the “filler” bits of in the middle), I believe in anyone who might read this to manage to power through.

But, like I said: there’s a whole separate article that you can check out for all of my thoughts on the campaign already. I’m dedicating this overall review to focus more on general aspects and what really stays relevant across the lifespan of the title: the multiplayer. Sometimes offending me with pokey jests, I’ve heard many friends over the past 20 years say that they don’t ever touch the campaign, they’re just here for the multiplayer. Which I know many people agree, but… c’mon guys. The campaigns are excellent, don’t be a baby. Regardless of my pushback though, the multiplayer is always the cultural zeitgeist that keeps everyone coming back and paying a full game’s price premium every year. With the exception of Warzone, wherein you get access to the guns of a spread of Call of Duty titles’ guns, whether you buy them or not, paying that (now) $70 is a press that has to be set in for convincing players to get on. Which cannot be an easy task surely, but here we are almost 3 decades into yearly releases and it’s still convincing me to get on, so it’s clearly doing it right.

This year’s release comes with a lot of standard fare for content availability. 12 core maps pad out the primary space that players will interact with, but new and upgraded but returning modes do their part to try and drag you out of that pattern. Ground War is back, changed from the olden days of just being increased team sizes to instead offering an experience to challenge that of the Battlefield franchise. DMZ is back to take on the Tarkov format, or rather it’s… no longer in beta, I guess? It’s fully formed and feature rich in Modern Warfare 4, and ready for people to take it on as their primary mode. Kill Block brings variety and width to make Gunfight more interesting than before, and brand new game mode “Collateral” offers to give the Counter Strike experience in Call of Duty format.

You might notice a pattern with the things I mentioned above, and I would say it’s no secret: Call of Duty is positing itself to try and become to adults what Fortnite is to the world of children. An all-encompasing monolith that offers an unrivaled feature set where you can bounce between a wide array of experiences all within one game. Where it seemed some previous Call of Duty titles were trying to convince you they were the only game you needed by eating your entire drive space, Modern Warfare 4 manages all of this with a much smaller than prior launches’ 100GB, at least on PC (When did 100GB become small?). Warzone captures the wide demand for the Battle Royale experience, chock full of it’s own assortment of game modes, it alone is a full fledged title. But the same remains true for any of the modes I mentioned above. Playing Ground War hardly resembles the experience you get from playing something like Kill Block. DMZ might as well be a completely different dimension from that of Collateral. The breadth of content and consistent quality does wonders for the package.

I would like to dig in a bit to talk about some of these new or changed modes too. To start with the simplest: Collateral, as I mentioned, is essentially Call of Duty’s take on a Counter Strike game type. You could argue that’s always been here in the best way it could be by way of Search and Destroy, but you know what’s been missing the whole time? The ability to purchase your weapons round-to-round. It’s essentially search and destroy with an in-match economy; wherein you gain money by getting kills and playing the objective, to purchase your weapons and gear at the beginning of each round. Die and you lose it all. Pick something up from an enemy and you keep it as long as you survive. I’ve not seen a ton of commentary on this game mode quite yet, but I’d be interested to see if it doesn’t take over S&D’s spot as top dog in the competitive scene.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4’s “Kill Block” is both a mode and the map that you play on within the mode. Utilizing the Gunfight formula of having two teams facing off against each other with randomized gearsets that everyone has, Kill Block ups the ante by making it 10v10 instead of 2/3v2/3. But that’s only the game mode, and not really what makes Kill Block stand out. What really makes this mode unique is the map itself. As alluded, also named “Kill Block”, the map you play on is a dynamic, shifting map that changes every single round. Set on a stage with what are essentially revolving set pieces on platforms, you will find a potential of essentially over 500 unique maps that exist here. The setup is simple: there are a set of environments that pull from renowned maps that you’ll recognize from all across Call of Duty’s history. Each “map” is a one-third segment of a complete map. As rounds shuffle and players are given a new loadout, so too does the map. It randomly selects three pieces of three different maps, shoves them together as one unit, and then you face off against eachother. Of course this opens up the possibility of unfair advantages, but that’s why each map and gearset stays for two rounds, where the spawns are swapped.

Ground War, as mentioned, offers what is essentially a Battlefield game type. Evolved far beyond its roots, where, as I said, it used to just have you play 10v10 on the normal 6v6 maps. Ground War in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 is yet another fully encapsulated experience with a full feature set and maps to back it up. With three unique large-scale maps, Ground War gives you 32v32 matches of what is essentially large scale Domination (Or Conquest, for the estranged Battlefield diehard). You are put into a squad of four players, and when you die, you are given the ability to select where you spawn on an overhead map view. You can choose to spawn on said squadmates, or one of your team’s currently held objective points. Held objectives can be “reinforced” by standing on them longer, allowing you to get strong backup for your team to push forward harder. The highest level drops a tank for the team, so you can make your strongest possible push. Just like Battlefield, tanks will give you the business as a foot soldier, so make sure to keep your head down.

And finally, for the last on my list of new modes to mention in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4: DMZ. Infinity Ward’s very own take on the extraction shooter genre, DMZ is likewise given it’s very own fully fleshed feature set ready for you to make it the one thing you do. DMZ is technically not a part of the standard multiplayer, having it’s own tab at the main menu alongside multiplayer and campaign, but… that’s probably because I don’t think I could see how it could exist within standard multiplayer’s UI functionally. Given a full base where you’re able to walk around in third person, take on tasks, purchase gear, and sell extracted valuables, DMZ has a ton of its very own meta progression that is completely separate from that of the standard multiplayer or Warzone. A set of story missions to expand the narrative of the campaign can keep you focused in the immediate sense, but long-term, there’s a ton to grind for and earn. Before release, Activision released a giant blog post with everything you could possibly want to know about this mode, and I could probably make this segment take up 10 paragraphs alone. So instead, I’m just going to tell you to go check out one or both of my articles on DMZ I put out before release. You can see everything you need to know about general info or check out how gun progression and operators work, all courtesy of primarily Activision, but picked apart and curated by yours truly.

One major change with Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 that I want to call attention to and praise though is something relatively simple. Double XP no longer counts down outside of matches. Honestly, I don’t know whose wise idea it was to make them count down when you were outside of matches before, but listen… all I care about now is that the pressure is on to keep it this way. Please, never let us go back to the old system. As someone who might need to get up suddenly for real life things, it never felt good to be punished by the game for having other things going on. It previously kind of felt like a pressured incentive to never be allowed to leave, lest you lose your very limited resource of double XP. This change is nothing more than a line item on a giant list, but… it’s just such a sweet one that I think it deserves individual attention.

General gameplay handling feels snappy and punchy, guns handle well, and feel very unique. The only complaint I’d really levy at the overall gameplay functionality, mainly within multiplayer is that the time to die can very often feel wildly mismatched with your time to kill. It might be me imagining things, but it has started to feel like something that has become increasingly apparent over the years in Call of Duty. If you don’t know what I mean, I’m sure you can relate to the effects of this from playing past titles. That effect being where it feels like, from your own perspective, enemies always take exactly the correct number of hits to kill. But when you get shot… it’s like you die instantly almost every single time. But when you check the info after death it says you got shot 8 times. Why then does it feel like an insta-death? Honestly… I’m not really sure. Call of Duty has claimed that the multiplayer server tickrates are 60hz, which should be more than sufficient for information accuracy, but it still maintains this time-to-die/time-to-kill disparity. It’s not enough to take much away from the experience for me, but it does sometimes make you question your sanity, as if your own guns just don’t do as much damage as your enemies.

The guns in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 are a pretty interesting spread, and… I will once again reference you to an article I already wrote on this regarding how I felt about the options themselves. I wrote that before actually playing with the guns, so it focuses more on commentary about what the guns are with enough general firearm knowledge to make a statement of their place within the roster. But now that I’ve actually gotten a chance to be hands on with all of the guns I have to say that they all feel very good. Variety is wide in handling and use-cases, so everyone will likely find their new favorites in here. Being something of a marksman rifle kind of guy, I find myself well at home with all three of them in MW4 here. Each feels different enough to fill their own niches, largely for speed and range differences, so I’m a happy camper. Likewise in every other department: shotguns, ARs, SMGs, LMGs, and Snipers all have enough diversity to run the gamut of preferences.

Each firearm is given a unique “Apex attachment” that is used to further differentiate every gun from each other. The apex attachment system has a spectrum that ranges from “gets a sling” to “gets RFD tracker darts that can see enemies you hit through walls”, so expect that this brings a pretty heavy mixup into matches. Honestly, despite my fear that some of these might be a bit absurd and out of place before playing, I can say that I’ve not noticed much of anything standing out in action as particularly notable. The only one I’ve really messed with much is the underbarrel taser dart launcher that I unlocked for one of the ARs. While it’s ridiculous, I would argue that that particular Apex attachment is nearly useless, despite it sounding crazy. Which seems to be a similar case around the board. Not so much useless as “not noteworthy enough to notice being an issue”. Which is good, don’t misunderstand that. The Apex attachments are given as an extra among five attachments otherwise, with the one drawback being that each one disallows attachments on at least one slot for a given gun.

I’m very happy with this year’s release of Call of Duty. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 is another example of the fact that Infinity Ward clearly knowing what they’re doing, and it doesn’t seem like they’ve lost their touch. Modern Warfare 3 in 2023 was a bit of a letdown, but Infinity Ward wasn’t on the job, and it’s likewise hard to judge Sledgehammer for it due to some behind the scenes information that came out around the release. Regardless of all of that though, Modern Warfare 4 has cemented itself as a powerful enough force upon release to patch all the lingering wrongs with the previous Modern Warfare release. The campaign even does its duty of cleaning up a great many of the oddities of the past. With Season one coming in the near future, Modern Warfare 4 will also find itself being worked into Warzone as usual for a new Call of Duty release, so keep an eye on the front page, and even if you don’t play today, you can be ready to play with as much of it as they can fit into Warzone soon. However, I think you should just commit and buy it. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 is definitely one of, if not the best Call of Duty game that has been released this decade.

Note: Activision provided us with a Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 code for review purposes.

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