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.
سەرچاوەی فەرمی بە زمانی ئینگلیزی: https://www.ign.com/articles/call-of-duty-modern-warfare-4-dmz-review
