These are our impressions of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4’s campaign. Reviews of DMZ and multiplayer will follow.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4's campaign has been set an unenviable task: tie the bow on a seven-year-long series of stories I’d politely describe as “uneven.” To its credit, it handles this challenge well, delivering a genuinely exciting string of missions that are great when they focus on what is new, rather than getting bogged down in the past. It’s the best Modern Warfare has been since its 2019 reboot by quite some distance, and a reminder of how good Call of Duty can be when the people making it are given time to cook.
This collection of blockbuster sequences that has clearly been built from the ground up as a single-player experience is in stark contrast when compared to 2023’s woeful Modern Warfare 3 campaign, arguably the low point of the entire series. A mishmash of multiplayer maps mixed with slivers of near-incomprehensible story, I don’t envy Infinity Ward having to pick up from where it left off. The studio has done about as good a job as it could, though, thanks to a smart structure which splits the two halves of this story until they inevitably collide, providing both variety in mission design and tone.
Captain Price has been at the centre of the Modern Warfare plot, and that doesn’t change too much here. Following the disastrous finale of MW3, he’s now on the run, acting as a lone wolf, wanted by the very people he used to work for. His half of the story is initially tied up in knots so twisted even Alfred Borden would have trouble with them. Infinity Ward’s answer? Take a machete to much of it and kill off any characters introduced in the past two games that it deems superfluous. It’s almost an admission of guilt over how poorly these people were handled in the past, but it does give a sense of finality to this seemingly saga-ending chapter.
A tale of string-pullers and warmongers, Price’s story takes place over the course of five days in the run-up to the North Korean invasion of South Korea (plenty more on that in a moment). The former SAS captain has the blinkers on for his nemesis Makarov and whoever his boss may be. It’s fair to say that the Russian terrorist is not close to being the well-developed threat from the original Modern Warfare 2, which feels like a wasted opportunity to revive a famous villain. In his place steps Mads Mikkelsen’s The Archer.
For the most part, Price’s chapters of the story play like a Bond movie, packed full of parkour escapes, car chases, and stealthy infiltrations. Mikkelsen’s casting only reinforces this feeling, and while he’s classically unsettling in his performance, his character was never given quite enough screen time for me to grow a connection with him. As such, while the missions that make up Price’s side of the story are fun, it comes across as the weaker half. Infinity Ward clearly wants Price to be the strongest emotional bond to the player and for his personal vendettas to feel like our own, but, in truth, many more of the missions are dedicated to the Korean conflict. Incidentally, this is also where I found a lot more of the engaging storytelling to be found.
MW4’s 16 missions took me around the world as well as back and forth in time. The Korean invasion takes place in the “present day” as I followed a squad of soldiers from the moment war is sparked to its conclusion, while we switch back to Price every now and then as he hunts for whoever is behind the plot in the preceding week. These time shifts also allow for a clever mixture between traditional military missions and behind-enemy-lines ingenuity. For example, an early level has you fistfighting and gun-fu-ing your way through a New York nightclub as Price puts on his best John Wick impression. The next, you’ll be holding off paratroopers on the streets of Seoul armed with a mortar. While the Korean sections are generally louder and more traditional boots-on-the-ground “Call of Duty” in their approach, it came somewhat as a surprise to me that it managed to build such a strong connection to its playable character.
There’s an endearing nature to Young Mazino's Park Hyun Jun. Just as Farah did in 2019’s reboot, he gives an emotional anchor to the story that offsets the gruff military types nicely. The same can be said for his whole squad, a mixture of Korean and US soldiers who maintain a well-balanced mixture of levity and seriousness. Their bonds rooted me in its events well, and I actually cared what happened to them by the end. In general, I found the Korean side of things much more compelling and ended up caring about the likes of Park, his friend Jae, and their northern counterpart, Ko, a lot more. While Mikkelsen’s The Archer can come across as a moustache-twirling, nuclear weapon-wielding caricature at times, MW4 actually does a good job of bringing depth to the North Korean threat instead of painting each and every one of its leaders and people following their orders in one shade of evil.
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