Quadrilogies exist in great numbers across many bodies of work, but you think of them less often than a trilogy or pentalogy. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 is the conclusion of the new Modern Warfare series that reimagines the late aughts series of Call of Duty games that redefined this franchise and the era. Each of the game’s modes, from its campaign to DMZ to multiplayer are incredibly well-crafted and everything feels exciting again in a way that it simply hasn’t for years now. While the last game really felt hastily put together, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 feels like an apology tour from Infinity Ward across all three of its modes, and well: apology accepted.
CAMPAIGN
The campaigns in this new series don’t have a one-to-one correlation to their previous counterparts. Understanding that 2019’s Modern Warfare is a prequel game that has no comparison, 2022’s Modern Warfare II mostly resembles the events of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (2007), and 2023’s Modern Warfare III ties to the events of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (2009). This year’s Modern Warfare 4 offers a never-before-seen numbered entry that has some similarities and ties to the events of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 (2011) – but redresses itself in a whole new way to rescue itself from the story and gameplay hole it was dug into in the last game. You see, Modern Warfare III wasn’t developed by Infinity Ward, and it showed. So, Infinity Ward really locked in this time to course correct to really show up in this finale, and they knocked it out of the park.
A recap video is available to catch you up quick, whether you’ve been playing the games up until this point, or not. The Modern Warfare series of games are bombastic, military thrillers, and this is no exception. From the opening mission, the new characters you’re introduced to are immediately engaging and life-like, with many Korean-American actors helping to fill the roles of the campaign’s Korea-centered war for power such as Lanny Joon as Ko, Jae Kim as So Jae-Woo to name a few. You’re patrolling Haijin, a fictional city that is split between both North and South Korea. You stop at a convenience store with the squad to stock up on food, and witness an EMP blast that kicks off North Korea’s imposing invasion of South Korea. This casting provides excellent authenticity, contrasting well against U.S. Marines like Lt. West (Luke Tennie), who really round out the cast. This is another fantastic globe-trotting adventure with characters that actually have depth.
Captain Price is now a wanted man after witnessing Soap’s death and then assassinating General Shepard at the end of Modern Warfare III. The core four are now three, and without saying who’s who, it feels very much Iron Man vs Captain America from “Captain America: Civil War” with your favorites against one another. This tension runs in tandem with the ongoing invasion and reprisal of the South Korean army and U.S. Marines who are stationed there. Criminally, Farrah (my absolute favorite character in the series) doesn’t have a role here and is sorely missed. Mads Mikkelsen has been a part of the marketing for this game, and serves as the big bad here. But I gotta say his inclusion so late into this series makes his presence less impactful. We spend a lot of time with Tiger-1, and so Task Force 141 takes a backseat and their finality is rushed, but ultimately provides closure. There’s some great character development all throughout the campaign, and the game does well to tie up loose ends.
CAMPAIGN (cont’d)
While normally talking about difficulty settings in a Call of Duty game is not needed, this year is different in calling attention to the fact that aside from the default selection of: Recruit, Regular, Veteran, and Hardened, two new levels are present here. Realism is unlocked after beating the campaign on any difficulty. Finally you have YOLO, which is only unlocked after completing the campaign on Realism. Now while it can be understood that Realism will teach you to be careful, YOLO difficulty is a one-life mode where killing a civilian, dying to a chained explosion, or accidental friendly fire will really humble you as it restarts your campaign progress. These new challenging difficulty modes offer more incentive to stick with the campaign longer than you might’ve in years past.
The missions themselves feature some of the strongest set pieces and missions to ever exist. While you can distill and reduce all missions in every Call of Duty as killing everything, escorting someone, defending a position, and breaching rooms, it’s much more than that. From car chases to running along rooftops to clearing rooms with hybrid NVG and thermal vision, every mission hits. Most of the game’s levels are linear in structure, but there is one level in particular that is open-ended, and in the vein of Modern Warfare III but much more thoughtful and interesting. “Stranded” has you trapped behind enemy lines, fighting to disrupt North Korea’s occupation and communication abilities. You can play the mission one of two ways: the first is as close to linear as possible, where you just fast-travel to each of the locations to complete the objective. Or, you can be dropped into the zone to sneak, kill, and scavenge for parts that will unlock weapons, parts, and ghillie suits to use during these missions with nearly complete freedom. You’re given a backpack to hold items as you work your way through it. Collectibles are largely non-existent here, with notes occupying most of the game, and this open-ended mission being the exception to scavenge these parts and yellow supply crates.
…YOLO difficulty is a one-life mode where killing a civilian, dying to a chained explosion, or accidental friendly fire will really humble you…
The campaign just fires on all cylinders to really be memorable. While things seemingly put the world in good hands and end in a safe place, this is how DMZ is introduced to send you into the next mode (that was unlocked second in the three-phase rollout)…
DMZ
The De-Militarized Zone, or DMZ for short is Call of Duty‘s response to the extraction shooter. Many might remember that DMZ debuted once before as a Beta after the launch of Modern Warfare II back in 2022. However, it never left Beta and was essentially abandoned and never revisited – until now. Serving as the continuation to the campaign, DMZ serves in a literal De-Militarized Zone that places you in the city of Haijin that sits between North and South Korea. After playing a majority of this, this is something that’s clearly no longer a beta and feels finished and fully featured.
There’s a lot new to DMZ if you played the Beta in 2022. The biggest and most necessary improvement is that there’s meta-progression this time. Before there were missions and tasks to complete, but there was no overall economy or anything you were actually working towards – so it all felt fruitless. However, Infinity Ward has now built out a hub, similar to Escape from Tarkov‘s hideout. This hub area contains a 3D printer, a gunsmith to build custom guns, a vendor for rotating in-game purchases, your operators, traits per operator, and even a range for testing your guns. Parachutes are not guaranteed, you now need to purchase or acquire them to use once you’ve deployed into the DMZ. Whether you’ve jumped off a building without said parachute, or get killed by some other means, you can self-revive without an actual self-revive item, but it comes at the cost of some health and can only be done once per raid. There are now story missions that are more involved, require coordination with your squad, and are even repeatable. While I don’t find the story missions to be all that memorable, the six that are there now offer great rewards and offer distinct gameplay that the dynamic operations that roll out in other deployments do not. Infinity Ward really went all-in on DMZ this time around, and that work is paying off.
The core gameplay loop is to bring in gear to fight with, complete missions, maybe fight other players, and then get out alive – an extraction shooter. Two modes of play can be found here: deploying to the DMZ for story missions or dynamic missions. The story missions still place you into a PvPvE raid with other players, but the objectives you have to complete are focused only on story and nothing else. The dynamic missions randomly place you into the zone and give you a rotating list of objectives to complete until you are ready to extract. You can play solo or in trios, as there’s no dedicated solos mode, though you can opt out of matchmaking to form a trio. A lot of the rules of old DMZ exist: teammates can be downed, or even fully killed, and still be revived. With bosses to hunt, helicopters to fight, SAM sites to takeover for air cover – it’s all refined. This is a mode full of lessons learnt that are paying dividends.
DMZ (cont’d)
Once you have boots on the ground, there’s a timer ticking down until a randomly placed pocket of radiation begins to spread outward. Once that soft timer expires, you still have time to seek an extraction. After that hard timer expires, there will be one final extract to get out at. If you miss all of them, then your operator will die, and you’ll lose all loot you both brought in, and acquired during that raid. Extraction is a helicopter that must be called in, wait for it to arrive, then board and wait for it to take off again. During all of this, NPCs or other players can arrive to either contest or try to team up to try to get out together. It’s very stressful and chaotic, and you may not survive it, but that’s the risk-reward element. Alternatively, the more expensive option is to purchase a Fulton device that will let you and your squad extract anywhere you call it.
While deployed into the DMZ, there’s a heat meter that builds up over time as you kill more hostiles, which makes you more attractive to the AI, and ultimately makes completing objectives harder. While this system wasn’t exactly the same, this was unfortunately the same problem in the original DMZ, as you’re just getting swarmed by enemies constantly. It’s like Infinity Ward was afraid of downtime, or this mode being perceived as boring or too quiet. Comparing it to something like Escape from Tarkov or even Marathon, you kill under 20 NPCs in each raid. Here, it’s very likely you’ll have a tally of 50 or more hostiles killed, it’s outrageous. This gets exhausting because you’re constantly running out of plates and ammo. And this is largely my only complaint of this mode. It’s not perfect, but it is a very well-done extraction shooter and mode that players will essentially ‘get for free’.
Operators will level up based on the things you’ve done in a raid, such as completing objectives, killing other operators, and more. There’s a big skill tree to invest in various skills and buffs that will cater to your playstyle. You can maintain three separate operators that focus on different areas of expertise. If one operator dies, you can pay a fee to revive them for use, but that gets more expensive with each successive purchase. Alternatively, you can use another operator to build up cash to save your previous, since operators share money, stash, story/mission progress, but not traits.
MULTIPLAYER
The PvP mode isn’t full of too many surprises, but what’s here is the strongest showing in years. You have your share of modes between core and hardcore playlists. There’s Team Deathmatch, Free-For-All, Domination, Search & Destroy, Hardpoint, Hijack, Gunfight, and even the large-scale Ground War as returning modes. Ground War does a great job at hiding the kills each player is getting, which in turn creates a focus on playing the objective rather than chasing a Kill/Death Ratio. New to Modern Warfare 4 is Inflation where teams fight to collect the most money, Frontline which removes dynamic spawns and every player spawns at their base with protection for a period of time, and Collateral which is essentially Counter-Strike in every way it would have to be. Perhaps the game’s biggest addition is Kill Block, which places you into a training facility that configures itself each round with three random pieces to construct the level you’ll be playing in. A variant of this is Kill Block – Gunfight which takes the 2v2 intense gunfights, expands it to 10v10 for a big team esports feel as this elimination mode requires more teamwork and coordination to see it through, and then combines that with the modular redefinition of the maps per round, make it a stand out.
There’s lots of visual and quality of life improvements. First of all, smoke now has volumetric properties and is physically present. This means that if you shoot through smoke, it can create pockets to see through, very much how Counter-Strike 2 implemented it. It not only creates cover, but tactical opportunities especially for round-based modes like Search & Destroy and Collateral. I really love the augmented reality placement of the logos that introduce each map, as every one is different and fits well within the game. While this isn’t new, it’s a reminder that watching a kill cam is no longer a humiliation tactic by the developers: if you want what they have, there’s a button to copy their build so you can use their loadout against them the next time you face-off with them. It’s just so clever, you won’t know how you did without it.
