Call of Duty Modern Warfare 4 (2026) Review The Campaign Saves the Day

Call of Duty's single player track record has been a massive roller coaster over the last few years. While the 2019 Modern Warfare reboot kicked things off with a bang, recent entries like Modern Warfare 3 and the disastrous Black Ops 7 left story focused fans feeling entirely burned. The narratives were messy, the missions felt like recycled multiplayer assets, and the magic just wasn't there.

So, going into Modern Warfare 4 pitched as the grand finale of this rebooted timeline expectations were firmly on the floor. Yet, in a massive surprise, the development team actually pulled it off. This year's offering delivers what might just be the best CoD campaign in a decade, even if the traditional multiplayer suite struggles to keep up.

The single player mode clocks in at a meaty 6 to 11 hours depending on your difficulty setting, which is a breath of fresh air compared to the usual 4 hour sprint. The story splits your time between two distinct perspectives that eventually tie together.

The most shocking triumph here is the introduction of a joint American Korean unit known as Mayhem 1. You play heavily as a rookie named Park, caught in the middle of a sudden, massive North Korean invasion. CoD usually struggles to make you care about anyone who isn't wearing a skull mask, but the writing for this squad is genuinely excellent. Entire sections of the game are spoken entirely in Korean with English subtitles, giving the conflict an authentic, grounded feel. These large scale combat scenarios evoke memories of the classic World War II CoD games pushing frontlines, falling back, taking out armor but with a slick modern twist.

On the flip side, you have Captain Price going completely off the grid. He's reckless, teaming up with cartels, and hunting a new villain called The Archer, played brilliantly by Mads Mikkelsen. Mikkelsen brings a quiet menace to the role, even if the script leaves him a bit underutilized. Price's side of the plot is definitely the messier half it spends a lot of time trying to retcon and clean up the convoluted lore from previous games but the actual missions are a blast, capped off with a highly anticipated showdown involving Ghost.

Combat features a few new wrinkles. The biggest addition is a dedicated hand to hand parry system. Blocking right before an enemy strikes opens them up for a brutal counterattack. It's a simple addition, but the first person animations make it incredibly satisfying.

Armor management is also handled much smarter than in MW3. Rather than constantly showering you in Warzone plates, the game varies the scarcity. Some missions strip you of armor entirely, forcing you to play carefully, while others dole it out sparingly as a reward.

Then there’s Stranded, a massive open area mission that takes place about two thirds of the way into the story. Historically, CoD's attempts at open world missions feel incredibly lazy. This time, they committed to the bit. You drop in with nothing and have to scavenge a large map for night vision goggles and heavier firepower to tackle 11 enemy bases. While it runs a little long, it feels deliberately designed rather than slapped together.

Running on the PC, the game is stunning. The lighting and environmental detail are top tier. There are a few minor visual gripes hitting enemies sometimes triggers comically large blood effects, and the transition between pre rendered CGI cutscenes and in engine gameplay can be visually jarring. But overall, it runs like butter.

Surprisingly, this game also hit the Nintendo Switch 2 with complete feature parity. Playing a massive shooter like this on a handheld obviously comes with compromises muddy textures, lower resolution, and frame rate dips but it is entirely playable and an impressive technical feat (I played the game a little bit on the Switch 2, but I didn't finish it there. I just tested it.).

If you enjoy extraction shooters, the overhauled DMZ mode is a major win. Set in the fallout of the campaign's Korean conflict, you're scavenging the ruins of Hajin City for a hidden weapons stockpile while fending off North Korean patrols and rival players.

The new pre match headquarters hub is a fantastic addition, letting you craft gear, test weapons on a firing range, and prep your loadout before dropping in. The mission structure is much better this time around, offering multi step objectives that give you a real reason to explore.

The PvP element adds much needed tension, though you will undoubtedly run into rats players who just camp the extraction choppers to steal your hard earned loot. It's frustrating, especially since losing an operator means having to pay a hefty credit fee to rescue them, which gets wildly expensive at higher levels. Another strange omission is the lack of proximity chat, which feels like a massive missed opportunity for a mode built around player encounters.

Unfortunately, traditional 6v6 PvP multiplayer drops the ball. The actual gunplay is phenomenal. Infinity Ward knows how to make weapons sound and feel punchy, and the decision to slow down the time to kill (borrowing a page from Treyarch's playbook) means actual gunfights require tracking and skill rather than just who shoots first.

But everything surrounding that gunplay is frustrating. The launch roster of 12 maps is completely forgettable. None of them stand out, and terrible spawn logic makes a few of them actively miserable to play.

Matchmaking is incredibly strict, meaning every single lobby feels like the grand finals of a cash tournament. Movement has been smoothed out, and shifting Tactical Sprint to a perk was a smart balancing move, but base aim down sight and strafe speeds feel bizarrely sluggish.

the camo grind is ruining objective modes again. Because the game requires ridiculous tasks like prone or mounted kills, half your team will ignore the objective to lay on the floor in a random hallway. Add in a stale Gunsmith system we've been using since 2019, and the multiplayer just feels exhausting.