Modern Warfare 4 Is Legitimately a Top-5 Call of Duty Campaign

When it comes to single-player campaigns, Infinity Ward has long been the Call of Duty studio players trust most. Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare and Modern Warfare 2 remain the high-water marks of the franchise, and the 2019 reboot, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, started the new era on firm footing. Modern Warfare 4 is a little short on playtime, but it still belongs among the very best the series has produced.

Two stories unfold side by side in Modern Warfare 4. The first follows Sierra-1, a unit of South Korean and American soldiers who struggle to repel a North Korean invasion. Across a handful of missions, you fight through the streets of the fictional Hajin City, cross a frozen North Korean wasteland, and battle along trenches in a desperate bid to stop a nuclear reactor from detonating.

The second thread is the more familiar Modern Warfare narrative. You step into the boots of the legendary Captain John Price, a fugitive after killing the treacherous General Shepherd at the end of Modern Warfare 3. He is chasing the Russian defense minister, known only as the Archer (Mads Mikkelsen), and the trail takes Price and his unlikely cartel allies through New York, Paris, Mumbai and, finally, North Korea.

As that summary suggests, Modern Warfare 4 reads like it was lifted straight from the news cycle. It isn’t hard to imagine North Korea, backed by Russia, one day moving against its southern neighbor. That plausibility is where the game is strongest, and it hits hardest when you’re embedded in a squad that just wants to survive and takes the war as it comes. Park Hyun-Jun, the soldier you mostly control, and the rest of Sierra-1 live a very different war from Price and Ghost, who are tangled up in the politics and scheming behind the conflict.

MW4 is one of the good types of COD campaigns

Call of Duty campaigns tend to fall into one of two camps: those with memorable moments that linger long after the credits, and those so forgettable you question why you bothered. Last year’s Black Ops 7 firmly belonged to the second group, with its incoherent hallucination sequences and absurd, over-the-top boss fights. It barely felt like a Call of Duty game at all.

Modern Warfare 4 lands in the first camp. From the moment an EMP strikes Hajin City in the opening mission, forcing you to fight in the dark before you pick paratroopers out of the sky from inside a sports stadium, you can tell the ride will be a wild one. Nearly every mission has a standout moment that makes you say, “holy shit, now that was cool.”

The game wears its influences proudly, and to great effect. In one of the best missions, Captain Price turns into John Wick as he tracks down Vladimir Makarov, the longtime Modern Warfare antagonist, through a New York nightclub. When Sierra-1 fights to retake Hajin City, the landing evokes the D-Day opening of Saving Private Ryan: allied troops pour out of naval vehicles and endure a crushing barrage while pushing toward the shore.

Infinity Ward has also sharpened its melee combat and stealth this time around. Several missions leave you badly outnumbered and outgunned, so you can either creep past the heavily armed guards hunting for you or take them out from behind. The tension and atmosphere in these levels are intense, almost like a horror game. Slinking through prison corridors gave me serious Outlast vibes.

MW4 dabbles in open-world frameworks

Then comes “Stranded,” where Modern Warfare 4 swaps its tightly crafted, linear rollercoaster for an open-world shooter that plays like a miniature Far Cry. There are enemy-filled outposts to clear, supply crates scattered across the map, vehicles to commandeer, and patrols to dodge. You also have a home base to return supplies to, where you can craft extra weapons and gear. (This continues a trend that began with the “open combat missions” of Modern Warfare 3 and improved with the excellent “Hunting Season” mission in Black Ops 6, before Black Ops 7 squandered that progress with its dreadful Avalon-set levels.)

On its own, “Stranded” is perfectly enjoyable. There are secrets to uncover, multiple ways to approach each point of interest, and three main objectives to finish. But after a campaign that hits relentlessly hard, jumping from one jaw-dropping set piece to the next, a slower-paced sandbox deflates the momentum.

You can skip the open-world portion entirely and fast-travel straight to the three main objectives, though doing so leaves you with a much thinner loadout, since you won’t have gathered any supplies. That makes each mandatory task harder. You won’t have night vision for a trek into an old underground bunker, for instance, or a suppressed weapon for a stealth mission atop a snowy mountain. Skipping the exploration also cuts quite a few hours from an already brisk runtime.

Modern Warfare 4 does have its share of bugs. Some were hilarious. While destroying a SAM site, one of the three main objectives in “Stranded,” I used a recon drone to scout enemies. My two squadmates mistook the drone for me and began racing around the island after it instead of staying in cover where my soldier actually was.

Other problems amount to general jankiness: grenades that don’t affect enemies caught mid-animation, deployable bomb drones that whirl wildly through the air the instant they’re launched, and a rooftop section that looked solid but let me fall straight through. Once, I saved and quit, then returned to find I couldn’t interact with anything except the pause menu. The only fix was restarting the entire mission.

Despite all this praise, and let me be clear that Modern Warfare 4 is an excellent Call of Duty campaign and easily a top-five entry of all time, the credits arrive abruptly. Maybe I expected more than eight hours to sink my teeth into, or maybe I was enjoying myself too much to want it to end, but when the game wrapped up, I wasn’t quite satisfied.

Sierra-1’s story is neatly resolved, but Captain Price and company clearly have unfinished business, presumably to be settled in Modern Warfare 5. The two storylines also never really converge, probably because Price’s missions all take place a few days before the South Korean thread, almost like flashbacks. I’m left with some narrative questions, but judged on everything else it offers, Modern Warfare 4’s campaign is one for the history books.

Source: Polygon