Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 Review (PS5)

Duty is still calling

Version Reviewed: PS5 Pro / European

By this point, Call of Duty fans are familiar with the fluctuating quality of the FPS giant’s yearly release schedule: it’s basically a constant cycle of proclaiming the series is dead, then confidently stating we’re so back.

Modern Warfare 4, thankfully, lands in the latter. The conclusion to the rebooted Modern Warfare series, which started back in 2019, is exactly the confident high-budget blockbuster experience that I’m personally looking for with the series.

That being said, it isn’t a complete slam dunk, with some peaks and troughs along the three pillars of its experience.

Let’s start with the campaign, which is a riotous affair spanning the globe and stuffed to the rafters with thrilling action set pieces. You’re jumping perspectives from mission to mission, ranging from South Korean soldiers to the beloved Captain Price, and even the leader of North Korea.

It’s a completely bonkers campaign where, on one hand, you have North Korea’s invasion of South Korea, and on the other, you have a MacGuffin-chasing storyline with Price and the remnants of Task Force 141.

I really enjoyed the pacing of the campaign, where it never stays in one place for too long, and really is a spectacle of best-in-class visuals and sound design. It’s complemented by some insanely well-produced CGI cutscenes — standard practice for CoD these days, but impressive nonetheless.

It feels like a high-budget blockbuster, which it rightly should, and I was regularly taken aback by some awesome set pieces. A club shootout straight out of John Wick was a personal highlight for me.

The campaign doesn’t get it all right, though, as at a certain point it pumps the brakes to do what can only be described as a tutorial section for its DMZ mode (more on that later). It was in stark contrast to the highly focused linear nature of most other levels in the campaign, and it killed the pacing a little.

Ultimately, though, I had a great time with the campaign. It’s loud, it’s stupid, but it is a lot of fun.

Then comes the multiplayer, which has long been the cornerstone of the Call of Duty experience. Here, though, I couldn’t help but feel let down by it all.

Modern Warfare 4 returns to a speedy, albeit grounded movement system, which is an improvement over the omnimovement of the last two Black Ops entries. Guns feel weighty, the time-to-kill is fast but not instant, and traversal is quick yet tactile.

I'd be lying if I said I didn’t have some fun revisiting modes like Domination and Gun Game (the latter is a particular favourite of mine). I even thought the new Gunfight mode was cool as it mashes together different aspects of maps to create a varied arena in each round.

It’s easy to jump into a quick match and almost turn your brain off. Matches are never much longer than five minutes, and respawns after death are instant. Y’know, Call of Duty stuff.

But that’s sort of the issue for me: the game does nothing to really evolve the multiplayer offering; even the maps are pretty cookie-cutter.

Maybe that’s contradictory of me to say considering I just complained about omnimovement in previous entries, which was Treyarch ultimately trying to do something different. But I can’t help but feel like I’m playing the same variant of the multiplayer that’s been kicking around since Modern Warfare launched in 2019.

Maybe that’s exactly what you’re looking for, and in that case, sure, multiplayer has the usual depths expected of the series. You can grind XP all day long, with weapon attachments to be unlocked to discover the meta, and prestige ranks so you’re constantly levelling up – the levelling screen is so over-the-top to ensure maximum dopamine.

Where Modern Warfare 4 really gets interesting for me is with its new iteration of DMZ — an extraction mode that first debuted in 2022’s Modern Warfare 2. This is described as a “living combat sandbox”, and I was surprised by how much depth this mode has.

Squads of three head out on expeditions in a large map made up of points of interest. By either picking up quests on the run or going in with a selected story mission, you will explore buildings, collect materials, complete quests, and survive against enemy AI and real players.

This is a much slower-paced and tactical experience as opposed to the main multiplayer offering. Certain areas come with heavier resistance, there are roaming bosses, and you’ll need to keep an eye on your supplies like ammunition, healing, and armour plating. My team underestimated the enemy AI on more than a few occasions.

Some of the missions are also much more linearly designed than I expected. Some require you to hack into a bunch of computers to unlock a safe; others task you with retrieving an official from his hospital bed and rolling him out to safety.

There are bosses and tough sections of these missions that reminded me more of Destiny than ARC Raiders or Marathon.

I often found that I was really immersed in this mode, as my mates and I cleared out an area, low on supplies, eagerly trying to make it to the extraction, which stood a few hundred metres away. And, of course, to add to the tension, there is always the potential of running into other players.

While this did happen on a number of occasions and matches are home to upwards of 20 squads, I didn’t find the PvP prospects of this mode all that strong.

I personally liked that the only telling factor between AI and real players was movement, so it meant that you’re always on edge. However, it did mean on a few occasions I was completely blindsided by real players after spending 20 minutes on a mission with a backpack full of gear.

If you do manage to extract with said gear, you’ll head back to the Forward Operating Base, which is sort of like the Headquarters from Call of Duty: WWII. Here you’ll accept missions, manage your loadout, buy and customise weapons, and level up your character.

You can have three characters, each with their own skill trees, and these are a lot more dense than I expected, especially since a character can be lost if you fail to extract – although you can just buy them back for increasing fees.

With upgrades to be made to your base, weapon customisation to unlock, and currency and resources to collect when out on a patrol, DMZ is teetering on the brink of being too big a game mode to be locked within a Call of Duty game. It’s quite impressive.

Does it have the same fun factor as some other extraction shooters, though? For me, not really. I like the mission structure and the depth of upgrades and customisation, but it also doesn’t feel like it does one thing really well and lacks the tension that some others in the genre have.

DMZ is sort of an amalgamation of various games within the extraction and looter shooter genre, including even the other big Call of Duty mode, Warzone. It's not this hardcore immersive mode, but more a casual extraction experience, which I reckon many players will enjoy.

I played all three modes across both PS5 and PS5 Pro, and as you would expect, Modern Warfare 4 is phenomenally optimised. Running at a rock-solid 60 frames per second on both consoles with impeccable visuals, this game is a technical delight.

It also has some brilliant DualSense implementation, with haptic rumbles being particularly noticeable and well-tuned during that campaign. It’s very immersive.

Conclusion

Modern Warfare 4 isn’t perfect, but it's still a fairly cohesive Call of Duty package. Multiplayer is just more multiplayer, which did let me down, but it’s bolstered by a thoroughly entertaining campaign and a surprisingly deep extraction offering with DMZ. While it may be another round in the Call of Duty cycle and history may repeat itself, for now, we’re so back.