Modern Warfare 4 is the final bit of evidence, if we ever even needed it, that Infinity Ward is the best thing that’s ever happened to Call of Duty

It’s easy to dislike Call of Duty. Aside from the annual cycle of development, marketing, and controversy that has defined the series identity for the past 22 years, the series has become an integral part of how video games prop up the military-industrial complex. Whilst some of the stories – especially 2025’s Black Ops 7 – have deteriorated into the realms of science-fiction absurdity, many of the narratives you’ll find in the Modern Warfare splinter of the series are more grounded in reality. When you’re playing as semi-fictional UK and US troopers, taking part in illegal operations in foreign territory, wantonly executing people over differences in ideology, Call of Duty can feel gross: paper-thin propaganda designed to glorify war and reinforce lines between ‘them’ and ‘us’.

But Modern Warfare 4 shies away from this. A little. The bar is low, granted, but there is a slightly more humanitarian slant to the game this year – aping 2009’s No Russian, there are a few missions that plant you into the shoes of the ‘enemy’, and ask you to make moral choices that, I won’t lie, I was rather shocked to see manifest in a CoD game. In 2019, developer Infinity Ward asked what would happen if there was a terrorist attack on the streets of London. In 2022, the studio ponders what happens when a co-ordinated international military operation goes awry on a Mexican oil rig. In 2023, we go to Lower Manhattan as the Russian army stages an attack on the New York Stock Exchange. So, in moving our lens and making us play as a North Korean militiaman, I was genuinely surprised to learn that – if you refuse your orders – you are summarily shot, leaving the rest of the mission to play out in front of your lifeless corpse. There is no ‘game over’ state for not complying: the horrors carried out by the ruthless regime carry on even in the face of your dereliction of duty. It might be using baby speak, by literary standards, but here I think Call of Duty is trying to make a point.

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And it doesn’t fall on ears unwilling to listen, either. Just this week, a South Korean politician urged the country’s president to play Modern Warfare 4, so striking is its depiction of a theorised North Korean assault on the nation (which makes the dev’s inclusion of real disaster footage an even more regrettable gaffe. Whilst it’s important to remember that a country’s population is not its leadership, the news has been full of North Korean threats and bluster for many years now. And in Modern Warfare 4, Infinity Ward wanted to tell a story “ripped from the headlines”. The result is a slightly more ‘reactive’ setup, where a militarised nation responds to an invasion rather than instigates one, which in turn gives a sense of urgency and speculation that is more agreeable than, say, another shadowy skirmish in the Middle East, or an insurgency into some proxy state secretly controlled by Russia (don’t hold your breath).

As we flip back and forth between ex-SAS hard bastard, John Price (who we’ve been following since 2007) and a ragtag bunch of conscribed South Korean soldiers and US Marine allies that find themselves in the middle of a brutal, casualty-heavy North Korean invasion, we get to see Call of Duty campaign design at its finest. There’s a rousing John Wick-inspired shootout in a club that evolves into a parkour dash across Manhattan rooftops. There’s a cinematic and genuinely impressive shooting gallery-like encounter in a trainyard that evokes classic arcade lightgun design. There’s an expansive open world area that toys with stealth and sniping, there’s a car chase through the streets of Paris, and there’s a beachhead assault that ties it all together nicely.

Beyond even those, the standout mission is Stranded, which sees the South Korean team deep in enemy territory, fighting for their lives. This introduces crafting for a few missions – something that could feel tacked-on and rote, but is actually deployed like a lever by Infinity Ward to wedge open just how important each of the various tools at your disposal are. Want a thermal scope? Then you’re going to prioritise that over more munitions. Want explosives? Then your basic arms will suffer. It serves to emphasise just how well every aspect of Modern Warfare’s toolkit complements every other piece, resulting in this rich, deep, interlocking marvel that makes older Call of Duty games look rudimentary in comparison.

This is complemented by setpieces like Traffic, where you engage on a breakneck chase through the streets of Paris in a romp sure to cost the Parisian treasury millions in collateral damage. Here, you get to see the breadth and depth of the enemy AI that Infinity Ward has crafted – which no doubt went hand-in-hand with the new DMZ mode, more on that later – as we witness just how complex the studio’s engine can get: destruction, cover mechanics, and so many different kinds of visual effect all rush on-screen at once. It’s overwhelming, it’s intimidating, it’s electrifying. It’s peak Call of Duty.

Between these standout missions, there are moments where you’re asked to consider what it’s like for the pawns on the board – the other soldiers, the unnamed, those whose strings are being pulled by forces they don’t understand. It’s a bit Fisher-Price, a bit A-Level, a ‘War is Bad’ pin badge worn on a jacket from an Army Surplus store, but hey: I’d rather this than a completely unobserved ‘ooh-rah!’ story about the US army coming to the rescue again.

The downside of the campaign comes more from its setup and pacing than its content, then. Price’s story wraps up without applause, really – I won’t ruin the specifics here, but his actions and what he does to quash the machinations of a very oddly-implemented Mads Mikkelsen are sort of left in the dark to rot, as the desperate resistance of our South Korean recruits takes the spotlight. Again, I think Call of Duty might be trying to say something here: that the morally ambiguous and collateral damage-accumulating actions of one desperate operative that actually saved the world don’t get to breathe in the daylight; instead, the ‘courageous’ defense of privates on the frontline should be lauded. War is messy, no-one is in the right, everyone loses except for the multinationals putting the hardware in the hands of the humans. Is that what I’m supposed to come out of this thinking?

Whatever the emotional impact is, you can’t argue with the physical one: this is a tight, eight-hour campaign with moments up there with Modern Warfare’s best. It stops before it ever risks getting overlong, it’s got plenty of new ideas to throw at you and – played on the hardest mode – it’s a tight puzzle box of encounter design that’s just as obsessed with detail as it is with Michael Bay-esque spectacle. It’s a far cry from whatever the hell was going on in Black Ops 7 last year.

Reeling from the fact I think I nearly felt something during a Call of Duty campaign, I needed to boot up the multiplayer – a mode which has by now been refined into its near-perfect form, an ultra-fast, turbo-injected mosh pit of quick scopes, slide cancels, and kill corridors. Map design is great – of course it is, it’s Infinity Ward – and the gunplay is good as it ever has been in the Modern Warfare games. Since 2019, when Infinity Ward went to great expense to rebuild its engine, the Call of Duty experience has been luxurious. The sound design alone is worthy of applause, every clack of a bolt-action lever, every shell casing falling to the floor, every fizz of thermite boring through your cover… it’s immediately identifiable and extremely important. To play Modern Warfare 4 without a decent set of headphones or a good surround sound setup is to intentionally handicap yourself.

There are a few qualms, as ever: some respawn mechanics are vexing (especially on quicker, gnarlier maps – this week’s addition of Shipment is a hilariously bad example of this), and some of the weapon balancing has yet to be totally calmed down, in part owing to a last-minute change to weapon damage that extends the time-to-kill beyond Infinity Ward’s usual fare. Whilst this means there’s a bit of chaos for early adopters like myself, it actually speaks to the level of nuance Infinity Ward has to play with: I’d love to see the backend of Modern Warfare 4, with all its knobs and dials, seeing how the studio tweaks and balances guns to keep up with what players are doing. The slightly lower time-to-kill is actually a fascinating experiment in figuring out what Modern Warfare is beyond its selection of guns – and I’d happily take a bit of weird balancing a deeper, more intricate damage system.

Speaking of, the customisation system also works nicely here. With the right attachments, some guns are elevated from ‘useful’ to ‘essential’. The ISO Nightshade SMG seems a bit busted right now, and I keep getting chewed up by suspiciously powerful one-two taps of the Type 73 LMG. I’m a born sharpshooter, and the Oris 8.6 is an early favourite for popping heads across the map, especially dressed up with a 2.1x scope with thermal imagine. The overall economy of guns and range-versus-power feels a bit off as it stands – and is quite literally being addressed as I type – but I’m playing multiplayer in launch week, so there’s always going to be some friction.

Then there’s Kill Block: an experimental and dynamic rotating multiplayer map and mode concept. It’s absurd in its pitch: by using a selection of ‘slabs’, it can form 500+ unique combinations of map, meaning no match plays out quite like the last. Maps in Call of Duty are (in)famously defined by their sight lines; if you stand here, you can shoot someone there. If you camp this corner, you’ll rack up kills. If you snipe on this lane, you’ll collect greenhorn scalps a-plenty. Kill Block turns all that on its head, forcing players to be more reactive, and engage more with the systems on offer in Modern Warfare 4, rather than rely on instincts baked in from two-plus decades of CoD. With the promise of more modular elements to come – from fan-favourite maps like Crash, for instance – I can see this mode and setup becoming yet another staple in the ever-expanding Call of Duty canon. This is how you breathe life into the more competitive-focused modes that often fail to shine alongside respawn-focused experiences like Team Deathmatch.

I have to praise the complexity and wizardry Infinity Ward has displayed with how the guns handle; each attachment is meaningful, most guns feel unique, and the feedback you get from firing any armament is exquisite. It has all the production value of a dedicated military sim, but in action it’s readable and almost arcade-like in its simplicity. No one does it like Infinity Ward, and even though this feels like an iteration on the last three Modern Warfare games, I won’t knock the developers down for staying in their lane and developing a formula that works.

And that brings us to DMZ. Initially, I was cynical. ‘This is Call of Duty chasing the bag’, I thought. ‘This is trend-chasing gone awry’. But Infinity Ward is not afraid of change, and I shouldn’t be either. The extraction shooter trend shows no signs of abating, and with even Call of Duty managing to make it work within the specific arcade-cum-sim setup of its engine, I need to accept that. I don’t think it’s a stretch to say DMZ could be a standalone game – packed with enough to go toe-to-toe with the likes of Marathon or Arc Raiders.

The Hajin city map, smartly repurposed from the campaign, is expansive and packed with nuance, and the tasks you’re given within the city limits are quick and painless – more than I can say of Marathon. You can easily and somewhat permanently get cash that persists even if you die, you can sacrifice max health to ‘revive’ from a down-but-not-out state, and you get XP for doing just about anything. The result is an extraction shooter experience that feels more casual and agreeable to the average FPS enjoyer; this isn’t a ‘lifestyle game’ like other extraction shooters. Even if it does have its own pseudo-stealth system, for some reason.

In many ways, DMZ emulates what Activision did with Warzone: a wrangling of a complicated formula that makes sense within the uber-specific Call of Duty ecosystem. It’s a great interpretation of the PvPvE formula that’s been slowly but surely evolving over the past decade or so, and I think this is where DMZ finds its niche: Arc Raiders has become more about the PvE side of things (at least in my experience) and Marathon and Tarkov go hard on the PvP. DMZ somehow treads the line between both and, as time goes on and Infinity Ward monitors the mode and how people engage with it, I imagine its niche will only become more distinct compared to its genre stable-mates. We’re already seeing some changes bleed into the game, and it’s not even been out a week – it bodes well for the future.

Modern Warfare 4 represents the highest tide for Call of Duty in seven years. Infinity Ward needed to pull off a balancing act I don’t envy; injecting just enough nostalgia into a series propped up with so many conventions and expectations there’s barely room for anything new, alongside enough innovation and intrigue to keep people interested. Beyond that, after several weaker years in a row, Black Ops 7 in particular caused enough reputation damage that even the most loyal CoD fanatics started to see through the series’ aging veneer. And so, even if the campaign occasionally struggles under the weight of legacy, and the multiplayer is happy to keep rolling on the same wheels Modern Warfare has been using for four games now, Infinity Ward has succeeded – after four years away from the helm – in saving Call of Duty. Modern Warfare 4 is a course correction sorely needed, and deftly deployed.