Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 Campaign Review (Patreon)

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4’s three chunks are being released at three different times. This is being presented as a pre-order incentive, rather than some kind of new strategy, but the upshot of all this is that the single-player campaign came out first, followed by the returning DMZ multiplayer mode, and finishing up with the standard competitive multiplayer.

The story of MW4’s campaign is told in two parts. One of these picks up from the final moments of the previous Modern Warfare. John Price has survived numerous double-crosses, he’s put a stop to Makarov’s insidious plans, and he’s put a bullet in the head of the US general that screwed him over. Now he’s ready to finish the job by any means necessary, setting off in search of a Russian known only as “the Archer.” To get close enough to do this, Price ends up partnering up with the cartels. Going rogue here puts Price in a number of compromising situations but also gives him an opportunity to tie up loose ends with a number of characters. This aspect of the game feels slapdash and weirdly rushed. You’re almost left with the impression that the writers were just bored by a bunch of these long-running characters and wanted to wipe them off the map as quickly as possible.

The other half of the game takes place in Korea, as North Korea invades the South with help from a mysterious EMP-like weapon. Here you primarily play as a South Korean soldier named Park who, naturally, can’t wait to get out of the military just before he’s thrown into the middle of this chaotic invasion. As Park you fend off parts of the invasion and eventually work with a Special Forces operator who brings your squad into North Korea for some sneaky stuff. As opposed to Price’s devotion to tying off loose ends one bullet at a time, this side of the story is more about camaraderie and loyalty, up to and including a North Korean defector who’s seen enough and joins your team. The whole thing is very blunt, extremely hamfisted in its execution, right down to the North Korean soldiers yelling about killing capitalists right before you burst through the door and waste them all. This side of the story also puts you in the role of a politician in a stealth mission that falls somewhere between being silly and stupid, and all of this just serves to cement the campaign as a specific sort of direct-to-streaming action movie junk that I ended up appreciating as a whole, even if the individual pieces get a bit too dumb for their own good. It’s closer to “debuted on Amazon’s service to zero fanfare” than it is to “direct to Tubi,” if that makes any sense.

The campaign keeps up a fairly breakneck pace, swapping from Price’s stuff to the Korean situation at the right moments. It also deliberately bogs itself down at one point, when Park and his squad get downed in North Korea and must clear a path to getting rescued by taking out a series of targets spread across an open area. You can head straight for the three objectives, if you want, but there’s also a ton of little outposts, guard patrols, weapons, and supplies to interact with. This open combat area is neat, and it’s worth going around and collecting supplies to get access to boots that let you run faster, a ghillie suit that helps you hide in the snow more effectively, silenced weapons, and so on. You could probably spend more time here than the rest of the entire campaign, but after getting the gist of it, taking over some secondary outposts, and unlocking some key upgrades, I was ready to get going.

The action is solid and it usually looks really good, but there’s something about the pace of it and the nature of it that feels off. Half of the game—Price’s sections, mostly, though the game also puts you in the role of a North Korean soldier as you sweep through a village in search of defectors—feels like someone sat down, played the No Russian level from the old Modern Warfare continuity, and decided to make an entire story out of that. Price’s whole arc is that he’s in situations where his cartel associates are killing civilians fairly indiscriminately. While you can attempt to play “clean,” this doesn’t seem to be something the game really cares about. In one section you’re in a van, escaping from French police—sorry, fake French police, it’s OK to kill them all—with an infinite supply of C4 charges. If you manage to blow up some civilian vehicles along the way, the cartel leader chimes in to snidely say “don’t worry, you’re still the good guy.”

The game wants to revel in this blurred line style of action and wants to make it feel like you can still make choices—much like you could either partake in the airport shooting of No Russian or just sort of shoot in the air and pretend—but it feels hollow, like a series of false choices. As an example, in another section you, as a North Korean soldier, are confronted by the Supreme Leader of North Korea and asked a question about an assassination. You can tell the truth, that you know that the leader was directly involved, but doing so just gets you a bullet in the head and sent right back to the same dialogue tree so you can pick the correct lie to tell. It's goofy, it's pointless. The game works best when it’s straightforward, dead-ahead shooting with enough intrigue around the edges to keep you wondering about what will happen next. Its attempts to be larger than that feel half-hearted, at best.

That said, for the most part the action is very straightforward, flashy, and entertaining. I don’t think it reaches the heist-style heights of Black Ops 6, which really excelled at providing just enough variety to make the game feel both big and personal. Also the way Price’s segments deal almost exclusively with killing named characters make the game feel like the product of a team that desperately wants to get away from this world and setting. But considering the name recognition that “Modern Warfare” still holds, it’s almost certainly not the last time those words will be written on a box. Hey, they could always reboot it… right?

Let’s reconvene once more parts of the game are out and see how the whole package comes together.