Critics Call Modern Warfare 4 campaign best in years as early access begins

Launch day is October 23 2026 for Modern Warfare 4 on PC, PS5, Xbox Series X/S and Switch 2. The Guardian feature published on October 21 2026 calls the campaign one of the series’ best for at least six years. The feature also says the South Korea invasion premise has proved controversial in a video game.

The Guardian describes the setup as one that could fuel a hundred instantly forgettable Netflix films, though it has proved controversial specifically as a video game premise. An authoritarian regime under a new fictitious ruler uses a powerful experimental weapon as the opening gambit in an explosive attack, and the regime is not afraid to use it that way.

The player takes control of Park Hyun Jun, a conscripted South Korean soldier fighting alongside inexperienced grunts as cities burn and enemy paratroopers fill the skies. The Guardian frames Park Hyun Jun’s ragtag squad as one of three dysfunctional families at the heart of the campaign, alongside the North Korean ruling family and Price’s Task Force 141.

Captain John Price has gone rogue and is working with cartel boss Valeria Garza to track down Makarov, with the two narrative strands intertwining as the story’s propulsive engine. Price’s vendetta targets Mads Mikkelsen’s The Archer, which IGN describes as a pursuit like Modern Warfare 2’s hunt for Makarov. The Guardian describes the campaign as throwing an arsenal of gigantic set-piece battles at the player while edging toward a layered finale.

The feature compares the story to disaster movies centering on one or two main characters, so audiences experience drama vicariously. It argues Infinity Ward brought this emotional toolkit to the finale of the Modern Warfare series.

The Guardian says the campaign might not win a Pulitzer prize but gives players something to think about and people to root for. The piece acknowledges the story’s limitations while affirming its emotional hook ahead of Grand Theft Auto VI’s release.

IGN’s Matt Purslow states that the campaign ranks among the series’ best because it copies the Modern Warfare 2 formula from 2009. Purslow explains that swapping Modern Warfare 2’s Russian invasion of America for a South Korean setting and North Korean aggressors creates what he calls the CliffsNotes for Modern Warfare 4.

Purslow says that in the last three years Call of Duty has seen one of its best campaigns sandwiched between two of its very worst. He frames the series as zig-zagging between highs and lows, with its annual cadence making the undulating quality more prominent, and describes each year’s campaign as a coin flip.

The 2009 sequel takes place during a Russian invasion of America, with battles through houses, government buildings and burger joints, and special operatives led by Captain Price targeting a Russian mastermind. Purslow provides studio history, explaining that Infinity Ward was riding high in the late 2000s before Modern Warfare 2 brought the noise in 2009.

Seventeen years have passed since the 2009 game, giving Infinity Ward a pass for revisiting the formula after two lackluster chapters. The formula is a perfect vehicle for Call of Duty’s strengths, mixing World War 2-scale military action with smaller espionage-style missions.

Young Mazino’s Park Hyun-Jun is the campaign’s real heart, a junior soldier conscripted under the South Korean Military Service Act who has no interest in being a professional soldier. The unexpected North Korean invasion transforms his backyard into a war zone and forces him into combat despite his lack of interest in a military career.

No space exists to fully explore the emotional toll on conscripted soldier Park Hyun-Jun, though small moments such as a nervously twitching leg and Young Mazino’s softer, downbeat delivery let the concept shine. Purslow contrasts Park with special forces operators from previous reboot games.

The scenario design pulls directly from Modern Warfare 2, with paratroopers descending into a regular city and clearing housing blocks of invaders, though the tone is markedly darker. The game shares ground with 2019’s Modern Warfare reboot, which examined themes like the 2007 original with a darker tone drawn from The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty.

Call of Duty moved from its 1940s origins to contemporary battlefields with the first Modern Warfare in 2007, which used a quieter, eerier approach featuring green night vision, silencers and decaying Soviet architecture. The 2019 reboot’s Clean House was a remix of Death From Above and All Ghillied Up that created a new Call of Duty icon defining the reboot’s intended direction, while 2022’s Modern Warfare 2 played weak covers of Crew Expendable, All Ghillied Up and Death From Above with little more than extra gloss.

Infinity Ward needed to get the Modern Warfare series back on track after two lackluster chapters. Raven Software’s Black Ops 6 set a new bar for Call of Duty with every mission a different beast and every new corner an opportunity to push gameplay in unexpected directions. The game is a loud and cinematic celebration of Call of Duty’s most classic strengths: World War 2 with laser-guided missiles and EMP strikes, reviving old ideas through new eyes.

Purslow concludes by calling the game exactly what Call of Duty needed in 2026. He had questioned the Modern Warfare 2 comparison just weeks before writing, especially given Black Ops 6’s experimental approach, but Modern Warfare 4 proved what the series needed that year.

One mission, Following Orders, casts the player as a North Korean soldier tasked with hunting down an enemy of the totalitarian regime. Players can choose whether to bring up medical contraband found, reveal a woman found beneath a kitchen floor, question an ally’s use of torture, or hold the rope that hangs an alleged defector.

IGN says Following Orders paints a broad image of North Korea’s political situation but does not contribute to the story in the same way that No Russian contributes to Modern Warfare 2’s story.

Passenger, the rebooted Modern Warfare 3’s attempt at a No Russian-style mission, is a first-person cutscene where interaction means walking forward between scripted sequences. Purslow calls Passenger a woeful misunderstanding of player agency. IGN’s Matt Purslow describes Modern Warfare 3 (2023) as an odd, barely-finished experiment in mission design, built from stapled-together chunks of Warzone’s Verdansk map.

The game does its best to pretend its predecessor does not exist by brushing the previous game’s loose threads under the bloody rug as fast as it can through its first few missions. Purslow argues that Modern Warfare 4 gets away with distancing itself from Modern Warfare 3 because, like the reboot’s first chapter, it understands the mission of honoring the past while reinventing it.

TheGamer reports that IGN scored the campaign 8 out of 10, placing it above Black Ops and just behind Call of Duty 2 and World at War. IGN reviewer Simon Cardy described the campaign’s expansive behind-enemy-lines mission, which borrows most of its ideas from DMZ mode, as a real highlight.

IGN reviewer Simon Cardy said, “Modern Warfare 4 made me feel something for the series again,” and added that the campaign juggled a bloated cast while saying goodbye to familiar faces and building bonds with new ones. He also praised full-throttle blockbuster battles and said that if Modern Warfare 4 is the end of the saga, the series is going out on a high note.

On Steam, Modern Warfare 4 holds a Very Positive review score, and players call the campaign the best in the series since Modern Warfare 2019. Top posts on the game’s subreddit describe the campaign as the best since the original trilogy, and some users call it the best campaign in the franchise’s history.

Reddit user u/Stueww asked if they were mistaken to think Modern Warfare 4 might be the best Call of Duty campaign ever made, saying the fifth mission was absolutely incredible and kept them invested like a blockbuster movie. Other Reddit users including u/Havkas, u/Previous_Estimate_22 and u/Resting-Tiger praise the pacing, set pieces, dialogue and storytelling. They also highlight deaths, the poignant North Korean section, music, graphics and the sense of a complete story.

Dzejkob argues on Steam that Modern Warfare 4’s campaign is the best in Modern Warfare history and the perfect conclusion to the series. CharlieIntel described the campaign as one of the best Call of Duty campaigns in a long time, while Windows Central called it a cinematic achievement and a BIG return to form.

Polygon said Activision appears to have taken note of criticism that AI slop and hack job designs saturated recent Call of Duty campaigns, according to TheGamer. TheGamer’s author had expressed skepticism based on recent campaigns featuring zombies in original Black Ops missions and a giant red-eyed Michael Rooker tied to a new extraction shooter mode, before noting the shift in sentiment for Modern Warfare 4.

Jeff Negus, Infinity Ward’s narrative director, says a Modern Warfare story must feel like something that could happen in the real world. He frames the first question as whether it feels grounded and the other as what will resonate with a modern audience. Negus says, “The DNA of a Modern Warfare story is that it is something you believe could happen in the real world,” and explains the studio’s approach to narrative design, emphasizing grounded storytelling and modern resonance while avoiding repetition because experiences have changed the characters.

Negus describes a healthy symbiosis between quieter character-led moments and apocalyptic action set-pieces, comparing action to a movie explosion that lacks meaning without knowing the people involved. The team starts with strong narrative and gameplay and asks how to interweave them intentionally, invoking player-protagonist parity so the audience feels what the character feels.

The team uses iteration despite early filming and animation of cinematic sequences, and lead writer Justin Harris maps story beats like a television season or movie using levels. The team moves beats around, debates, analyzes and road-tests them before finalizing them, and the timeline can shift in certain ways.

For story accuracy, Infinity Ward brought in military and cultural consultants, including actors conscripted in Korea and dialect coach June Yoon, who understands North and South Korean dialectical differences. Yoon helped reword lines to be more colloquially appropriate, and some actors identify with conscription while military consultants span many branches and service types.

According to The Guardian, the campaign is a story of dysfunctional families: North Korea’s ruling family, Park Hyun Jun’s ragtag squad and Price’s Task Force 141, whose tensions provide the human underpinning. The feature says the campaign might be up there with the original Modern Warfare trilogy. The Guardian reports that most positive reviews mention how the story combines its own ideas with themes and plots from previous titles.

The campaign is available in early access before launch and includes a locked difficulty tier called YOLO, or you only live once, that is harder than Realism and gives the player a single life to complete the entire campaign. Dying once sends the player back to the start.

To unlock YOLO difficulty, players must first finish the entire Modern Warfare 4 campaign on Realism difficulty. The reward for completing the campaign on YOLO difficulty is a multiplayer Calling Card, which Eurogamer describes as among the lowest tier of cosmetic rewards in Call of Duty. Because the reward is underwhelming and the acquisition method is not clear, most players probably will not notice how players earned it.

Reddit user Lost-Equivalent2352 completed the Modern Warfare 4 campaign on YOLO difficulty in 20 hours, relying on hiding, letting AI teammates kill enemies, flashbangs and grenades. The player shared a screenshot of the completed run and said flashbangs and grenades were risky in a nighttime North Korean invasion mission because civilians and allies spread across the battlefield, and they only beat that mission by pure luck.

Lost-Equivalent2352 said, “I think that [it’s] impossible to complete it with a controller,” because players need good recoil control at long distances. The player used mouse and keyboard and identified hand-to-hand combat sections as among the most difficult, since miss-countering a single attack ends the fight and the entire run.