COGconnected and Beebom Call Modern Warfare 4 a return to form

This is a new development in a story we reported earlier: Activision Blizzard confirms Modern Warfare 4 won't launch on Game Pass.

COGconnected and Beebom published Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 reviews on Oct. 23, 2026, calling the game a return to form for the franchise after last year’s disappointing entry.

Beebom says the campaign story begins three years after the previous game. The death of John “Soap” MacTavish shatters the squad’s moral compass, and Captain Price becomes a vengeful lone wolf hunting Makarov’s network. Captain Price teams up with cartel boss Valeria Garza to hunt Russian mastermind The Archer, played by Mads Mikkelsen.

The review says the story kills beloved veterans unexpectedly to make the point that war is brutal and no one is untouchable. In the Gone Dark mission, Ghost and Gaz face their former mentor in a dark hotel and finish with a knife fight. The present-day campaign adds a sudden North Korean invasion, putting the player in control of South Korean conscript Private Park Hyun-Jun.

The player also controls a senior North Korean officer who questions brutal orders during a village sweep that includes public executions. The officer eventually defects to help Park’s surviving marines. Beebom names Barry Sloane as rogue Captain Price, Samuel Roukin as Ghost, Elliot Knight as Gaz, Mads Mikkelsen as The Archer, Young Mazino as Private Park, and Maria Elisa Camargo as Valeria.

The review describes Sloane’s work as career-best and says Mikkelsen brings quiet, calculating dread to The Archer. Young Mazino gives Private Park a trembling, relatable vulnerability. Beebom highlights a Manhattan nightclub brawl using a new parry-and-counter melee system, a Paris highway chase, and the Counter Attack mission, which involves storming a heavily fortified beach like a modern explosive answer to D-Day.

The campaign includes parkour, scripted objectives, and missions where the player switches between characters. Beebom describes the tenth mission, Stranded, as a snowy Far Cry sandbox where the player crashes behind enemy lines, scavenges supplies, solves keypad puzzles, and raids outposts to craft suppressed sniper rifles, with fast travel to three main objectives on a second run.

The reviewer says the slow pacing killed story urgency. The review points to a mismatch between serious cutscenes and gameplay, including a scene where Price lectures about collateral damage before blowing up cars on a crowded highway. Shooting a sprinting civilian during chaotic street battles in Korea causes an instant mission fail, and constantly stuffing armor plates into vests instead of classic health regeneration grows tiring.

Beebom’s verdict calls the game a brutal, emotional masterpiece and triumphant return to form, docking one point only because the campaign is short. Beebom’s reviewer completed all 16 missions in seven hours and said the game needed at least two more chapters set on the Korean peninsula. As the credits roll, Price makes a bloody sacrifice in the snow, and Kate Laswell welcomes a surviving Ghost into the Watcher program.

Beebom’s reviewer ran through all 16 missions twice during the weekend. Beebom reports locked sixty frames per second on console with zero noticeable drops during massive building collapses and explosions. On high-end PC, the tester used an Intel i7 14700K processor, an Nvidia RTX 5080 Founder’s Edition 16 GB graphics card, and Crucial 2x16GB 5200MHz DDR5 memory.

At 4K Extreme DLAA the RTX 5080 averaged 62 frames per second with 46 frames per second lows while drawing 251 watts. Switching to DLSS Quality lifted the average to 92 frames per second, while DLSS Performance reached 144 frames per second inside neon corridors. Four-times frame generation with DLSS Quality at 4K hit 237 frames per second using 15.7 GB of VRAM but pushed render latency to 43.8 milliseconds.

The RTX 5080 stayed between 55 and 58 degrees Celsius while boosting around 2775 MHz. Even with a spinning bomb drone and one frozen pause menu, the core gunplay and sliding controls felt highly responsive. Beebom concludes the optimization is more reliable than some previous entries.

Yahoo Tech says last year’s disappointing Call of Duty entry pulled down Xbox’s financials overall, adding pressure for Modern Warfare 4 to deliver. The shooter held the top sales spot on both Xbox and PlayStation as of writing, beating out GTA 6 for now. Yahoo Tech says reviews indicate the game delivered, with fans and critics calling it possibly the best campaign in a decade, and says it looks set to be the best Call of Duty of the decade so far.

Xbox replaced custom Series X|S backgrounds with a yellow Call of Duty theme and placed advertising tiles across the dashboard. The outlet calls the takeover irritating and says it reminds customers that Xbox can hijack consoles even after the recent $799 price. Switching backgrounds will not stop the takeover, but players can turn off event-themed backgrounds in Settings under General, Personalization, My backgrounds, possibly with a PIN.

The outlet says the yellow Call of Duty picture is temporary and will likely disappear by the end of the day. Xbox Cloud Gaming bills playtime by the hour, part of its argument about rented compute and ownership. Call of Duty money is effectively propping up other bets Xbox is making right now.