Modern Warfare 4 Is Out: What the Reviews Say About the Campaign, Multiplayer and DMZ

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 is out today in NZ and Australia, and the early-access crowd has had a week with it. So, is the CoD that made Steam say nice things actually good across the board, or just the campaign? We’ve been through the big reviews of the campaign, multiplayer and DMZ, plus what players are saying. One heads-up: most outlets are still calling these “reviews in progress” until they’ve played on busy public servers, so expect the numbers to move.

The scoreboard so far

• OpenCritic: 77, rated “Strong”. It’s early and leans on the campaign, but that’s still CoD’s best reception in years.
• Steam: “Very Positive”, with 5,855 of 6,477 reviews thumbs up (about 90%) as of launch morning NZT.
• GameSpot: 8/10 (in progress, covering all three modes).
• Insider Gaming: 90 for the campaign, calling it a “breathtaking, emotionally devastating six-hour spectacle”.
• Screen Rant: 80 for the campaign, a “welcome return to form”.
• IGN and PC Gamer haven’t scored it yet. Both have published in-progress takes on DMZ, and PC Gamer has covered the campaign too.
• Metacritic: no Metascore yet. Final reviews are expected towards the end of next week.

The campaign: the best since 2019

This is where critics agree most. GameSpot says it’s the best Call of Duty campaign since Modern Warfare 2019, and PC Gamer calls it the most fun it’s had with a CoD campaign in years.

• Two stories. One follows Private Park, a young South Korean conscript caught up when North Korea invades. The other follows a rogue Captain Price hunting Makarov after Modern Warfare 3, teaming up with Valeria and the cartel, and chasing Mads Mikkelsen’s villain, the Archer. It jumps between Korea, New York, Paris and Mumbai.
• Back to linear. There’s just one open-world mission this time, Stranded, and both GameSpot and PC Gamer reckon it’s Infinity Ward’s best go at one yet. PC Gamer likens it to a mini Far Cry in the middle of a CoD campaign.
• Standout missions. GameSpot singles out Gone Dark, where you play Gaz hunting Price through a dark hotel. PC Gamer’s favourites are the desperate fights to hold Hajin City and the huge beach assault in Counter Attack.
• Length: about six hours by Insider Gaming and PC Gamer’s count, and about eight for GameSpot.

The complaints: the knife-fight “boss battles” at the end are too short and too easy (GameSpot), and it doesn’t really do anything new. PC Gamer is harsher about the Price half. It says the new South Korean squad is the real heart of the game, while Price’s story feels like Infinity Ward ticking boxes to wrap up the trilogy, and it wastes Mikkelsen. At least one critic also noted there’s no co-op.

Multiplayer: no omnimovement, and a map that rebuilds itself

• Omnimovement is gone. After two years of Black Ops diving and wall-jumping, MW4 goes back to a grounded style. GameSpot says it still feels quick and fluid, thanks to smoother mantling, the ability to mantle straight into a slide, a slide under low obstacles, and climbing pipes to get up high. Early hands-on players also noticed a slightly longer time-to-kill than Black Ops 7.
• Kill Block is the star. It’s a Shoot House-sized Gunfight map built from three modular pieces that reshuffle between rounds, with chunks of classics like Shoot House, Verdansk’s Storage Town and MW2’s Highrise stitched together. GameSpot calls it one of the best ideas of the whole reboot. The catch is that, for now, it’s only in the Gunfight playlists.
• New modes. Inflation is Kill Confirmed with cash, where big earners drop their money when they die, so leads can flip in seconds. Collateral is Search and Destroy with a Counter-Strike-style buy system.
• Gunsmith changes. Every gun gets a free Apex attachment that changes how it plays: one turns the Oden into a single-shot sniper, and another lets a marksman rifle fire throwing knives. Shared attachments mean far less grinding to level up guns, and there’s a “Gunny” assistant that suggests builds.
• Maps: New York, snowy Korea and Mumbai, plus Ground War maps carved out of DMZ’s Hajin.

The complaint: streaks lean almost entirely on kill chains. The objective players get a token amount of points, and GameSpot wants MW2’s killstreak/scorestreak toggle back.

DMZ: a full extraction shooter hiding inside CoD

DMZ is the big surprise of the reviews. GameSpot calls it the standout part of MW4. PC Gamer says Infinity Ward has “made a whole extraction shooter” that could have been a standalone Tarkov or Marathon rival, and IGN says it “makes a great first impression”.

• Hajin. A fictional Korean DMZ that GameSpot says is CoD’s biggest map ever, bigger than Verdansk and Black Ops 7’s Avalon. It has villages, a prison, a nuclear plant, tunnels, the walled-off red zone “The Grid”, a train you can ride, and patches of fog and rain that change fights.
• The basics. Squads of up to three (no dedicated solos or duos at launch), around 60 players, and 30-minute runs before the radiation gas closes in.
• Dynamic Ops pop up as you move around the map, such as escorts, bombings and package grabs, and pay out more the more you chain. There are also six story missions, including a casino heist and wheeling a patient out of a hospital on a gurney while under fire.
• The FOB. Your own walkable base, with a firing range, vendor, bounty board, dog-tag trophy case and a 3D printer for crafting. Mates join your FOB when you party up.
• No buy stations. You loot or craft your gear. Custom guns cost DMZ cash for each attachment slot and attachment, and PC Gamer paid over $90,000 for a single gun.
• It’s generous. Mission cash is banked even if you die, you can pick yourself up once, and a dead operator goes MIA instead of being deleted, so you can pay to get them back. PC Gamer says it sometimes feels like a CoD RPG.
• PvP has a wanted level. Killing players raises your heat and puts a bounty on you, which others can buy intel on. If you leave people alone, you mostly stay off the radar.

The complaints:

• It’s not free anymore. DMZ is part of the full-price game now.
• Vault Edition owners get extra kit: an extra operator slot, backpacks and plate carriers. GameSpot doesn’t think it’s pay-to-win yet, but it worries it’s a slippery slope.
• Only six story missions, which GameSpot says is too few.
• The AI enemies are dull. PC Gamer and IGN say they’re just soldiers in heavy armour, nowhere near ARC Raiders’ killer machines.
• Operators are all the same. IGN says they have no individual abilities, and parts of Hajin look a bit samey.
• Windows Central found it undercooked at first, and Nintendo Life’s Switch 2 hands-on reported it targets 40fps there.

What players are moaning about

Steam reviewers love the campaign, and most of the negative reviews are about everything around the game:

• It runs through the Call of Duty HQ launcher.
• PC needs TPM 2.0 and Secure Boot for the Ricochet anti-cheat.
• There are some PC performance gripes.

It’s NZ$119.99 for the standard edition on Steam, or NZ$169.99 for the Vault Edition, on PC, PS5, Xbox Series X|S and Switch 2.

Our take

We haven’t played enough to put our own number on it, so this one’s a roundup, not a GetRekt score. But the picture is pretty clear: this is the most complete Call of Duty in years. The campaign is a proper campaign again, multiplayer drops the Black Ops acrobatics without feeling slow, and DMZ looks like the real reason Infinity Ward took four years.

Two things to watch. First, DMZ isn’t free anymore, and it’s already handing extra gear to people who paid NZ$50 more. Do that once and next season it’s a UAV, so Activision needs to keep its hands off. Second, every one of these reviews was written before the public arrived. Launch-week servers, cheaters and the first season’s store are where a CoD lives or dies. A great review week has never saved a CoD from a rough first season.

On paper, though? Kill Block, a decent campaign and an extraction mode that critics are comparing with ARC Raiders and Tarkov. CoD hasn’t had a week this good in a long time.

Campaign, multiplayer or DMZ, where are you dropping first? Tell us in the comments, or come squad up for Hajin in the GetRekt Discord.

Sources

• IGN: Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 DMZ Review So Far (Jarrett Green, 22 Oct)
• GameSpot: Modern Warfare 4 campaign, DMZ and multiplayer review in progress (S.E. Doster, 8/10)
• PC Gamer: Modern Warfare 4 review in progress, DMZ and campaign (Morgan Park)
• OpenCritic: MW4 reviews reach a high not seen since 2010’s Black Ops
• Metacritic: Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4
• U4N: MW4 review roundup (Insider Gaming and Screen Rant campaign scores)
• Destructoid: Modern Warfare 4 multiplayer hands-on
• Windows Central: Hands-on with MW4’s DMZ
• Nintendo Life: MW4 DMZ impressions on Switch 2
• Steam: Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 (reviews and NZ pricing checked 23 Oct)
• GetRekt: Modern Warfare 4 is the best-reviewed CoD on Steam in a decade