{"id":15581,"date":"2026-10-16T17:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-10-16T17:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nextlevelnews.co.uk\/blog\/2026\/10\/16\/call-of-duty-modern-warfare-4-campaign-review\/"},"modified":"2026-10-16T17:00:00","modified_gmt":"2026-10-16T17:00:00","slug":"call-of-duty-modern-warfare-4-campaign-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nextlevelnews.co.uk\/blog\/2026\/10\/16\/call-of-duty-modern-warfare-4-campaign-review\/","title":{"rendered":"Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 – Campaign Review"},"content":{"rendered":"
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These are our impressions of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4\u2019s campaign. Reviews of DMZ and multiplayer will follow.<\/em><\/p>\n

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Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4’s campaign has been set an unenviable task: tie the bow on a seven-year-long series of stories I\u2019d politely describe as \u201cuneven.\u201d To its credit, it handles this challenge well, delivering a genuinely exciting string of missions that are great when they focus on what is new, rather than getting bogged down in the past. It\u2019s the best Modern Warfare has been since its 2019 reboot by quite some distance, and a reminder of how good Call of Duty can be when the people making it are given time to cook.<\/p>\n

This collection of blockbuster sequences that has clearly been built from the ground up as a single-player experience is in stark contrast when compared to 2023\u2019s woeful Modern Warfare 3 campaign, arguably the low point of the entire series. A mishmash of multiplayer maps mixed with slivers of near-incomprehensible story, I don\u2019t envy Infinity Ward having to pick up from where it left off. The studio has done about as good a job as it could, though, thanks to a smart structure which splits the two halves of this story until they inevitably collide, providing both variety in mission design and tone.<\/p>\n

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Captain Price has been at the centre of the Modern Warfare plot, and that doesn\u2019t change too much here. Following the disastrous finale of MW3, he\u2019s now on the run, acting as a lone wolf, wanted by the very people he used to work for. His half of the story is initially tied up in knots so twisted even Alfred Borden would have trouble with them. Infinity Ward\u2019s answer? Take a machete to much of it and kill off any characters introduced in the past two games that it deems superfluous. It\u2019s almost an admission of guilt over how poorly these people were handled in the past, but it does give a sense of finality to this seemingly saga-ending chapter.<\/p>\n

A tale of string-pullers and warmongers, Price\u2019s story takes place over the course of five days in the run-up to the North Korean invasion of South Korea (plenty more on that in a moment). The former SAS captain has the blinkers on for his nemesis Makarov and whoever his boss may be. It\u2019s fair to say that the Russian terrorist is not close to being the well-developed threat from the original Modern Warfare 2, which feels like a wasted opportunity to revive a famous villain. In his place steps Mads Mikkelsen\u2019s The Archer. <\/p>\n

For the most part, Price\u2019s chapters of the story play like a Bond movie, packed full of parkour escapes, car chases, and stealthy infiltrations. Mikkelsen\u2019s casting only reinforces this feeling, and while he\u2019s classically unsettling in his performance, his character was never given quite enough screen time for me to grow a connection with him. As such, while the missions that make up Price\u2019s side of the story are fun, it comes across as the weaker half. Infinity Ward clearly wants Price to be the strongest emotional bond to the player and for his personal vendettas to feel like our own, but, in truth, many more of the missions are dedicated to the Korean conflict. Incidentally, this is also where I found a lot more of the engaging storytelling to be found.<\/p>\n