An EMP plunges Hajin City into darkness in Modern Warfare 4’s opening mission, before players shoot paratroopers out of the sky from inside a sports stadium. Polygon’s reviewer says almost every mission in the campaign has a memorable peak, though its roughly eight-hour runtime left them wanting more.
The reviewer considers Infinity Ward the Call of Duty studio to rely on for single-player campaigns, ranks the original Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare and Modern Warfare 2 as the series’ best, and praises the strong start made by 2019’s Modern Warfare reboot. Despite its slightly underwhelming length, Modern Warfare 4 belongs alongside the best of them in their assessment.
Modern Warfare 4 runs two storylines at once, following two groups with very different perspectives on the same war.
Image: Infinity Ward/Activision
One storyline follows Sierra-1, a unit of South Korean and United States soldiers resisting an invasion by the North Korean military. Its missions take the squad through the streets of fictional Hajin City, a snow-covered North Korean wasteland, and trenches where they fight to stop a nuclear reactor from exploding.
The other puts players in the boots of Captain John Price, who is on the run after assassinating the traitorous General Shepherd at the end of Modern Warfare 3. His target is Russia’s defense minister, known only as the Archer and played by Mads Mikkelsen. With unlikely allies from the cartel, Price travels to New York, Paris, Mumbai, and eventually North Korea.
Polygon’s reviewer sees the premise as drawn from real-world headlines, finding a Russian-backed North Korean invasion of South Korea plausible. The reviewer says that realism is where the campaign thrives, especially when Sierra-1’s soldiers are simply fighting to survive. Park Hyun-Jun, the soldier players control most often, and his squad face the war directly, unlike Price and Ghost, who are caught up in the politics and manipulation behind it.
MW4 is one of the good types of COD campaigns
The reviewer divides Call of Duty campaigns into two categories: those whose memorable moments stick with players after the credits, and those so forgettable that playing them feels pointless. They place the previous year’s Black Ops 7 firmly in the latter group, criticizing its nonsensical hallucination sequences and ridiculous, over-the-top boss battles as barely feeling like Call of Duty.
Modern Warfare 4 falls into the first category. Beyond its opening assault, almost every mission has a standout moment that impressed the reviewer.
The campaign wears its cinematic influences openly, and Polygon says they work well. Price’s pursuit of longtime Modern Warfare antagonist Vladimir Makarov through a New York nightclub evokes John Wick. Sierra-1’s attempt to retake Hajin City recalls Saving Private Ryan’s D-Day sequence, with allied troops leaving naval vehicles and pushing toward the sand under suppressive fire.
The review also praises Infinity Ward’s refinements to hand-to-hand combat and stealth, particularly in missions where players are heavily outnumbered and outgunned. Players can sneak past heavily armed guards searching for them or take them down from behind. The atmosphere approaches horror-game tension; skulking through prison corridors specifically reminded the reviewer of Outlast.
MW4 dabbles in open-world frameworks
The biggest change of pace comes in “Stranded.” Instead of another tightly directed mission, it offers a small open-world shooter setup that Polygon compares to Far Cry: enemy outposts to clear, supply crates scattered across the map, vehicles to steal, and patrols to evade. Players bring collected supplies back to a base, where they can craft additional weapons and equipment.
The reviewer places this experiment within a longer progression. Modern Warfare 3 introduced open combat missions; Black Ops 6 improved the idea with its “stellar” “Hunting Season” mission; then Black Ops 7’s Avalon-set levels, which the reviewer calls dreadful, undid that progress.
“Stranded” isn’t bad in isolation. It has secrets to find, multiple ways to tackle each point of interest, and three main objectives. The reviewer’s objection concerns its placement: after a run of hard-hitting set pieces, slowing down to explore a sandbox drains the campaign’s momentum.
Players can skip the open-world section entirely and fast-travel to each of the three main objectives. There’s a catch: without collecting supplies, their loadout is much more limited, making the mandatory tasks harder. The review gives two concrete examples: entering an old underground bunker without night vision goggles, and attempting a stealth mission atop a snowy mountain without a suppressed weapon. Skipping the exploration also cuts quite a few hours from an already fairly short campaign.
The campaign also has bugs, some of which the reviewer found hilarious. During the objective to destroy a SAM site in “Stranded,” they used a recon drone to scout enemies. Their two following squadmates treated the drone as though it were the player character and chased it around the island, rather than staying in cover beside the soldier operating it.
Other reported problems were general jankiness. Grenades failed to affect enemies caught mid-animation. Deployable bomb drones spun through the air at high speed immediately after activation. The reviewer fell through a section of rooftop that appeared intact and solid. On another occasion, returning after saving and quitting left every interaction unavailable except the pause menu. Restarting the entire mission was the only solution.
Despite those problems, Polygon’s reviewer calls Modern Warfare 4 an excellent Call of Duty campaign and confidently places it in the series’ all-time top five. Their reservation is that the credits arrive unexpectedly quickly. After eight hours, they weren’t quite satisfied, whether because they’d expected a longer campaign or because they were enjoying it too much to be ready for it to end.
Sierra-1’s story is wrapped up, but Price and his allies still have unfinished business, presumably for Modern Warfare 5. The reviewer also finds that the two storylines never truly intersect, likely because Price’s missions take place a few days before the South Korean storyline and function like flashbacks.
That leaves the reviewer with narrative questions, but not doubts about the rest of the campaign. Their final assessment is that, outside those unresolved story concerns, Modern Warfare 4 is “one for the history books.”
