Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 Review: The Campaign That Won Back a Skeptic

Call of Duty has been running the same play for a while now, so it says something that the early reviews for Modern Warfare 4 keep using the word "surprised." With pre-purchase campaign access live ahead of the October 22 launch, the first wave of Steam reviews is almost entirely about the single-player story, and the reaction from a lot of self-described burned-out, longtime series players is genuinely warm. That doesn't mean everything is settled yet — multiplayer and DMZ haven't really been put through their paces publicly, and one early reviewer is already flagging rough performance. Here's what the actual player feedback says so far.

Pros

• The campaign is the clear headline. Multiple reviewers who say they've grown tired of Call of Duty's yearly cycle describe this one as a genuine return to form, name-checking Captain Price, new mission variety across Korea, New York, Paris, and Mumbai, and a story that actually holds their attention start to finish.
• Pacing gets singled out more than once — reviewers describe it as slower and more deliberate than recent entries, with more room for tactical moments instead of nonstop set pieces.
• Several reviews explicitly compare it favorably to Modern Warfare (2019), with one giving the campaign an 8/10 and calling it "genuinely a blast" despite going in expecting to dislike it.
• Visual presentation gets consistent praise — character models, lighting, and the bigger spectacle moments (one reviewer specifically calls out a nuclear reactor set piece) come up as highlights.
• There's real nostalgia value for series veterans; a couple of reviewers mention having played these characters for over a decade and finishing the campaign with that in mind.

Cons

• Performance isn't universally smooth. At least one early reviewer reports stuttering, lag, judder, and blurry visuals on PC — a real complaint worth weighing against the otherwise positive performance comments from others.
• Because access so far has mostly covered the campaign, there's very little public feedback yet on multiplayer or DMZ, which are arguably just as important to whether this is worth $69.99 (or $99.99 for the Vault Edition) for a lot of buyers.
• The campaign's actual length isn't something reviewers dwell on in detail, and for a series that's historically kept single-player short, that's worth going in with reasonable expectations about.
• At full AAA pricing with a $30 step up to the Vault Edition's cosmetics and bonuses, this is not a budget purchase, and the value case rests heavily on how much of the package — not just the campaign — you actually use.

Performance & PC

Minimum spec asks for a Ryzen 5 1400 or Core i5-6600, 8 GB of RAM, and a GTX 970 / RX 470-class GPU, with 115 GB of storage — not a light install. Recommended spec steps up to a Ryzen 5 3600 or Core i7-8700K, 16 GB RAM, and an RTX 3060 / RX 6600 XT-class card. That's a reasonably modern ask for a current Call of Duty release, and storage alone is going to be the first thing a lot of people need to clear space for.

On the actual experience: feedback is mixed but mostly quiet on this front so far. One reviewer explicitly called out stutter, lag, judder, blur, and slowdown, while another, in the same batch of early reviews, said it "runs very well" and is "much better than the last couple of COD releases." With review volume still building ahead of the full launch, it's worth treating performance as unsettled rather than solved — the campaign-focused early access window is a small, self-selected sample, and widescale multiplayer load hasn't been tested in public reviews yet.

How it compares

Gears of War: E-Day is the closer point of comparison for anyone drawn in by the cinematic, story-first military action here — it's chasing a similar campaign-first pitch, just with a third-person lens instead of first-person.

Counter-Strike 2 is the other end of the spectrum: no campaign at all, pure competitive multiplayer, and a useful reminder of what a shooter looks like when it's built around one mode instead of trying to do campaign, multiplayer, and DMZ all at once.

ACE COMBAT 8: WINGS OF THEVE shares the military setting and AAA action-game budget, but trades boots-on-the-ground shooting for aerial combat — a good alternative if the appeal here is more "big military spectacle" than "FPS campaign" specifically.

Summary

The early read on Modern Warfare 4 is more encouraging than a lot of people probably expected, and it's coming from a notably skeptical crowd — reviewers who say outright they didn't want to like another yearly Call of Duty campaign and ended up liking it anyway. That's worth something. What's missing from the picture right now is everything outside the campaign: multiplayer and DMZ haven't had their moment in public reviews yet, and the one real performance complaint on record is a flag, not a verdict. If the campaign is genuinely what's being described here, series fans and campaign-first players have a reasonable case to jump in at launch. Anyone whose Call of Duty time is mostly multiplayer might get more value waiting a few days past October 22 for a clearer picture of how the full package holds up under real player load.