Modern Warfare 4 Kills Off Old Favorites, and Critics Love It

Infinity Ward's finale for its rebooted Call of Duty series holds an 85 top-critic average, and 97% of critics recommend it.

Captain John Price, Call of Duty's longtime white hat, spends Modern Warfare 4 as a bearded fugitive trading fire with his former squadmates. In its review, GamesRadar+ said Price is "kind of a dick here." It added that wrestling with that is part of what the game is going for.

Critics have mostly lined up behind it. When reviews of Infinity Ward's shooter landed Oct. 23, GamesIndustry.biz rounded up the critical consensus. On OpenCritic, the game holds an 85 top-critic average, and 97% of critics recommend it, across 31 critic reviews as of Sunday.

This is the last chapter of the rebooted Modern Warfare series, out on PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X and Nintendo Switch 2. Activision rolled it out in stages, too. Players who preordered got the campaign a week before full launch, Windows Central reported, and early access to the DMZ mode followed a few days later.

The high end is loud. GameRant gave it a 10 out of 10 and called it "the best Call of Duty since Black Ops 2," according to its blurb on OpenCritic. Under reasons to avoid it, Windows Central listed just one: a player who doesn't care for Call of Duty or shooters in general. Even the lowest score on OpenCritic's front page, GameSpot's 7 out of 10, said the game finishes on a high note.

Most of the love is for how the story ends. Windows Central wrote that the campaign opens in Seoul, where young South Korean conscripts and American Marines horse around a convenience store to Wu-Tang Clan's C.R.E.A.M. Then North Korea invades. According to GamesRadar+, the game goes on to kill off a string of beloved characters, and the camera stays on the bodies so nobody expects them back in a future update.

Both reviews singled out a mission called Stranded. It drops the player into the North Korean countryside with nothing but a pistol and three objectives to take in any order. GamesRadar+ predicted fans will be arguing for years over whether it's the best mission in the series.

The other big draw is DMZ, a revived extraction mode set in a huge map called Hajin City. Squads go in for loot, fight AI soldiers and other players, and try to get out alive. GamesRadar+ said it could end up the reviewer's favorite multiplayer game of the year.

The complaints are specific. GamesRadar+ hated that hitting a single civilian ends the mission on the spot, even when you're firing from a speeding car. It also kept up its war on killstreaks, and it called Price's own storyline lackluster, the twist that started all the talk. Press Start pointed to problems with matchmaking, maps and spawns, according to OpenCritic.

Nintendo players got a first. Nintendo Life gave the Switch 2 version a 9 out of 10, according to its review listing on OpenCritic, noting it's the first Call of Duty on a Nintendo platform in more than a decade and that it launched the same day as every other version. It also said series veterans could probably take a point off, since all the explosions won't impress them as much.

Hollywood is studying the same squad. Peter Berg is directing the live-action Call of Duty movie with writer Taylor Sheridan, and he told ComicBook that Price, Soap and Ghost are nuanced people, not cartoon characters, IGN reported. Back in 2013, IGN noted, Berg called war video games "pathetic."

Now he says the heart of Modern Warfare is "the cost of war," he told ComicBook. It's the same moral weight GamesRadar+ said the game puts on Price, even as it called his storyline lackluster. Berg's movie reaches theaters June 30, 2028.

Source: gamesradar.com, retrieved October 25, 2026. Other sources: opencritic.com, windowscentral.com, ign.com.