Most Call of Duty launches save the surprises for the trailers. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 saved one for the review calendar instead: critics got early access to the campaign a full week before the game's actual October 23 launch, and the scores that trickled out are unusually warm for a franchise that spent the last few years being told its story mode didn't matter anymore.
The event
Infinity Ward and Activision opened Campaign Early Access on October 16 for anyone who pre-ordered a digital edition, with DMZ Early Access following on October 20. The full game, including multiplayer's day-one roster of 12 new 6v6 maps and larger vehicle-infantry battlegrounds, doesn't go live until October 23 across PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, PC, and Nintendo Switch 2. There is no last-gen version this time; PS4 and Xbox One are cut entirely.
That staggered rollout meant something that almost never happens with a Call of Duty release: the campaign got reviewed, and scored, in isolation — days before anyone outside the studio had touched a gun in multiplayer.
The details
The campaign scores that surfaced between October 16 and October 20 were notably strong for a mode the series has treated as an afterthought in recent years. Insider Gaming gave it a 9/10, IGN an 8/10 (explicitly flagged as not final, pending multiplayer), and GameSpot a 7/10. Several outlets, including GamesRadar, published early verdicts without locking in a number at all, saving their final score for after the full launch. Metacritic still needs four critic reviews on a single platform before it can post an aggregate, which as of the campaign window hadn't happened.
The story itself centers on a North Korean invasion of the Korean peninsula, following a squad of young South Korean marines on the front lines while Captain Price runs a separate, shadowier operation half a world away. One standout mission, nicknamed "Stranded" in early write-ups, drops the squad behind enemy lines with non-linear objectives, side content, and a crafting hideout — reviewers compared it to a condensed open-world detour in the middle of a traditionally linear shooter.
Why it matters
This is the part that should actually grab a skeptical buyer's attention: multiple outlets are calling this the best Modern Warfare campaign since the 2019 reboot kicked off this current era of the sub-series. That's a meaningful claim given how uneven the campaigns sandwiched in between have been, and given how much of the marketing oxygen for any Call of Duty release now goes to Warzone integration and battle passes instead of the story.
It also matters because of how it was revealed. Letting critics review and score a slice of the game before the full release is a gamble — it either builds goodwill momentum into launch day, or it invites the obvious follow-up question: if the campaign is this good on its own, why wasn't the whole game ready to be judged at once? Right now the multiplayer and DMZ verdicts are still unwritten, and that's the half of the game most Call of Duty owners will actually live in for the next twelve months.
There's also a quieter financial wrinkle shaping the reception: Modern Warfare 4 is launching as a fully standalone purchase and won't reach Xbox Game Pass until Holiday 2027. For a series that leaned on subscription access in recent years, treating this entry as a full-price-only release raises the stakes on exactly how good the whole package needs to be, not just the six-hour story.
Reactions
The most striking line out of the early coverage wasn't a number, it was the tone. One outlet described the subreddit consensus as "unanimous" that this ranks among the best Call of Duty campaigns ever, while a widely echoed reaction called it the strongest single-player chapter the series has produced in years.
It's the first time in too long that Call of Duty's campaign has felt uncompromised by the influence of Warzone or Zombies.
Not every note was glowing. One review-in-progress flagged that Price himself gets sidelined for the back half of the story, calling his arc "bizarre" and "less interesting" than the newer South Korean squad he's ostensibly supposed to be sharing the spotlight with — a strange outcome for a campaign explicitly billed as closing out the Modern Warfare saga that restarted in 2019.
Behind it
Infinity Ward built this entry around the premise that the campaign shouldn't just be a tutorial for multiplayer. The studio's own marketing leans on the phrase "Warfare Without Limits", and the design choices back that framing up: a single open-world-style mission dropped into an otherwise traditional, linear structure, a cast built mostly around new faces rather than the returning Task Force 141 regulars, and a geopolitical hook — a North Korean invasion — that's blunter and more grounded than the series' recent flirtations with near-future tech thrillers.
The pre-order incentives tell their own story about where Activision thinks the pressure points are: digital pre-orders bundle Campaign and DMZ early access windows plus cosmetic rewards usable across Modern Warfare 4, Black Ops 7, and Warzone — a reminder that even a campaign this acclaimed still exists inside a live-service ecosystem built to keep players spending across multiple titles at once.
Open questions
- Will the multiplayer and DMZ reviews, due after the October 23 full launch, match the campaign's early momentum, or expose the usual day-one jank?
- Does sidelining Captain Price for most of the back half undercut the campaign's billing as the conclusion of the Modern Warfare story that began in 2019?
- How will the standalone, no-Game-Pass-until-2027 pricing model affect uptake compared to recent entries that launched inside the subscription?
- Can Infinity Ward sustain the "Stranded"-style sandbox mission as a recurring idea in future entries, or was it a one-off highlight?
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