Call of Duty®: Modern Warfare® 4

The most obvious and frustrating let-down The story in this campaign is incredible. The story, direction, acting, gameplay and graphics are all of the highest standard. It’s the best campaign I’ve played in the series. In a way, because of this campaign, the reboot has become better for me than the original trilogy. But, unfortunately, the campaign isn’t even on a par with a third of the game, whilst everything else raises a lot of questions. 10/10 DMZ is a really cool, enjoyable and addictive mode. But it’s not the sort of thing that’ll keep you hooked for a whole year. It’s nice to pop into it a couple of times in the evening. The missions are better than in the 2022 beta; the bosses are fun, but at their core they’re very boring and repetitive—just damage sponges in different guises. The loot is interesting, and the AI has become smarter and more dangerous. But I just can’t help wondering: why should I play this? What’s the point? If I want a proper extraction shooter, I’ll go and play Tarkov, the gold standard of the genre. It’s hard to say the mode is bad – it’s actually good. But it’s nothing fantastic, and certainly not anything like what was shown in the trailers. 6/10 And now, the main part of the game – multiplayer. It’s awful. Really, really bad. Horrible. I’d even say it’s practically unplayable. The maps aren’t designed to be played on. They’re designed for sitting and lying around on. The sounds are so loud that you can hear footsteps from 15 metres away, which completely ruins any sense of aggressive gameplay. Hit detection is dreadful, and the damage distribution simply doesn’t work, which often results in me being killed with just five shots from an M4, whilst I, having fired the same number of shots, only deal 97 damage. As I’ve already said, the maps are dreadful. There isn’t a single good map in the game. If we’re being generous, perhaps two of them could be classified as B-grade. Visibility is non-existent. The only positives worth mentioning are the shooting and movement. The shooting is incredible. I haven’t enjoyed killing this much in a long time. Movement is trickier to assess; it’s good. It’s nice to return to something more classic and slower-paced after BO6 and BO7. But it still falls short of MW3. At times, it feels very clunky. Also, our friends at Infinity Ward have brought back SBMM once again. It’s stronger than in any other title and turns every match into a ranked. Unfortunately, Infinity Ward haven’t managed to create a multiplayer experience that comes anywhere near the standard set by Sledgehammer Games in MW3 and Treyarch in BO7. Overall, you can still get some enjoyment out of it, but I certainly wouldn’t call this multiplayer fun. 3/10