Modern Warfare 4 Campaign Reviews Begin: IGN Calls It ‘Best MW Since 2019’

Reviews of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4‘s campaign went live on October 16, the same day digital pre-order Campaign Early Access opened. IGN’s Simon Cardy published a Review In Progress that calls the campaign “the best Modern Warfare has been since its 2019 reboot by quite some distance.” Cardy stops short of calling it “an all-timer” on the level of All Ghillied Up or Clean House. DMZ and multiplayer reviews are still to come.

Cardy logged roughly seven hours across the 16 missions. Standouts include a D-Day-style Korean beach landing, an airfield escape with character switching, and a snow-shrouded open mission called Stranded that borrows from the DMZ extraction mode. The writeup praises the Korean-side cast and storyline, calls the Mads Mikkelsen-voiced villain The Archer “classically unsettling” but short on screen time, and notes that the team cut a lot of past-game characters to keep the plot tight. Expect a full IGN score when the embargoed multiplayer and DMZ reviews drop closer to launch.

Variety also published a long interview today with Infinity Ward narrative director Jeff Negas about how the cast came together. Negas, a former Naughty Dog writer on Uncharted and The Last of Us, said the studio often starts with a character design and rewrites to fit the actor. The full cast includes Barry Sloane as Captain Price, Samuel Roukin as Ghost, Elliot Knight as Gaz, Young Mazino as Private Park, Rya Kihlstedt as Kate Laswell, María Elisa Camargo as Valeria Garza, and Prisca Kim as North Korean officer Ri Ju-Young, who Negas singled out as reshaping the role with “quiet power.” Negas said bringing in Mikkelsen, an actor Variety described as recognizable for villain roles, was a deliberate choice: “we needed something the audience could recognize, a wider audience could recognize, as quickly as we could.”

What is actually live today. Digital pre-order Campaign early access opened on Oct 16. The next milestone is DMZ early access on Oct 20, then the full launch on Oct 23 across PS5, Xbox Series X|S, PC (Steam and Battle.net), and Nintendo Switch 2. Game Pass subscribers do not get the game at launch. Activision confirmed this week that MW4 reaches the Game Pass library in Holiday 2027.

What critics are saying so far. IGN’s verdict is the most concrete review to land on day one of Early Access and frames the campaign as the rare bright spot in a Modern Warfare run that has stumbled since 2022. The MW4 campaign is the only piece reviewers have played so far. Expect a second wave of impressions once DMZ early access goes live on Oct 20. Today’s coverage is also notable for what it is not: a full numeric score, multiplayer impressions, or a Multiplayer vs Campaign comparison. All of those wait for the full launch on Oct 23.

Our Modern Warfare 4 release time guide covers the unlock windows for the full launch and Early Access, the Editions Compared guide breaks down Standard vs Vault, the Early Access explainer covers how to start today, and the Game Pass and PS Plus answer lays out the Holiday 2027 Game Pass date that Activision confirmed this week.

Edited by Kerwin Stewart, Editor-in-Chief · How we report