Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 has been on sale since 23 October, and the people playing it agree far more about one half of the game than the other. The campaign, which digital pre-order owners could start a week early on 16 October, has been welcomed as one of the best the series has produced. Multiplayer is a different conversation altogether, and most of the anger on Steam traces back to skill-based matchmaking, spawns and a launch map pool that few players are excited about.
We have not reviewed Modern Warfare 4 ourselves, so this roundup leans on what can be measured: Steam’s own review history, critic scores and the patch notes Infinity Ward has published since launch. The game costs $69.99 on Steam, or ₹4,999 in India, and it is out on PS5, Xbox Series X|S, PC and Nintendo Switch 2, with no version for PS4 or Xbox One. Infinity Ward leads development, while Beenox handled the PC version and Digital Legends built the Switch 2 edition, with Treyarch, Sledgehammer Games and Raven Software in support.
The Steam numbers show how quickly the mood changed. During the early access week, when only the story was playable, players left 5,238 positive reviews and 596 negative ones, so roughly nine in ten recommended it. Once multiplayer and DMZ opened on 23 October, however, the picture shifted. Since then the game has collected 3,137 positive and 2,244 negative reviews across all languages, a positive share of 58%, and the daily figure has stayed between roughly 48% and 64% the whole time. Across both periods it sits at 75% positive, while the English score on the store page reads Mostly Positive, with 73% of 5,738 reviews in favour as of 3 November.
That drop needs some context, though, because Modern Warfare 4 is still the best-received new Call of Duty on Steam in a long while. Its 73% among English reviews is ahead of Vanguard at 67%, Modern Warfare III at 46%, Modern Warfare II at 43%, Black Ops 6 at 42% and Black Ops 7 at 35%, and you have to go back to Black Ops III in 2015, which now sits at 90%, to find a yearly release that scores higher on the same store. Critics have been kinder still, with Metacritic listing the game at 85 overall, the PC version at 85, PS5 at 83 and Switch 2 at 86. Xbox CEO Asha Sharma went as far as calling it “one of the most celebrated Call of Duty games in its 24-year history” when she announced that the series had passed $40 billion in lifetime revenue.
A campaign players actually want to finish
Modern Warfare 4 closes out the rebooted Modern Warfare series that began in 2019, and it opens with North Korea invading the South. Much of the early story follows Private Park Hyun-jun, a young South Korean soldier whose squad is trying to hold the city of Hajin, while a second thread picks up where Modern Warfare III left off. Task Force 141 has broken up and Captain Price is on the run, with Ghost and Gaz under orders to bring him in. Price, meanwhile, is working off the books alongside Valeria Garza of the Las Almas Cartel, chasing a weapon on its way to a villain known as the Archer, played by Mads Mikkelsen, and CIA station chief Kate Laswell is still in touch with him.
Over 16 missions the story travels from Hajin to a New York nightclub, a car chase through Paris and a night raid in Mumbai, where Price and Gaz split into two teams. Mumbai later returns as one of the 12 core multiplayer maps, and one early mission even puts players in the boots of a North Korean soldier hunting a defector. Most players say they finished on Normal in six to eight hours, and anyone who beats it on Realism unlocks YOLO mode, a one-life difficulty that sends you back to the first mission the moment you die.
That pacing is what most of the positive Steam reviews talk about. Players describe the Hajin opening as an instant hook, and many rank the campaign among the best the series has made, which the 90% score from early access week backs up. Fans of the 2019 reboot in particular say this darker, more grounded story feels closer to that game than to the recent Black Ops entries.
The Korean setting has also spilled over into politics. In South Korea, lawmakers have told President Lee Jae Myung to play the game to understand the threat from the North, and the Culture Minister has said it will not be censored, as our report on the Modern Warfare 4 Korea controversy explains in more detail.
The goodwill carries over into how the game handles, too. Infinity Ward rebuilt its gunplay under a system it calls Ballistic Authority, which removes bloom and reworks recoil, convergence and handling, and movement now includes mantling, climbing, hanging and shimmying along ledges. All of it is slower than the omnimovement of Black Ops 6 and Black Ops 7, which is what fans of Modern Warfare (2019) had been asking for, and casual and competitive players alike have been positive about how the guns feel.
Players have also welcomed Infinity Ward’s promise to keep operator skins realistic, and when the Halloween mode Possession arrived on 29 October, it came with a “Non-MilSim Content” warning on its playlist. DMZ is back from day one as well, with squads of up to three, a Forward Operating Base hub and trait trees, while Kill Block, a modular map with more than 500 possible layouts, has given Gunfight players something new to learn every round.
Why multiplayer is dragging the score down
Skill-based matchmaking is the complaint that comes up most often. Creators and regular players say it feels at least as strong as it did in the August beta, and that a good match is often followed by a much harder lobby. Multiplayer creative director Joe Cecot said in a launch-week interview that he is not sure a perfect matchmaking system exists, adding that the team uses player data with the aim of making every match a good one. So far, however, Infinity Ward has not announced any change to how matchmaking works.
Spawns are the next big frustration, with players describing respawns that drop enemies behind them or put them next to the same opponent several times in a row. Infinity Ward improved spawn locations and respawn timing in Hijack on 24 October, and its launch patch notes say work is continuing on player separation, squad spawning and Hardpoint spawns.
Opinion on the 12 core 6v6 maps is mixed as well, and some players argue that the long sightlines reward camping over movement. Shipment was added on 27 October, and more maps arrive with Season 1. Time to kill is even more divisive, since some players say gunfights last longer than in recent Modern Warfare games while others feel they die too quickly, and a few put the blame on hit registration instead. The first weapon tuning on 28 October aimed for a more consistent time to kill by cutting neck and upper-body damage on some assault rifles and raising SMG damage to the arms and hands, and our MW4 launch patch notes cover every change.
The launch has not been especially clean either. DMZ had an item duplication glitch in its first week, and Infinity Ward has since started enforcement against players who used it. A dive exploit after sprint jumps was patched by cutting dive speed by 23%, with a longer-term fix still to come, and DMZ players who missed a Level 37 armour reward are being compensated, according to the studio. Some challenges were also still not tracking properly on 28 October. On PC, meanwhile, the game needs TPM 2.0, Secure Boot and 115 GB of SSD space, as listed in our Modern Warfare 4 PC specs, and mouse-and-keyboard players continue to complain about controller aim assist.
What Season 1 has to fix
Season 1 begins on 6 November, and it is Infinity Ward’s first real chance to win back the multiplayer crowd. Multiplayer gets two new 6v6 maps in Backstab and Canyon, along with a reworked Shoot House, while Ministry and Overflow are due mid-season. DMZ adds the X01 black site near Hajin with new enemies and bosses, and Warzone moves over to Modern Warfare 4 with the Hajin and Zodiac maps, alongside the return of Verdansk and Rebirth Island. The Battle Pass has 100 tiers and costs 1,100 COD Points, and the full list of changes is in the official Season 1 announcement.
If you buy Call of Duty mainly for the campaign, player opinion on Modern Warfare 4 is about as positive as it has been for any recent entry, which makes it an easy pick. Multiplayer players face a harder decision, though, because the Steam numbers point to a real chance of frustration with matchmaking and spawns, and waiting to see what Season 1 fixes is a sensible call, unless DMZ is your main mode, since it has the most new content coming in the update.
