TechRadar Review Calls Modern Warfare 4 a Return to Form for Call of Duty
TechRadar review praises Modern Warfare 4's campaign and multiplayer as a series high, while faulting its faction design.
The review said the game reverses the decline it associates with 2025's Black Ops 7 and 2023's Modern Warfare III, both of which it characterised as rushed and sloppy. It singled out the single-player campaign as the best in a decade, praised the visuals and art direction, and called the core multiplayer "wonderfully crafted," blending fast-paced firefights with tactical play. It also pointed to DMZ, an extraction shooter mode, as a substantial addition filled with tense encounters.
The campaign opens in the fictional South Korean city of Hajin, where the player controls Private Park, an unwilling conscript whose routine patrol is interrupted by the start of a full-scale invasion by North Korea. The review said the decision to focus on newcomers rather than the established Modern Warfare cast gives the story higher stakes, and it highlighted Dunn, a US Marine embedded with the local unit, as comic relief that keeps the bleak tone from becoming unrelenting. It described set-piece sequences, including one in which the player switches between squad members across an air base to repel waves of North Korean troops, and a large open-world mission with scavenging, outposts to clear and puzzles to solve, which the review said took several hours and can be resumed from a mission select screen.
Park's storyline is interspersed with missions following Captain Price, who is on the run after the events of the previous game and is hunting members of a cabal across global locations. The review compared those segments to Mission: Impossible-style action, citing an infiltration of a New York nightclub and a car chase through Paris. The text supplied ends mid-sentence as it introduces Vladimir Makarov, a terrorist Price pursued in the previous game.
The review's summary box conflicts with its body text. That box refers to Black Ops 7 rather than Modern Warfare 4, and states that "the rest of the co-op campaign is a rushed and sloppy mess that drags the overall package down," while the same box lists "the best campaign in a decade" among reasons to buy and an "expansive DMZ extraction shooter mode." It also names a new Endgame mode as a highlight. The one criticism in the box that matches the review's subject is that the game "lacks coherent multiplayer factions." TechRadar's verdict nonetheless concluded that the package should not be missed and that the series is "in good hands" if the game sets the trajectory for future instalments.