After two years of back-to-back Black Ops games, Modern Warfare 4 was always going to feel like a breath of fresh air. Even though the differences between the two series are subtle, the minor tweaks to movement, gunplay, and aesthetic are always noticeable to anyone who plays year in, year out. And I’ve always been a Modern Warfare kid at heart, from way back in 2007, when I lived and breathed Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare for a year straight. The last Call of Duty that truly captivated me was 2019’s Modern Warfare.
Where the two subsequent Modern Warfare games declined ever so slightly from that peak, Modern Warfare 4 has turned a corner in some aspects. New, innovative movement mechanics enable the most fluid traversal the Call of Duty series has ever seen, including the ability to climb pipes, slide on your back, and jump directionally off ledges. These movements are often very situational, but even the smoother mantling, which allows you to shoot one-handed while hanging, lends itself to a more polished experience.
On the other hand, the gunplay is best-in-class, as always. The weapons in Modern Warfare consistently feel varied, and each one is satisfying to use. Call of Duty has always excelled when it comes to the shooting mechanics, and even though the war against Battlefield rages on, few would dispute the claim that the Activision-published series trumps EA’s in that aspect.
For the first time in a while, we’ve got multiple new modes, not including DMZ, the game’s extraction shooter component. Collateral is inspired by Counter-Strike; it’s essentially Search & Destroy (round-based, no respawns, eliminate the enemy team or detonate/defuse the bomb to win), but it works on an economy basis. You earn cash based on your performance and must buy armor, weapons, and equipment at the start of each round.
I’m here for it. Call of Duty and Counter-Strike are so far apart in terms of shooters that they’re almost different genres entirely, but Search & Destroy is rife with players using Ninja to mask their footsteps and suppressed weapons to stop shots from appearing on the minimap. In other words, it’s the sweatiest mode in the series. Collateral limits how much of this is possible, with only a select few weapons available from the buy screen, making it a more level playing field.
Image: Infinity Ward/Activision via Polygon
Then there’s Inflation, which is also themed around cash, albeit in a different format. The more kills you get, the higher the bounty on your head. However, to collect the cash dropped by other players, you must grab it from where they die. (It’s like Kill Confirmed, far and away the worst game mode ever introduced to Call of Duty, and it’s unbelievable that it’s persisted this long.) This results in you constantly being shot in the back because you’re forced to run into the open; if you automatically collected the cash upon killing an enemy, the mode would be immensely better for it.
Finally, there’s Frontline. For some reason, this mode is split into two rounds, but the accumulated score carries over from one to the next. Score is earned simply by getting kills, and hitting 50 triggers a soccer-esque halftime switch, because there’s one more rule in play here: you always spawn back at your base.
This puts Frontline in an interesting position, because on paper, it fixes what is far and away the biggest complaint that I, and most of the community, has: how broken the spawns are. Games in the Call of Duty series have rarely nailed spawns, but some games definitely do it better than others. Modern Warfare 4 is one of the worst recent offenders.
Image: Infinity Ward/Activision via Polygon
There’s a lot of nuance to this, but generally bad, broken, or unfair spawns in a Call of Duty game are when you respawn behind enemy lines, or too close to enemies. If you’re being shot in the back by an enemy that has respawned right behind you, you feel cheated out of a life. If you’re the one spawning there, the kills don’t feel earned.
These spawns rarely happen consistently amongst your team though, which means that whoever is on the receiving end of a seemingly random respawn point ends up at the other side of the map from their team. There goes any hope of teamwork. Predicting enemy spawn locations is also an art in Call of Duty, and “spawn trapping” has long been a viable strategy amongst communicative teams, however frustrating that makes the experience for the other team. At least that’s frustrating as a result of the other team’s skill, rather than broken mechanics.
Image: Infinity Ward/Activision via Polygon
It isn’t helped by the fact that the maps are a little lackluster this year, which is a shame when Black Ops 7 nailed its map design. Cachette (a rural French farm), Lotus (a South Korean village), and Silkworm (a South Korean city center) are the only adequate inclusions, likely because they follow the classic three-lane map design philosophy, something last year’s Call of Duty also excelled in. That said, the underwhelming maps aren’t a dealbreaker for me, which should be evident since I explained 2019’s Modern Warfare was the last game in the series I grinded, and the maps in that game were abhorrent.
Ultimately, great gunplay is what multiplayer lives and dies by in Call of Duty, and Modern Warfare 4 has sunk its teeth into me once again. Will I grind for the completionist camos like I did in the initial reboot of the series? Probably not, because there’s another game on the horizon in a couple of weeks that will occupy a lot of my time. But I can certainly see this year’s Call of Duty being one I return to on a regular basis, when I need to unwind by mowing down enemies with my trusty M4.
