Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 review-in-progress: A campaign you shouldn't skip

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I just got back from a three-day Modern Warfare 4 review event in Los Angeles. While the ~24 hours of playtime across the campaign, multiplayer, and DMZ was a useful headstart, you never really know how a Call of Duty ranks until you're up against the public. As such, I won't be putting a score on this thing until sometime after launch. In the meantime, below are my thoughts on the campaign, and come back early next week for DMZ impressions.

As I watched the credits roll on Modern Warfare 4's campaign, a sobering thought infiltrated: I've been playing Call of Duty for over 20 years—two-thirds of my life. While I consider it primarily a multiplayer game these days, what I loved about Call of Duty all that time ago was its campaigns. In 2006, as a shy fourth grader at a new school, I made my first friend because we both played Call of Duty 3 on the Wii and spent a week recounting cool moments from the campaign over lunch. By 2007 (the year of Modern Warfare, of course), our lunch table was losing its collective shit over the part where Captain Price slides you the pistol right as he (as we thought at the time) dies.

As memorable as that sequence was, it marked the moment Call of Duty became globe-trotting romps about superhuman, super serious operatives who prevent WW3 before breakfast. It was pretty badass at the time, but what they gained in the sort of spectacle that makes great Sunday Night Football ads, they lost in relatability.

Sure, those early WW2 campaigns were shlocky riffs on movies, but they starred normal people who primarily wanted to go home—grizzled sergeants and green privates who fended off helplessness with humor. They depicted large-scale offensives won by smaller contributions. That's the energy that Infinity Ward tries to harness again in Modern Warfare 4. At times, it totally works.

This is the most fun I've had with a Call of Duty campaign in years, lending mostly to its new, non-elite faces. Over half of the 6-hour campaign revolves around a crew of young South Korean marines (plus a few Americans) running out the clock on their compulsory military service when North Korea suddenly invades. The guys themselves are familiar archetypes—a serious guy, an audience insert who doesn't talk much, an American who fills every silence with a joke—but they're basically charming enough that I cared to remember their names.

I like the idea, even if this latest "ripped from the headlines" premise of a North Korean offensive continues Infinity Ward's streak of flattening complex foreign conflicts through a conventionally American lens (while conveniently making the CIA's dogs the good guys). You'll never guess which global superpower is really pulling the strings this time, ya'll.

Playing a "cog in a machine" again unlocks Modern Warfare 4's most standout missions, many of which remind me of the series' best days. "Mayhem" and "Losing Ground" follow a futile attempt to hold the fictional Hajin City against the overwhelming invasion. They're loud, chaotic fights where your characters are noticeably terrified of what's happening (a rarity in a post-Price world) and your side is constantly outnumbered. Later on, "Counter Attack" ramps up the scale and intensity with a massive beachfront assault that can only really be achieved by throwing a silly amount of money at it. It's certainly a better use of resources than the overly gimmicky, Warzone-y campaigns of recent Black Ops sequels.

Even when the action gets smaller, Private Park (no relation) and friends are simply fun to follow. "Stranded" picks up with the squad crash landing behind enemy lines in North Korea, and its Infinity Ward's best swing at a sandbox level to date. The multi-hour mission establishes three non-linear objectives, side quests, and a hideout where you can craft better armor, guns, and camouflage. It's a comparatively quiet, isolating mission than the ones that precede it—almost like playing a micro Far Cry in the middle of a CoD campaign. It was a bit jarring at first, but ended up a major highlight.

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