Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 Review (Switch 2): Ending on a Good Price

While Call of Duty titles might not hold the same cultural dominance they once did with the core gaming crowd, the casual audience still comes in droves to the yearly entry as one of the few games they decide to buy that year. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 brings the strongest campaign the series has had in a long time, backed up by the usual reliably solid multiplayer, plus an expanded DMZ for another attempt at a Call of Duty-flavored extraction experience. Having all of this in a portable manner on the Nintendo Switch 2 makes it easy to enjoy Call of Duty in a different way, but at the end of the day, it can’t rise above the peak the series has set for itself for mass appeal.

Ending One Story for Another?

As promised by Infinity Ward, the Modern Warfare 4 campaign is the end of the rebooted series. Knowing the finality of that, the game is a good rush of action, regularly jumping between various warzones filled with armies or tight corridors to sneak past enemies. It will not be memorable for its storytelling overall, but Infinity Ward was not afraid to make some bold choices inside its blockbuster action movie by killing off various important characters, and maybe setting up their next series with a new, capable team that I ended up empathizing with.

Throughout the campaign, you are routinely hopping between Captain John Price and South Korean soldier Park Hyun-Jun. The two never directly meet, but their stories are intertwined interestingly. One moment you have an impactful decision made by one that later dictates the course of action the other has to take. Price has gone rogue and is on the run, while Park is just working with his team to survive a North Korean invasion. Overall, the structure lays a sturdy foundation for the story. Between hunting down Mads Mikkelsen’s Archer and the North Korean war general who has become obsessed with world domination, both villains kept me wanting to see what happened next.

Typically, Call of Duty stories are pretty predictable. Bombastic set pieces set up for blood-pumping action sequences with plenty of moments to observe and think about the horrors of war. While there is definitely plenty of that here, there’s a more personal story that I found quite interesting. As a South Korean forced into the military, Park is forced into a war he doesn’t want to be part of. Now and then, you get a look at how he and the other Koreans on the team are still fighting back against the North Koreans even though their government forces them into a fight they don’t necessarily want to be front-and-center for. There’s a theme of “making choices for yourself” that I felt was well executed without becoming too ham-fisted in its focus. I thought Infinity Ward handled the two stories quite well, and I would really like to see more of Park in the future in a potential new series if it goes that way.

On Price’s side, the story is all focused on what lines a person is willing to cross to get the job done. While still exciting from an action standpoint, I felt his journey here wasn’t as strong as Park’s. He regularly goes against everything he believes in just to go up against his teammates from previous games just to end with a “Oh, I shouldn’t have done that” moment. It’s a rather weak narrative ending for an iconic character in the franchise.

Gameplay-wise, there aren’t many new additions. Fist-fighting is the big new feature, which regularly happens while playing as Price. While exciting in the moment, it’s just a matter of timing your parry correctly and spamming your punch. It can set up a cutscene to be impactful, but it doesn’t necessarily make you feel like you are a fighting pro or anything. There are also times it’s hard to tell what’s a cutscene and what’s gameplay in these sections, so getting a game over screen because you thought control was being taken from you is quite frustrating.

While not necessarily new, I did particularly enjoy the running sections throughout the missions. There are plenty of times in Call of Duty’s past where you are either chasing someone down or running for exfil when the building you’re in is coming down around you. That is here, but the focus on making your character mantle objects, climb siding, and jump from dangerous slides keeps you on your feet and feels like more than just a cutscene where you’re holding the stick forward.

What’s Old is Still Old

On the multiplayer side, things are pretty standard all around. Various modes throw you into matches of constant rushing action, and yep, it’s Call of Duty. Even after taking a year off and not touching last year’s game, I still feel quite tired whenever I play a new Call of Duty multiplayer. The controls and guns feel about the same quality-wise as you expect, but at the end of the day, I played a lot of this game when I was in high school in the late 2000s. If you’ve played one Call of Duty in the last 23 years, you have also played a lot of this. New toys, modes, and pretty boring maps to play with don’t do enough to feel special.

That said, bringing back the Switch 2 factor, playing multiplayer portably while having a movie or show on my TV in the background was kind of surreal. The game has full crossplay (which can be turned off if you want) and cross-progression, so I was able to jump between my Switch and Xbox and have all of my levels, unlocks, and loadouts ready to go right away. With the suitable performance, I found this version to not miss a beat compared to the more powerful Xbox Series X.

For DMZ, things have been expanded on since its last appearance in Modern Warfare 2. To be frank, I’m not an extraction shooter fan, and this did nothing to win me over. I tried following story missions, but all they have you do is go somewhere and shoot up a bunch of bot enemies that all act the same way unless they have armor on. Also, dealing with the curse of relying on random teammates to help you in these sections is unreliable at best. There are a lot of progression items for fans of this game type, but I’m not one of them.

On-the-Go Warfare

If you play Modern Warfare 4 on the Switch 2, you are doing so with the knowledge that it comes at the cost of graphical fidelity. Compared to other versions of the game, gameplay is much blurrier, and there are times of pop-in. That said, I was very impressed with how this game performs. The framerate stays at a smooth 30 frames per second, loading times seem comparable to the Xbox version, and as someone who doesn’t need to have the most impressive graphics to be happy, I thought the game looked good enough to still be able to enjoy each mode.

The portable nature does have a pretty big downside, though. The install size is very large for the Switch 2, and it’s only going to take up more space over time. If you want to get the game on the portable console, I’d highly recommend having a good microSD card unless you’re fine with deleting a bunch of other games.

The Switch 2 allows you to control your gunplay in a few different ways. Playing in handheld with standard Joy-Con was actually better than I thought it would be. It’s not as good as with a Pro Controller as you might expect, but the sticks were comfortable enough to get me through the campaign and a few multiplayer matches without ruining the experience, as I expect would be the case were I using the original Joy-Con. The mouse controls are also pretty intuitive and easy to jump in and out of. I did find the motion controls a bit wonky, but those who played Call of Duty on the Wii might have a bigger appreciation for them.

Final Verdict

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 is a good package when taken as a whole. If you have been waiting for a return to form for CoD campaigns, I believe the single-player here is definitely the best of the rebooted Modern Warfare games. Multiplayer is about as standard as it gets, which may be good for the regular players, but it hasn’t been impressive or surprising for a very long time. In total, Modern Warfare 4 is pretty on par with, or slightly above, Call of Duty releases in the last decade, which isn’t a bad thing. It’s just not necessarily something worthy of great discussion.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 was reviewed on Nintendo Switch 2 with a code provided by Activision. It is also on PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X.

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