Modern Warfare 4 Review: Call of Duty's Old Problem Is Harder to Ignore

Disliking Call of Duty is easy. The franchise has run on an annual cycle of development, marketing, and controversy for 22 years, and it has become a regular fixture in the way mainstream games touch on the military. A new review of Modern Warfare 4 starts from that discomfort and argues that the newest entry is no exception.

The reviewer draws a line between the recent Black Ops entries and the Modern Warfare branch. Black Ops 7, released in 2025, drifted into science-fiction territory that the reviewer found close to absurd. The Modern Warfare stories, by comparison, sit closer to real conflicts and real places. That grounding is the reason they unsettle the critic. Players step into semi-fictional British and American soldiers carrying out covert operations on foreign soil, and the campaign asks them to take part in killings driven by ideology.

The review's central complaint is that the story offers little in the way of a counterweight. Instead of examining what these operations cost, the reviewer says, the game presents them as routine and leaves the player with a clean division between friend and enemy. That framing, the critic argues, is closer to propaganda than to storytelling, and it is hard to shake even when the gunplay is polished.

Whether readers agree is likely to depend on how they already feel about the series. Fans who see Call of Duty as pure spectacle may shrug off the criticism. For others, the review makes a case that the franchise's realism is exactly what makes its message harder to accept, and that a more honest war story would have to ask players what they are being asked to cheer for.