Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, the 2019 reboot from Infinity Ward and Activision, is the sixteenth game in the series and the one that reminded people why the sub-series mattered. It is a first-person shooter with a single-player campaign, cooperative Special Ops missions and a multiplayer suite with cross-platform play. All three are competent. The campaign is the reason to talk about it.
Trailer, via PlayStation.
Price, Farah and Alex
The story opens with a CIA officer losing a shipment of chemical weapons during a covert operation in Eastern Europe. The next day, suicide bombers from a terrorist group called Al-Qatala attack London. British SAS Captain John Price, CIA operative Alex and Farah Karim, leader of the Urzikstan Liberation Force, join up to track the chemicals and confront both the terrorists and a Russian general whose occupation has destabilized the fictional Republic of Urzikstan for decades.
Farah is the campaign’s best decision. She is fighting foreign occupation and extremism in her own country at the same time, and the game gives her the moral center. Alex has to decide how far he will go outside official channels. Price does what Price does, which is assemble a coalition that can stop the weapons before they hit civilians.
Tactical Realism
The campaign emphasizes what Infinity Ward calls tactical realism: morally complex scenarios, civilian threat assessments and night-vision operations. In practice that means missions where the question is not whether to shoot but whether the person in the doorway is armed. Those sections are tense in a way the series had not managed for years, and they are the reason the campaign is remembered.
Multiplayer
Multiplayer got a revised gunplay system with extensive weapon customization. Realism mode strips the HUD. Ground War supports more than 100 players. Gunfight is a 2v2 mode that turned out to be the most addictive thing in the package. The seasonal battle pass replaced the old season pass, with content delivered as free updates, and the free-to-play battle royale Warzone arrived after launch.
Where It Falls Short
The campaign is short, and its ambitions outrun its willingness to commit. It raises hard questions about occupation and collateral damage and then answers them with a set piece. The multiplayer’s customization depth is real, but the maps at launch were uneven, and Ground War’s scale came at the cost of coherence. Special Ops is the weakest of the three modes, padding rather than content.
The Verdict
Modern Warfare shipped on PlayStation 4, Xbox One and Windows, and later reached PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S. It is the best Call of Duty campaign in years and a solid multiplayer game that was quickly overshadowed by its own free spin-off. That is a strange legacy for a game this good, and it is still a good game.
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