This PS5 Pro game just consumed my whole weekend – it's a welcome return
Modern Warfare 4 is closer to the COD I like
It's been a hot minute since a Call of Duty game managed to really grab me. The last couple of entries felt rushed at the best of times, but even if you were a Multiplayer-only type of player, you'd have to gel with the way they pushed into quicker and quicker territory. I'm not into movement shooters, so the return of a slightly more grounded style with Modern Warfare 4 has been a real pleasure this past weekend.
That said, it's the campaign that I mainlined the most efficiently, which is never too huge a challenge given COD's generally modest single-player runtimes. After the enormous disappointment of MW3, I was at least a little interested to see how Infinity Ward innovated and switched things up.
To be honest, I'm not sure this is the return to form that it's been greeted as, having rolled credits on it. While there are some great missions and the production value is right back up there, I still didn't really do anything that felt unlike something from previous games – including the open-world "Stranded" mission that felt like a glimpse into how boring a huge COD could really be.
That's harsh, of course, and the story ripped along at a good pace, but I was disappointed by how little time I spent with a new team of interesting and well-acted South Korean marines, instead repeatedly getting hooked back into the overarching storyline driven by Captain Price.
Price is now a full-on war criminal, for the uninitiated, and it's quite funny to watch the recap video included in the game, showing us a principled and straightforward operator, before dropping into the campaign and watching him be at first complicit and then fully participating in large-scale civilian death.
Still, while its story continued to get sillier and sillier, it's undeniably true that the COD mission format still feels exhilarating to play. As you push through front lines, accompanied by dozens of other marines, the sense of scale is often really impressive, and it crucially all looks pretty stellar.
In fact, playing on my PS5 Pro I was reminded time and again that Infinity Ward really know how to push the COD game engine to its limits. From night-time lighting that's impressively realistic, to explosions that shake your very bones when they hit, this is a really impressive-looking campaign.
It features a few locations that are just insanely detailed if you stop and take the time to soak them in, too. The Korean convenience store from the game's opening moments is perhaps the most photorealistic storefront I've ever seen in a game.
On the PS5 Pro, this is all rendered extremely sharply, too, with the console able to keep things even smoother than its less powerful sibling, without cutting back on the level of detail. Since my friends all game on PlayStation, this is another title that's pulled me away from my gaming PC right now.
As I've come to expect from Infinity Ward, the sound design is excellent. I'm playing with the SteelSeries Arctis Nova Elite connected, and the booming soundscapes of each battle are quite something to hear. Of course, next up is a multiplayer binge for me, and I'll be interested to see how reliable the audio is on this front.
If you've sat out the last couple of COD games, like me, because they just got too twitchy and were a little far from the traditional gameplay you enjoy, then I'd say this is one to take a look at. It's the biggest step back to basics that COD has made since 2019, and I can only hope it teaches Activision a lesson about leaning too far into competition with Fortnite.
