The Modern Warfare 4 campaign opens with a joint squad of South Korean and US Marines on break from a training exercise suddenly finding themselves on the frontline of a North Korean invasion. This is the point at which you take control of Park Hyun Jun, a young private doing his mandatory service who’s unsure of what’s next for him, but now finds himself a professional soldier. Park is featured in about half of the campaign’s sixteen missions, and these give you the chance to experience the large-scale combat the series is known for. And since this is a Modern Warfare game it has a near future setting - you’ll fight these battles with the weapons available to today’s soldiers with no robots in sight.
The campaign takes a dual timeline approach to its story. While Park is facing the leading edge of an invasion, series regular John Price appears in missions that take place prior to the war and show the international conspiracy that led to a North Korean coup that installed a new leader with an appetite for conquest. Price’s missions are the game’s covert ops missions, but in Modern Warfare 4 the line begins to blur between the good guys and bad guys as Price’s obsessive pursuit of his long-time antagonists leads him to go rogue. If you’ve been following Modern Warfare’s storyline through each of its iterations, you’ll see a lot of familiar faces. I don’t want to give any spoilers here, but a lot of the series’ storylines reach their conclusion and there will be some shocking and emotional moments in store for you in Price’s missions. Gameplay features a mix of stealth missions, chases through city streets and across rooftops, some epic one-on-one fights, and, of course, plenty of small arms firefights.
Interspersed with Price’s missions in the past are a few missions that put you inside North Korea’s inner circle. These not only give you a narrative perspective on what is happening behind enemy lines, but give you a look at how brutal life is under an authoritarian regime. One mission in particular is both disturbing and emotionally draining as the full brutality of the North Korean regime and its complete disregard for the lives of its citizens is put on full display. Parents, take heed of the game’s Mature rating.
Overall, this is a pretty classic Call of Duty campaign. A mix of globe-trotting covert ops missions, large-scale clashes between opposing armies, and those fun missions that have you directing incoming fire or manning heavy weapons. This is what you expect from a Call of Duty campaign, but there’s a surprise waiting for you in the middle of it all.
Halfway through the campaign, Park and his squad find themselves trapped behind enemy lines in North Korea. This mission, Stranded, takes place on an open-world map and serves as a bit of an introduction to the game’s DMZ mode. You begin holed-up underground with next to no equipment, with your only hope of rescue tied to making it safe for exfil. To make that happen, you need to complete three primary objectives which involve taking down three heavily guarded facilities. You’re free to go for them right away, but not only would you be making things extremely difficult on yourself, you’d be missing out on a map filled with secrets, puzzles, side missions, and, frankly, a lot of fun. There’s so much to do here, you can turn what is probably about a six-hour campaign into twice that. And if you’re worried about interrupting the narrative flow of the campaign by spending too long in this mission, once you complete the campaign you can go back into Stranded and your progress will be saved.
Here are just a few of the optional activities I tried in Stranded:
Investigating a locations of interest
Encountering a patrol near a village
Assaulting an enemy outpost
I really enjoyed the campaign, but I want to note a couple of things about it that break the trend of the past few years. While you can earn calling cards from playing through the campaign, there’s no experience tie-in to the other modes. You won’t progress in level for the other game modes, and you will not earn any weapon XP. Also, this is a truly single player experience. Drop-in/drop-out co-op doesn’t exist here, and while that’s understandable given the nature of the Price missions, it certainly would have been fun to have a friend join for an outpost assault in Stranded or to help repel the North Korean army from Haijin City.