Reviews for Modern Warfare 4 went up on 16 October, a week before the game comes out, and every one of them covers about a third of it. Activision gave digital pre-orders early access to the campaign and nothing else. Multiplayer and DMZ arrive with the full release on 23 October, which is why most of the outlets that filed last Friday filed without a number.
Five of them did put a number on the campaign. GameSpot 7, IGN 8 — tagged as not final — But Why Tho? 8.5, Insider Gaming 9, and GamesBeat’s reviewer at 4.5 out of 5, which is 9 on the scale everyone else uses. Mean of the five: 8.5. Range: 7 to 9.
Two points of spread on sixteen missions that take six to nine hours. That is narrow by this franchise’s standards, and the reviews agree on the reason — the story missions are the best Infinity Ward has shipped since Modern Warfare 2019. North Korea invades the South, a South Korean squad holds a collapsing front, and Price runs an off-book revenge war somewhere else entirely.
The two points sit on one mission
Where the five diverge is a semi-open, behind-enemy-lines mission borrowed from DMZ. IGN calls it a real highlight. GamesBeat says the open stretch is where the pacing goes. GamesRadar, filing without a score, lands somewhere between the two and blames rigid mission design around it rather than the mission itself. A reader of all three comes away knowing the section exists and not much else.
From the outside the disagreement reads like a budget, not a taste. A linear Call Of Duty mission is authored for one route. The art team knows where the camera will be, which means every silhouette, every light and every piece of set dressing can be placed for that read and nothing else — and the moment the player can approach from any direction, that stops being true. You get a kit instead: modular buildings, instanced props, lighting that has to work from all sides. Cheaper per square kilometre and thinner per minute. Players feel it as pacing.
The blog made this exact argument earlier this month, when Gears of War: E-Day turned out to be best when it stays linear — also on campaign-only early reviews, also split on level structure, also scoring an 8 off a wide range. Two shooters in a month is a pattern worth naming. Linear campaigns are expensive and reviewers keep rewarding them, and the open section is where the money ran out.
The floor moved
The more interesting number is not the score. Modern Warfare 4 is the first Modern Warfare that skips PS4 and Xbox One entirely, and Warzone left those machines in June. For thirteen years the baseline for a Call of Duty art budget was a Jaguar CPU and about 5GB of usable memory, because the campaign had to run there too. It does not any more.
What replaces it as the low end is Switch 2, which ships day one — the first Call of Duty on a Nintendo machine since Ghosts on Wii U, and the first time Microsoft’s regulatory promise has actually produced a game, after Black Ops 7 shipped without a Switch version at all. Infinity Ward is doing that build itself, with support from Digital Legends, and Beenox has the PC side.
That is a different proposition to a port handed to an outside team after the fact. We covered what porting Diablo 4 to Switch 2 costs the art team — re-authored LODs, texture budgets cut and recut, lighting rebuilt for a handheld thermal envelope. Doing it in-house, in parallel, means the decisions land in the source assets rather than in a fork of them. Whether it worked is a question for Digital Foundry next week. Nobody has measured the Switch 2 build yet, and I am not going to guess at it.
The number, and what it covers
8.5, from five published campaign scores between 7 and 9, collected on 19 October 2026 and converted to a ten-point scale.
Treat it as provisional in a way most averages are not. IGN’s 8 carries its own “score not final” tag, and one roundup reports no score on IGN’s page at all; the average is 8.5 with it and 8.5 without. More to the point, none of these five has touched the multiplayer, and multiplayer is the part people still play in March. The scores say the campaign is worth the week it takes to finish. They say nothing yet about the game.
Scores collected on 19 October 2026 from the outlets’ own pages and two review round-ups, converted to a 1-10 scale and averaged. Release date and price are Activision’s announced 23 October 2026 and $69.99; the Steam listing for the base game carries the same date.