This is an IGN opinion piece from Matt Purslow, who has been playing campaign shooters since he was old enough to master WASD+mouse. He has completed every Call of Duty campaign at least once.

Warning: this article features some minor spoilers for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4.

We’re in the final months of the year, so it’s time for the annual coin flip: is the latest Call of Duty campaign one of the good ones? The FPS series struggles with a curse few others do, zig-zagging between highs and lows, its annual cadence only making this undulating quality all the more prominent. In the last three years alone we’ve had one of its best campaigns sandwiched between two of its very worst. Thankfully, that on/off nature continues in 2026, which means it's a good year for Call of Duty. Modern Warfare 4’s campaign is one of the series’ best, and much of that is down to the fact that it replicates the formula of one of the greatest shooter campaigns ever made.

Infinity Ward was riding high in the late 2000s. It had successfully pivoted Call of Duty from its 1940s origins to contemporary battlefields with the first Modern Warfare, which presented a somewhat quieter, eerier approach to the studio’s slick combat killboxes – all green night vision, silencers, and decaying Soviet architecture. But for its 2009 sequel, Infinity Ward brought the noise. Set during a Russian invasion of America, it pulled on the iconography of World War 2 movies to create epic battle sequences.

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