Back in 2023, Modern Warfare III‘s multiplayer was a stale retread. It played fine, but it was more of what Call of Duty players had been grinding for years, and too much of the same thing left a sour taste. Two Black Ops games later, Infinity Ward is back running the show, and the Modern Warfare 4 multiplayer is a massive improvement over what fans got three years ago.
The Modern Warfare 4 multiplayer experience launches with 12 core 6v6 maps, four Gunfight maps, a shifting training ground called Kill Block, and three 32v32 Combat Outpost maps built around vehicles and infantry. DMZ is back, too, now set in Hajin, the exclusion zone the campaign leaves behind, and this time it feels like a mode worth sticking with.
Movement feels way more grounded again in Modern Warfare 4 multiplayer.
Pacing in the Modern Warfare 4 multiplayer is the first big change. Movement is slower and more grounded than in the last two Black Ops entries. Nobody is diving sideways through doorways anymore. Players slide and mantle like actual soldiers again, bringing back the heavier, boots-on-the-ground rhythm a lot of fans have missed.
Those new tricks are subtle, but they add a lot to the gameplay. Mantle Slide lets players vault over low cover straight into a slide, while double-tapping crouch mid-sprint drops into a longer Supine Slide that ends flat on your back, feet first. Neither mechanic pushes the pace back toward Black Ops territory, and a Mobility Course is there for anyone who wants to practice the timing between matches.
Infinity Ward also ditched weapon bloom, so shots fire straight from the barrel without random spread. The M4 does everything a reliable assault rifle should, but the WZ.55 Striga steals the show once SMGs enter the rotation. Time to kill feels fair, with just enough of a window to snap back and win a fight after getting caught off guard.
The map pool in the Modern Warfare 4 multiplayer is the biggest jump from MWIII, mixing long lanes with messy close-quarters spots so snipers and SMG rushers both have somewhere to go. Coal was an early surprise. It’s set in the remains of an old Soviet coal plant up in the mountains, and its tangled ore chutes and run-down processing buildings are a ton of fun to tear through. The routes vary enough that matches rarely play out the same way twice. The firefights in the giant coal shaft in the middle are absolute peak.
Nautical is the weak link. Fighting across a South Korean ferry pulling away from a war zone, with fires burning across its starboard side, should be a highlight, but the layout feels pretty generic. Worse, the deck is short enough that fights start pretty quickly after spawning, which is chaotic fun right up until the other team gets the drop on you and starts spawn camping.
Nautical also exposes the map pool’s weak spot. Some layouts are too easy to solve, and a team that plays together will lock down the power positions fast. Get stuck in a lobby of randoms against a coordinated squad, and it’s tough to pull off a win or even put up a decent individual game.
Collateral is the best new mode in the Modern Warfare 4 multiplayer.
The rest of the lineup echoes the campaign’s locations. Rooftops sends players across the snow-lined roof of a New York hotel, complete with a greenhouse and a pigeon coop. Reactor U92 puts the fight inside a South Korean reactor mid-meltdown, and Silkworm packs a South Korean shopping district around a convenience store and a subway entrance.
Kill Block shifts its sightlines and cover between matches and Gunfight rounds, with more than 500 possible layouts that include nods to classic Modern Warfare locations. It hosts 3v3 Gunfight and a new 10v10 Gunfight mode. Combining Gunfight and an ever-changing map means nobody ever knows what they’re loading into.
Collateral is the best new mode in the Modern Warfare 4 multiplayer. Players earn cash from kills and objectives, then spend it on a limited selection of weapons and gear each round. Everyone gets one life per round, and getting eliminated wipes the entire loadout. It’s basically Counter-Strike in CoD, and it’s great with a team that communicates.
Loadouts in the Modern Warfare 4 multiplayer are in a great spot.
Inflation hands out cash for kills, and anyone who carries enough to cross the High Value Target
threshold gets revealed to the entire enemy team. Hijack sends teams carrying and passing a Data Spike toward the enemy’s Comm Station to plant it. Staples like Team Deathmatch, Domination, Hardpoint, and Kill Confirmed are all back, too.
Combat Outpost is the new 32v32 spin on Ground War, with teams establishing Outposts to earn resources on maps like Wolves Stadium and Imjin Farmland. It’s also the package’s biggest letdown. Massive objective battles have their moments, but they don’t hit the same in a game built around smaller-scale fights. Vehicles and big maps can be fun, they just don’t feel special enough here to justify the mode.
Loadouts in the Modern Warfare 4 multiplayer are in a great spot. Each class picks three of 18 perks, and fully leveling a weapon unlocks Apex Attachments that can change how it handles. Players who don’t want to spend 20 minutes tinkering in the menus can let Gunny, a new build assistant, put together a weapon build based on their playstyle. Killstreaks also count objective play, so there is real incentive to not play every mode like its Team Deathmatch.
The worry with the loadout system is how easy copying builds has become. Once streamers and the community find the meta setups, everyone is going to run them. Hopefully Infinity Ward planned for that, or at least stays aggressive with balance patches so no single setup takes over the lobbies.
When DMZ last showed up in Modern Warfare II, it carried a beta tag and felt like it. In Modern Warfare 4, it’s a full mode. Players drop into Hajin solo or with a squad and choose between Story Missions, Dynamic Operations, and Free Roam, and the story missions are the strongest of the three.
My best run started with a story mission that gave us zero hand-holding. We had to figure out an unstated step through trial and error (and lots of dying) just to grab a specific item, and solving that small puzzle on our own felt great.
Things got hairier when we had to navigate in the dark without the night vision goggles we were supposed to have. Then came the exfil, a one-of-a-kind event, and I missed it. That meant getting out alone, sneaking past a roaming tank boss, and dodging a few other squads before barely reaching extraction. It was exhilarating.
Separately-leveled operators give DMZ its long-term hook.
Operators give DMZ its long-term hook. Players deploy as one of the Operators on their Active Duty roster, and each one levels up separately. Trait Points earned in the field belong to that Operator alone and go into three trait trees: Warfighter, Scout, and Survivalist. There are 66 Traits in total but a cap of only 18 points per Operator before Prestige, so every build forces real choices. One Operator can be built for heavy firefights while another leans into scavenging.
That progression is also what makes dying hurt. An Operator eliminated in Hajin goes MIA, and getting them back costs DMZ Cash, with the price climbing the more Traits they’ve unlocked. Pay up, and they return with every Trait intact but stripped of the gear they carried in.
Every harder story mission is a bet with your best gear and a fully built Operator on the line, and the walk to exfil with a full pack is tense in a way a regular multiplayer match never is. Missing that exfil stung for exactly that reason, which made getting out alive anyway feel even better.
The Modern Warfare 4 multiplayer feels fair from the first match.
The mode still has rough edges. The AI starts off easy and ramps up the more you kill. By the later story missions, the hunter squads sent after you are downright brutal, and miniboss lieutenants can show up in any match. That difficulty ramp is DMZ’s main problem right now. The jump from pushover to seemingly impossible is too steep and needs some tuning.
Between runs, players head back to the Forward Operating Base to craft gear on the 3D Printer and stash what they’ve extracted. The loop itself is smart, but feeding it can turn into a chore. What you find comes down to luck, and a bad streak means extra deployments just to track down a few basic materials.
The Modern Warfare 4 multiplayer feels fair from the first match, and DMZ gives players a way to feel the thrills of an extraction shooter with the gunplay and map creativity that make Call of Duty stand out. Just don’t miss the exfil.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 Multiplayer
9/10
TL;DR
The Modern Warfare 4 multiplayer feels fair from the first match, and DMZ gives players a way to feel the thrills of an extraction shooter with the gunplay and map creativity that make Call of Duty stand out.