Best Campaign in Years: Modern Warfare 4 Hits 92% Positive on Steam, and the Launcher Takes the Heat

Games · Call of Duty · Player Reactions

Five days before Modern Warfare 4 officially launches, the first verdict is already in — and it is not the one the last few years of Call of Duty would have predicted. Campaign early access opened on Friday, October 16 for digital pre-orders, and by Sunday afternoon Steam’s review page for the game held 3,156 user reviews, with 2,897 of them positive. That is a 92 percent approval rating and Steam’s own “Very Positive” label, earned entirely by the single-player campaign — the only part of the game anyone can play so far.

The speed of the climb tells its own story. Insider Gaming flagged the trend on Saturday, when roughly 900 reviews already made Modern Warfare 4 the highest-rated Call of Duty on Steam since 2015’s Black Ops III. By the time TechPowerUp checked on Sunday, the count had reached 1,812 reviews at 90 percent positive. It has nearly doubled again since. For a series whose recent Steam report cards, tracked by SteamDB, read 39 percent for Black Ops 7, 46 percent for Black Ops 6 and 48 percent for Modern Warfare III, this is a different universe.

What players are actually praising

Read the reviews and one sentence keeps coming back in different words: the campaign is the best in years. “Hate to say it, but the campaign was good,” wrote Steam user Lumina™, in the most-endorsed positive review on the page. “Easily the best campaign in years, and probably one of the best in the franchise.” Another player, Grimnir, called it “much darker than recent games,” adding: “Graphics look stunning. Performance is really good too.”

The refrain from long-time players is that this is the best Call of Duty campaign since the 2019 reboot of Modern Warfare — the game this one closes out. Modern Warfare 4 ends the Task Force 141 storyline that began in 2019, following Captain Price as he faces the consequences of his earlier choices, alongside a second thread about a young South Korean soldier, Private Park, fighting a North Korean invasion that begins with an EMP strike on Seoul. The villain is played by Mads Mikkelsen, and players have singled out the performances of Barry Sloane as Price and Samuel Roukin as Ghost. “The best campaign in Modern Warfare history and the perfect conclusion to the series,” wrote one reviewer, Dzejkob.

The structure is getting credit too. After Modern Warfare III’s open-world missions landed flat in 2023, this campaign returns to tight, corridor-style missions across 16 chapters — Korea, New York, Paris and Mumbai among the stops — running roughly eight to ten hours. Performance praise shows up even from players on mid-range PCs, and the in-game menus earned a compliment that sums up the mood: the interface “looks like a video game UI and not like I accidentally opened up a streaming service,” wrote reviewer Niv.

The campaign is only the first act of launch week. DMZ, the extraction mode returning from Modern Warfare II, opens in early access on Tuesday — the official DMZ gameplay trailer is below — and everything players earn there carries into the full game.

The villain of the reviews is a launcher

So why are 259 reviews negative? Read them, and the campaign is barely the target. The dominant complaint, by a wide margin, is that Modern Warfare 4 does not launch as its own game on PC. It runs through Call of Duty HQ, Activision’s shared hub app — a decision some players say they bought this game specifically to escape.

“Activision desperately needs to detach it from that awful ‘Call of Duty HQ’ launcher,” wrote reviewer CRONBACHALFA, who marked the game Not Recommended for that reason alone — in a review that also calls the campaign “the best CoD since MW 2019.” “Having to navigate through a bloated central hub just to launch the game… ruins the user experience.” Activision’s community team, which has been replying to reviews all weekend, answers that the shared install keeps every Call of Duty in one home, cuts the combined storage footprint and carries settings and social features between games.

The confusion cost goodwill before some players fired a shot. The single most-helpful review on the entire page — endorsed by 320 readers — is not a review at all. It is a set of instructions for finding the early access: open the Call of Duty app in your library, go to Properties, open the DLC tab, and tick the Modern Warfare 4 content. Reviews also note a side effect of the arrangement: the game itself shows 0.0 hours played, because Steam logs the time under the Call of Duty HQ app instead.

A BIOS update stands between some players and Tuesday

The second complaint cluster is more serious, and it has a deadline. RICOCHET, Call of Duty’s anti-cheat, now requires PC players to pass a Secure Attestation check — proof, verified against the motherboard, that TPM 2.0 and Secure Boot are genuinely on. The most-discussed negative review on the page, from a player posting as MAWstermind with more than 260 endorsements, describes the check failing on a brand-new Windows 11 machine with both features enabled, and being told the fix is to flash the motherboard’s BIOS firmware. “Unless you want to spend hours troubleshooting hardware security certificates and flashing firmware for a single game, save your money and skip this,” MAWstermind warns.

Activision’s reply, posted in that same thread, is that a small number of specific configurations hit the attestation problem, and that the security measures apply to online play only — pre-order players in that position can still play the campaign now. But online play is the point of this week: Call of Duty has set a required client update for Monday morning, October 19, and the attestation gate is enforced from the moment DMZ early access opens at 10 AM PT on Tuesday. Experience earned in DMZ early access carries into launch progression, so a player locked out on Tuesday starts Friday’s launch behind. The problem is not theoretical for everyone — in HP’s support community, owners of some OMEN desktops have been told HP will not issue the TPM update their machines need, leaving them with no fix at all. Fix guides for the TPM and Secure Boot checks were already circulating this weekend.

The verdict that isn’t in yet

One caution belongs on all of it: everybody reviewing this game right now paid in advance for the privilege. Early-access players are digital pre-order customers — the most committed slice of the audience — and they are judging a campaign, not the multiplayer most people buy Call of Duty for. The players know it. “I’m not commenting on multiplayer yet since it isn’t open,” wrote reviewer Ersd, “and we all know how that’s going to go anyway.”

What is known about multiplayer so far cuts both ways. The open beta in late August drew praise for its gunplay and real criticism for its powerful aim assist and close spawns, as Notebookcheck recapped — and campaign goodwill in this series has not always survived launch day. Modern Warfare 4 launches in full on Friday, October 23, for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, PC and Nintendo Switch 2 — the first Call of Duty on a Nintendo console since Ghosts in 2013 — at $69.99, or $99.99 for the Vault Edition, and it is not part of Game Pass at launch. The editions, the early-access week and the PC requirements are broken down in our early-access guide, and our Modern Warfare 4 page tracks the launch from here.

For now, the shape of launch week is set: a campaign that has won over the skeptics, a launcher fight Activision shows no sign of backing down from, and a security check that PC players would be smart to run before Tuesday morning. The next verdict — DMZ on Tuesday, multiplayer on Friday — is the one that decides whether the best campaign in years becomes the best Call of Duty in years.