Modern Warfare 4 Campaign Draws 90% Positive Steam Reviews in Early Access

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 does not go on sale until 23 October, yet its campaign has been playable since 16 October for anyone who pre-ordered digitally, and those players have given it the best Steam reception the series has had in more than a decade. TechPowerUp's tally on 18 October counted 1,630 positive reviews out of 1,812, a 90% score and a "Very Positive" label on the store page. SteamDB's weighted measure for the same reviews was 85.78%, lower because the site's formula pulls titles with few ratings toward 50%.

Related reading: Modern Warfare 4's PC Build Adds a New Mode, a 90 FPS Target, and a 115 GB Floor · Triple-i Initiative Packs 40 Indie Announcements Into 45 Minutes.

The two figures use different methods, but they point the same way. A week before launch the campaign is landing well with the people most inclined to give it a fair hearing.

The first 1,812 reviews

Insider Gaming spotted the pattern earlier, at around 900 reviews, when SteamDB had the game at 81.15% and it was already the best-rated Call of Duty on Steam since 2015's Black Ops III. SteamDB lists Black Ops III at 84.36%. The entries that followed sat far lower: Black Ops 7 at 38.71%, Black Ops 6 at 45.75%, Modern Warfare III at 48.19% and Modern Warfare II at 47.10%, none of them within reach of the halfway mark.

A 90% score against that backdrop is a sharp break in a pattern. It also has an obvious cause. Steam reviews written during a paid early-access window come from customers who bought before reading a single verdict, and they were judging a campaign rather than a full game.

The reviews themselves are not a monolith. TechPowerUp's piece is a count, not a survey of complaints, and 182 negative reviews out of 1,812 is enough dissent to matter at this scale. What the aggregate shows is that the campaign met the expectations of the crowd that showed up first.

Steam's review bands are coarse. A game at 90% is Very Positive; Overwhelmingly Positive begins at 95%, which a title with under 2,000 reviews would need almost unanimous approval to reach. The campaign is not in that territory, and does not have to be. The comparison that matters is against the 38% to 48% band the four previous games occupy.

Why a Steam score carries weight for this series

The PC version ships through Steam, Battle.net and the Xbox app on PC, so Steam is the storefront where most of the public argument about the port will happen, and its review summary sits at the top of the page above the screenshots. For a franchise that has spent a decade selling to console players first, the visible health of that page is part of the pitch.

The recent history there is bad. Four straight entries below 50% on SteamDB is the kind of record that follows a series into its next announcement, and it gives PC players a reason to wait for a discount or a patch. A campaign that early buyers recommend does not erase that, but it changes the first impression for the group arriving cold on 23 October.

The two snapshots also show how the weighted number behaves. Between Insider Gaming's look at roughly 900 reviews and TechPowerUp's count at 1,812, SteamDB's rating rose from 81.15% to 85.78%. Part of that is mechanical: the pull toward 50% weakens as a game collects reviews, so the weighted figure drifts up even when sentiment holds steady. The raw share is the cleaner signal, and it is the one to watch when the sample doubles again.

There is a commercial reason for the timing, too. Early access to the campaign converts a launch week into two weeks of coverage. Streamers play the missions while the store page collects reviews, and by the time the broader review embargo lifts, the game already has an audience score attached to it. That is now standard practice for big releases, and it tends to flatter the number that casual buyers see first.

A campaign built around a squad

The setup helps explain the reception. Players control a young squad of South Korean soldiers holding collapsing front lines while Captain Price runs an off-books war in the shadows, according to IGN's game page. That is a narrower brief than the series usually sets itself, and it puts the campaign somewhere the Modern Warfare line has rarely gone.

IGN's campaign review scored it 8/10 and singled out the missions built around what the game does that is new, rather than the familiar set pieces. The same review called it the best Modern Warfare has been since the 2019 reboot by a wide margin. Pure Xbox's roundup of the campaign coverage on 18 October found most critics positive, with several describing it as the best Call of Duty campaign in years. Its own writer gave it 4.5/5 while holding back a score for the full game.

Activision and Infinity Ward have framed the release as the end of this story arc. TechPowerUp reported on 16 October that the publisher is presenting Modern Warfare 4 as an "epic conclusion" to the Modern Warfare storyline, with a new sub-franchise to follow. A studio that knows it is closing a chapter has a reason to spend on story rather than on another round of familiar missions. That is one plausible reading of the campaign's reception, not a confirmed account of how the game was made.

The sample is the weak point

Everything above comes with a condition attached. A pre-order customer playing a campaign a week early is not a random Call of Duty player. They paid in advance, they chose the campaign over waiting for multiplayer, and many of them are fans of the story the game is closing. That group tends to score higher than the crowd that arrives on launch day asking whether the servers hold up.

The size of the sample makes the number fragile in a second way. Fewer than 2,000 reviews is a small base on Steam, and SteamDB's formula deliberately compresses early results toward the middle for exactly that reason. A run of negative reviews about performance on a particular GPU could move the visible score by several points in a day.

Then there is what has not been tested. Multiplayer and DMZ do not open until 23 October, so nobody outside the studio has played them at scale, and no one has seen how matchmaking, netcode or the in-game store behave with a real population. The problems that sink a PC launch are rarely exotic: stutter, crashes on particular hardware, queues at the door. Campaign play exercises the first two on a single-player scale, and 1,812 reviews of a pre-release build say nothing about how the 23 October build holds up with a full population on the servers. This article is about the campaign early access and nothing more. No sales figures have been released either, so there is no basis for calling this a commercial record.

Switch 2, TPM 2.0 and the rest of the launch

The full release on 23 October arrives on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, PC and Nintendo Switch 2, per the original announcement. There is no PS4 or Xbox One version. The Switch 2 release is the first mainline Call of Duty on a Nintendo platform in years, and it is the platform question the early access window cannot answer: nobody has seen how the campaign runs there, and none of the Steam reviews say anything about it.

On PC, the Steam listing asks for 115GB of SSD space at launch and for TPM 2.0 and Secure Boot to be enabled. A machine can run perfectly well and still fail either check, so it is worth confirming before 23 October rather than on the day.

What to watch after launch

The useful signals now are all downstream of the campaign. The first is what the full-game reviews say once multiplayer and DMZ are live, since a strong campaign cannot carry a package whose servers buckle in week one. The second is whether the Steam score holds above the recent entries once general buyers arrive; a drop into the 70s would still be a better result than the last four games managed, while a fall below 50% would put the early number down to sample bias.

The third is Switch 2. A mainline Call of Duty on Nintendo hardware is a test of reach, and the first week of footage from that version will say more about the port than any press release.

For now the campaign has done the job the early access window was designed to do: it put a positive number on the store page before the argument about the rest of the game began. The rest of the game arrives on Friday.

"The best Modern Warfare has been since its 2019 reboot by quite some distance." — IGN, Modern Warfare 4 campaign review, October 2026

Cover image: in-game screenshot from Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4, courtesy of Activision.