Modern Warfare 4’s Campaign Holds the Series’ Best Steam Rating in Over a Decade, and DMZ Early Access Opens Today

Set the 92.9% against the recent record and the gap is wide. Last year’s Black Ops 7 sits at Mostly Negative with about 37% positive reviews, and the well-liked 2019 Modern Warfare reboot reached about 79%, Mostly Positive, in the same comparisons. Earlier snapshots tell the same story as this week’s climb: coverage over the weekend recorded the rating rising from the low 80s through 90% at roughly 2,000 reviews and 92% past 3,400, before this morning’s 4,477-review reading. Critics who have finished the roughly six-hour campaign are aligned with the players so far. IGN scored it 8/10.

The campaign itself runs on two threads, and nothing here spoils either. One follows Private Park, a young South Korean soldier caught in a full-scale invasion of South Korea after an EMP strike on Seoul. The other follows Captain Price, operating outside official channels after the events of the earlier games pushed him underground. Missions move between the Korean Peninsula, New York, Paris and Mumbai, and Activision has billed this entry as the final chapter of the Modern Warfare sub-series, with a new sub-franchise to follow.

DMZ, the extraction mode that returns in this entry, opens its early access today, October 20, for players who pre-ordered a digital copy of either edition. Launch coverage notes this is the first time the series has offered DMZ ahead of release, and it comes with a practical gap: Activision has confirmed the date, and no exact unlock hour has been announced. Anyone planning a session around a circulating countdown is planning around a guess; the store page and official channels are the places the hour will appear. Multiplayer, the mode most buyers will judge the game on, is not part of either early window and arrives with the full launch on October 23.

The editions split cleanly. The $69.99 Standard Edition is the full game, and pre-orders add the early access windows plus a small cosmetic bundle. The $99.99 Vault Edition layers on two operator packs, a signature weapon collection of five blueprints, one season of the BlackCell pass, and a DMZ deployment bonus with an extra operator slot and items. Players who start with Standard can upgrade to Vault later for $30, so the premium tier is a decision that can safely wait until multiplayer has been judged.

Every reviewer behind that number paid for a pre-order and chose to play a week early. That is the series’ most committed audience, and launch coverage, Eurogamer included, has cautioned that the keenest fans may also be the most forgiving. The score also measures one mode. The reboot era has seen campaign praise fade once multiplayer reviews land, as PCGamesN observed about the 2022 and 2023 entries, because the Steam page collects verdicts on the whole package. None of this erases a 92.9% start, which no Call of Duty has posted on Steam in over a decade. It defines what the number can prove today: the campaign landed. The rest gets graded from today, in DMZ, and on Friday.

Buy the signal for what it is. If the campaign is your mode, the evidence is unusually strong for this series: a six-hour story, an 8/10 from IGN, and a Steam rating that kept climbing as thousands more reviews arrived. The $69.99 Standard Edition carries the whole game, and the Vault premium buys cosmetics and a season pass rather than content, so it can wait. Multiplayer-first players gain nothing by pre-ordering today beyond DMZ, and they lose the chance to read Friday’s verdicts with their money still in hand. Three days is a short wait for the mode that decides whether this game is played in 2027.