Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 DMZ Review

This is a standalone review that covers only Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4's DMZ mode. You can find our campaign and multiplayer review here.

Extraction shooters can feel a little like a modern trend, with some heavy hitters like Marathon and Arc Raiders shaking the table within the last year or so, but they’ve been a growing experiment in the shooter space for the past decade or so. Call of Duty dabbled in it with the original DMZ back in 2022 (you could even argue they were late to the party by then), and its return in 2026 is timely. I’ve logged quite a few bootsteps through the bombed out streets, scattered woodlands, and high security bases of this big new mode over the last week, and after hours of vehicle hijacking, SAM site hacking, and target elimination, I can say this bigger, better DMZ is a welcome newcomer to the extraction shooter slate.

The PvPvE dynamic of extraction shooters often lives and dies by how well the mission and level design encourages you to explore, rewards you for overcoming challenges, and guides you to interact with others in order to keep those spoils. The fictional Korean Hajin region your exploits take place in is well suited for this. Its dense pockets of urban development – a village in the north, the dangerous main city in the east, an isolated prison out west – are separated by rocky forests concealing all sorts of militarized checkpoints and other points of interest hiding loot to shove into your pockets.

Parts of it look a little samey, the consequence of modern urban development where (at least from the outside) most buildings look the same, especially compared to some of DMZ’s big sci-fi competitors that go above and beyond to look striking at first glance. But the map is so big that you could spend the entirety of your approximately half-hour runs in only a fraction of it. And where Battle Royales (like CoD’s own Warzone) move players around by having an encroaching death cloud forcing everyone into a smaller and smaller area, DMZ instead entices squads to adventure with its Dynamic Operations.

Dynamic Ops are spontaneous missions that appear as you travel across the battlefield which come in lots of forms, from securing a package to blowing up a target to escorting a VIP. Many of them are multi-stage affairs that have your fireteam moving from point to point as NPC enemies ramp up a more coordinated defense against you. These all get rewarded by supply drops that grant you loot, the value of which escalates based on how many of them you successfully complete. I prefer this sort of objective chasing to the more standard task lists in other games like this (which also exist here, in fairness) because it makes for more engaging individual runs. I’ll prepare the best I can beforehand, but can’t be ready for every possible string of operations once I deploy.

There are many actions and events, like aforementioned supply drops, that are broadcast to everyone within earshot, hypothetically to tempt other players to be nosy (and potentially belligerent). Despite those lures, open skirmishes with others have been pretty limited, as I’ve found most people opt to mind their own business. The influx of players at launch hasn't really changed the main emphasis on the E in the PvPvE structure of these runs, though human enemies can regularly play spoiler to otherwise solid runs if you’re not diligent.

There was a base level of tension with every step I took or round I let off.

It would be a mistake to confuse passivity with pacifism – this isn’t the Arc Raiders playerbase, which spent many of the opening months of that game more interested in helping than hurting. Whenever another player was in eye or earshot, it was assumed that a firefight was to follow, even though there is a specific truce ping that allows you the extend the olive branch to other players who you know are around but can’t (or don't want to) see in person. Like in all extraction shooters, the most tense PVP moment in DMZ happens when you’re waiting for your ride home and other players have decided that the extraction heli isn’t big enough for the both of you.

Hajin is a pretty lively place. Enemy patrols speed down roadways, sometimes as lone jeeps and other times in large caravans. Helicopters and drones streak across the sky looking for interlopers like me, or occasionally other NPCs from rival factions tearing the map apart. A train runs on a schedule, and you can absolutely hitch a ride on it to get from place to place. Squads of enemies could be posted up anywhere. Weird exploding robot dogs can sniff you out as you slink from building to building. There was always at least a base level of tension with every step I took or round I let off, because there was just enough going on around me that any push I made could be the one that knocked over the house of cards I was hiding behind.

Clashes with the NPC denizens of the DMZ start pretty tame, but ramp up as you and your squad make yourself more notorious by killing enemies and completing objectives. As enemy units start to don armor, pull up in more durable vehicles, and use higher grade weaponry to take you down, firefights can get desperate quickly. There's an instinct for people in pick-up groups to run out on their own, potentially to get first dibs on loot perhaps, and they almost always regret it – it doesn’t take much for enemies to get the drop on you, as you are only where you are and they are potentially anywhere and everywhere else.

Lieutenants are high-level boss challenges that really stand out as maybe the single most difficult thing you can attempt during any given run. They exist in specific regions, but where one in the forests lies in wait for unsuspecting operators to pass through their zone before springing their assault, another is dressed head to toe in armor with a mini-gun and will roam a piece of the city in hopes to stop you mid mission. They are better off avoided unless you’ve brought high-end gear with the specific purpose of hunting them.

The secret sauce of what makes the extraction shooter so appealing is the level of agency each player has to play how they want in a higher stakes PvP setting. You can go into every encounter guns blazing, or you can tip toe through them, taking the long way and hopefully having your patience and preparation rewarded. You can make racking up “objective completes” and bagging top tier loot your mission, or you can try to hunt down every human player you can. I like engaging in a bit of PvP, but my nearly 40-year-old eyes and reflexes frankly can’t keep up with the kind batshit action that goes on in the standard multiplayer modes (or even Warzone). In contrast, DMZ has created a great sandbox that serves all varieties of playstyles adequately.

There's always a way to jam up sightlines or to find some cover and take a breath. Every building has multiple points of entry, so sieges or chases through them always require some level of decision making. Sub-missions are always an option, where you can hack a tower for a UAV scan or SAM site coverage to support you in your main objective, but only if you’re willing the take on the added risk. I always felt like I could “yes, and” what was happening at any given moment, and thats not true for many of DMZ’s contemporaries.

Call of Duty’s top tier military shooter gunplay feels at home in DMZ.

Call of Duty’s top tier military shooter gunplay, toeing the line between the lethality of simulations and the snappy speed of arcadey romps, feels at home in DMZ as well. All of the new tweaks, like the way your weapons interact with your surroundings or movement adjustments, feel like they had roaming gunfights in an open world in mind. Being able to cancel out of mantles so you aren’t stuck in an animation when you least want to be feels like the kind of quality of life inclusion that Warzone demonstrated was needed for a long time. That said, the smattering of guns lack much in the way of real identities outside of the normal archetypal framings that have existed in gaming forever (shotgun, assault rifle, sniper, etc.).

You can also drop into story missions, which are quest chains that include more structure, resembling the campaign missions without the more cinematic story elements. These were pretty rowdy and unique, like an escort mission where our squad had to wheel an injured general out of a hospital, bed and all, while enduring swarms of enemy combatants. There's a finite number of these and the possible rewards are more limited, with less incentive to explore the places around you and no enemy players to pirate or evade. But they serve as a great tasting platter of the pace Dynamic Ops keep and a good tour of the various locations on the map you'll need to get familiar with.

In between missions, you’ll tend to all of your gear and progression from the safety of your FOB. Weapons, crafting ingredients, and consumables that you procure out in the field can be sorted through here, all of it put at risk when you equip it and redeploy. When you unlock the 3D printer and gunsmith areas, crafting new toys and upgrading weapons becomes the main way you spend your plunder to enhance your chances in Hajin. You can easily blow tens of thousands of won to trick out a weapon, but I found that the investments can be worth it in order to differentiate playstyles, like if you want a quieter load out with suppressors or a certain sort of optics to make mid-to-long range encounters more beneficial. I didn’t find the more money I invested automatically made my loadout feel more powerful, though.

Gaining experience is pretty easy as everything you do in the field gives you some amount of it. Progressing through the account level unlocks list was pretty breezy at first, helpful because a lot of recipes for some core equipment like grenades and ammo boxes are early rewards. At around half way up I found things slowed down quite significantly, but I also didn't find many late level goals to be enticing enough to turn up the grind. There's powerful kit, like a pistol that you can shoot downed teammates with to revive them, but I'm not torching all my spare time to sprint to level 64 to get it.

Similarly, Operators have individual sets of trait trees that you upgrade with points they earn in the field. These don’t appear to be novel to any individual fighter; there's no Ghost-specific ability where he gets unique buffs while saying something very British. Instead there are pools of passive traits across three categories, all operators have a choice between the same handful of major traits, and the 15 or so minor traits that fill out the trees are randomized. What makes an operator special seems to be limited mostly to how they look and sound, which was a bit of a bummer.

I was never champing at the bit to get my build “right.”

These traits can be meaningful in the field, though. One of the randomized traits I acquired for Valeria, Ammo Scavenger, doubled the ammo I got from ammo packs and made conserving my shots basically a thing of the past. The faster revive speed all operators have access to in their Survivalist tree has been the difference between clutch plays and total wipes on more than one occasion. There's definitely some kind of character building to be had here, but you really can’t know where it’s all leading until the next group of traits to choose from are revealed. And all that is before accounting for the fact that there's no way to reset or reallocate these trait points outside of abandoning the operator all together if you fail to extract with them (as opposed to spending some cash to get them back into the fight).

All of this created an environment where I was never champing at the bit to get my build “right.” Everything I picked worked at least a little bit. But I was also pretty detached from the whole process once I realized you really only had one shot at it per operator. I haven't maxed out any operator skill trees or account level reward path yet, but there are no substantial carrots left to tempt me down them either. Regardless of the trait investment, how good or bad I did in a run came down to how few bullets I ate in the process, and these trees, though valuable in specific cases, really didn't change that.