The campaign for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 dropped into early access this week, and the reception on Steam has been something the franchise hasn't seen in a very long time.
MW4 Steam review snapshot
Within 24 hours of campaign early access going live, Modern Warfare 4 surged to 87.4% positive on Steam from over 2,000 user reviews. That makes it the best-rated Call of Duty game on the platform since 2010's Black Ops, and comfortably clears every entry in the franchise released over the past decade.
How the franchise stacks up on Steam
To understand just how significant that number is, here's where MW4 sits against the last eleven Call of Duty releases on Steam:
| Game | Steam positive % |
|---|---|
| Modern Warfare 4 | 87.4% |
| Black Ops III | 84.36% |
| Cold War | 77.95% |
| Modern Warfare (2019) | 77.86% |
| WWII | 69.72% |
| Infinite Warfare | 61.28% |
| Vanguard | 65.94% |
| Modern Warfare III | 48.19% |
| Modern Warfare II | 47.10% |
| Black Ops 6 | 45.75% |
| Black Ops 7 | 38.71% |
That table tells a few stories at once. MW4 sits above every entry since Black Ops III, which held the top spot at 84.36%. Cold War, widely remembered as the rushed pandemic-era release, actually edges out Modern Warfare 2019, the game most credited with turning the franchise around. And Black Ops 7, the most recent entry before MW4, bottomed out at 38.71%.
The gap between MW4 and Black Ops 7 is nearly 49 percentage points. That's not a small swing.
What the numbers actually reflect
Here's the thing: these reviews are coming almost entirely from early access players, the segment of the audience that paid extra or pre-ordered specifically to get into the campaign a week before the global launch. That's not a neutral sample. Early adopters who are invested enough to pay a premium are, by definition, more primed to leave positive feedback.
The review pool, while now past 2,000 entries, is still small relative to what it will look like post-launch. The trajectory matters more than the exact number right now.
That said, the direction is hard to ignore. The campaign has clearly landed well, and the technological leap the game appears to have made is generating genuine enthusiasm rather than the polite-but-hollow reception that greeted several recent entries.
MW4 campaign mission screen
The multiplayer question
Multiplayer is where Call of Duty lives or dies on Steam, and that's the portion of MW4 that hasn't launched yet. DMZ and the competitive modes are still incoming, and the community knows from experience that campaign buzz doesn't always carry over.
For context, MW4 launches with 12 brand-new 6v6 maps. If you want a breakdown of every confirmed location before the full release, the all maps in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 guide has everything confirmed so far.
The full launch on October 23 on PS5, Xbox, and PC is when the real verdict arrives. If multiplayer holds even half the goodwill the campaign has built, MW4 could finish as the most positively received Call of Duty on Steam in fifteen years. If it stumbles, that 87.4% will become a footnote.
For everything confirmed about the release, editions, and platform details, the MW4 release date and everything new guide is the place to start ahead of launch day.
