Call of Duty: MW4 DMZ — Full Review & Transcript

[00:01] modern trend with some heavy hitters like Marathon and Arc Raiders shaking but they've been a growing experiment in the shooter space for the past decade or so. Call of Duty dabbled in it with its original DMZ back in 2022, and its

[00:16] return in 2026 is timely. I've logged quite a few bootsteps through the bombed out streets, scattered woodlands, and highsecurity bases of its new big mode over the last week. And after hours of

[00:29] vehicle hijacking, samsite hacking, and target elimination, I can say this bigger, better DMZ is a welcome newcomer to the extraction shooter slate.

[00:50] >> the PVPE 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

[01:03] spoils. The fictional Korean hygiene region your exploits take place in is well suited for this. It's dense pockets of urban development. A village in the north, a dangerous main city in the east, an isolated prison out west, are

[01:17] concealing all sorts of militarized checkpoints and other points of pockets. >> We've located enemy compound in your AO. Clear out all threats and secure any loot you find. Parts of it look a little

[01:30] sy. The consequence of modern urban development where at least from the outside most buildings look the same, especially when compared to some of DMZ's big sci-fi competitors that go above and beyond to look striking at

[01:42] first glance. But the map is so big that you could spend the entirety of your approximately halfhour runs and only a fraction of it. >> Marking an ob. Where the battle royals like Call of Duty's own war zone move

[01:54] players around by having encroaching death clouds, forcing everyone into smaller and smaller areas, DMZ instead entices squads to adventure with its >> Side up here. >> Dynamic ops are spontaneous missions

[02:09] that appear as you travel across the battlefield, which come in many forms, from securing a package to blowing up a target to escorting a VIP. Many of them are multi-stage affairs that have your fire team moving from point to point as

[02:22] NPCU 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 the sort of objective

[02:34] chasing to the more standard task lists in other games like this, which also exists here in fairness, because it makes for more engaging individual runs. I'll prepare the best I can beforehand, but I can't be ready for every possible

[02:48] string of operations once I deploy. >> Close air is unavailable in your grid. >> There are many actions and events like the affforementioned supply drops that are broadcast to everyone with an earshot hypothetically to tempt other

[03:01] belligerent. >> An enemy operator just opened fire. standby for redeployment. Despite those lures, open skirmishes with others has

[03:15] been pretty limited as I found that most people opt to mind their own business. The influx of players at launch hasn't really changed the main emphasis on the E and the PVP PVE structure of these drops. Though human enemies can

[03:27] regularly play spoiler to otherwise solid runs if you're not diligent. It would be a mistake to confuse passivity with pacifism. This isn't the Arc the opening months of that game more interested in helping than hurting.

[03:42] Whenever another player was an eye or earshot, it was assumed that a firefight was to follow. Even though there is a specific truce ping that allows you to extend the eyelet branch to other players who you know are around but

[03:55] can't or do not want to see in person. >> Check fire. Another squad's confirmed your troops. 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

[04:08] that the extraction heli isn't big enough for the both of you. patrols speed down the roadways, sometimes as little jeeps and other

[04:22] times as large caravans. Helicopters and drones streak across the sky looking for drones streak across the sky looking for interlopers like me. A train runs on schedule, and you can absolutely hitch your ride on it to get

[04:34] from place to place. Squads of enemies could be posted up anywhere. There was always at least a base level of tension with every step I took around I let off because there was just enough going on around me that any push I made could be

[04:47] the one that knocked over the house of cards I was hiding behind. start pretty tame, but ramp up as you and your squad make yourself more

[05:00] notorious by killing enemies and completing objectives. As enemy units start to dawn armor, pull up in more durable vehicles, and use higher grade weaponry to take you down. Firefights can get desperate quickly. There's an

[05:13] instinct for people in pickup 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

[05:25] are potentially everywhere and anywhere else. Lieutenants are highle boss maybe the single most difficult thing you can attempt during any given run. They exist in specific regions, but where one is in the forest and lies and

[05:40] through their zone before springing their assault, another is dressed head to toe in armor with a minigun and will stop you. mid mission. They are better

[05:52] gear with the specific purpose of hunting them down. 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 higher stakes PvP

[06:05] settings. You can go into every encounter guns blazing, or you can tiptoe through them, taking the long way and hopefully having your patience and preparation rewarded. You can make racking up objective completes and

[06:17] you can try to hunt down every human player you can. I like engaging in a little bit of PvP, but my nearly 40-year-old eyes and reflexes, frame batshit action that goes on in the standard multiplayer modes or even War

[06:32] Zone. In contrast, DMZ has created a great sandbox that serves all varieties of play styles adequately. Get out of the security room. There's always a way to jam up sightelines or to find some cover and take a breath. Every

[06:47] building has multiple points of entry, so sieges or chases through them always require some level of decision-making. Submissions are always an option where you can hack a tower for a UAV scan or sand site coverage to support you in

[07:00] your main objective, but only if you're willing to take on the added risk. I always felt like I could Yes. and what was happening at any given moment. And that's not true for many of DMZ's contemporaries.

[07:17] gunplay towing the line between the lethality of simulations and the snappy speed of arcadey rocks feels at home in DMZ as well. All the new tweaks like the surroundings or movement adjustments feel like they had roaming gunfights in

[07:32] an open world in mind. 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

[07:46] story missions, which are quest chains that include more structure, resembling the campaign mission, but the more cinematic story elements. They were pretty rowdy and unique, like an escort mission where our squad had to wheel an

[07:58] 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

[08:11] around you and no enemy players to pirate or evade. But they serve as a great tasting platter of the pace Dynamic Ops keeps and a good tour of the need to get familiar with >> baseupp.

[08:30] of your gear in progression from the safety of your FOB. Weapons, crafting procure out in the field can be sorted through here. All of it put at risk when unlock the 3D printer and gunsmith areas, crafting new toys and upgrading

[08:46] weapons becomes the main way you spend your plunder to enhance your chances and hygiene. You can easily blow tens of thousands of wands to trick out a can be worth it in order to differentiate play styles, like if you

[09:00] want a quieter load out with suppressors or certain sort of optics make mid to longrange encounters more beneficial. I didn't find that the more money I invested automatically made my loadout feel more powerful. Gaining experience

[09:13] is pretty easy as everything you do in the field gives you some amount of it. Progressing through the account level unlocks was pretty breezy at first. Helpful because a lot of the recipes for some core equipment like grenades and

[09:25] ammo boxes are early rewards. And about halfway up, I found things slowed down quite significantly. But I also didn't find many late game goals to be enticing enough to turn up the grind. There's powerful kit like a pistol that you can

[09:40] shoot down teammates with to revive them, but I'm not torching all my spare time to sprint up to level 64 to get it. Similarly, operators have individual with points they earn in the field. These don't appear to be novel to any

[09:56] individual fighter. There's no ghost specific ability where he gets a unique buff while saying something very British. Instead, there are pools of passive traits across three categories. All operators have a choice between the

[10:09] same handful of major traits and the 15 or so minor traits that fill out their 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.

[10:22] >> Put you higher on the radar. >> These traits can be meaningful in the field, though. One of the randomized traits I acquired for Valyria ammo scavenger doubled the ammo I got from ammo packs and made conserving my shots

[10:35] ammo packs and made conserving my shots basically a thing of the past. have access to in their survivalist tree has been the difference between clutch

[10:47] 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 you choose from become revealed. And all that is before accounting for the fact

[11:01] that there's no way to reset or reallocate these trait points outside of abandoning the operator altogether if you fail to extract with them as opposed into the fight. All of this created an environment where I was never chomping

[11:14] at the bit to get my build quote unquote right. Everything I picked worked at pretty detached from the whole process once I realized you only really had one shot at it per operator. I haven't maxed out any operator skill trees or the

[11:29] account level reward path yet, but there are no substantial carrots left to temp me down them either. Regardless of the trait investment, how good or bad I did in the run came down to how few bullets I ate in the process. And these trees,

[11:43] though valuable in specific cases, really didn't change that.

[11:55] the fun and frantic gameplay signature to Call of Duty into a genre I fancy more than its typical PvP multiplayer. While executing missions, the semiarch arcadey running and gutting mixes nicely with the vibrant exploration elements in

[12:07] Hygiene and the rapidfire dynamic objectives and side ops creating a delightfully high tension experience that also doesn't get too sweaty. All of gunsmithing, and to a larger extent, the almost RPG- like skill trees for

[12:22] individual operators provide little incentive to engage with them all that rigorously. This may not bode well for DMZ's staying power as a service across the coming year, but in the present, it's a strong addition to the growing

[12:36] list of worthwhile extraction shooters. >> GO, GO, GO. of Bolt Gun 2 or Phantom Blade Zero. And for everything else in the world of

[12:51] for everything else in the world of video games, stick with IGN.