Since Call of Duty: Ghosts launched in 2013 on the Wii U, no mainline COD game has appeared on a Nintendo console. 2026’s Modern Warfare 4 ends that 14-year drought by releasing on Switch 2, and I was able to play a few missions from the campaign to see how it goes. I’m not going to lie, my expectations were low – Call of Duty is still cutting edge in graphics and performance, and Nintendo’s latest isn’t intentionally designed for that. And yet, I came away pleasantly surprised by what Digital Legends, the Activision studio dedicated to this version of MW4, achieved from a technical point of view.
For my full review of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4, I played on PC, which provided a useful benchmark for what the most ideal version of the game looks like. Of course, when placed side-by-side with the Switch 2 version, you’ll immediately notice the difference: it looks great on PC and runs like a dream, as you’d expect. But the move to Switch 2 didn’t offend my eyes as I feared. Granted, the textures aren’t nearly as detailed, with flat surfaces and faces smoothed out to give the impression of plasticine versions of the campaign’s characters. It’s not an attractive look by any means, but considering the reduced power that Nintendo’s latest console runs on, the gameplay itself was smooth, running at 30fps in 4K when docked. The campaign is locked at 30, while multiplayer will target 60.
The campaign’s framerate also remained consistent, without even a hitch or stutter during some of the story’s more explosive moments – I deliberately made sure to capture part of a mission that features one of its most eventful sequences to test it out. You can check out this gameplay for yourself in the video above, but I was impressed that a game that normally demands so much of the hardware it’s played on runs so well on the Switch 2. Yes, it’s a visual downgrade compared to PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X, but that comes with the territory. And if you’re just a Nintendo owner who hasn’t had access to Call of Duty in over a decade, you get a version of Modern Warfare 4 that looks just as snappy as the series usually does, even if it’s a bit more muddled than Nintendo’s crisp visuals.
Simon Cardy is an editor at IGN who can mostly be found lurking around open-world games, indulging in Korean cinema, or despairing over Tottenham Hotspur State and the New York Jets. Follow him on Bluesky at @cardy.bsky.social.
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