Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare Beta Review - 5 Ups & 5 Downs
3. Massively Underwhelming Visuals
Activision has extensively talked up the new engine being used to power Modern Warfare, succeeding the wildly outdated IW engine which the franchise has been using for almost 15 years.
And yet, despite a series of glossy trailers playing-up the slick new 4K visuals, from what's on offer in the beta, the results are pretty underwhelming.
Even when running in 4K on a powerful PC, textures frequently look blandly low-poly and there's an embarrassing amount of graphical pop-in.
Worse still is the game's approach to dynamic range lighting: dark areas are frequently too dark, making it difficult to spot enemies until they've got the drop on you.
It might be "realistic" for sudden lighting changes to affect the player's vision, but it's not fun wandering into a room with compromised visibility for a second-or-so.
Performance is meanwhile far more variable on consoles: base PS4 can't regularly maintain 60 FPS, and there's a garish blurriness that's incredibly offputting.
Overall, whatever the platform, this isn't the tectonic leap in visual fidelity fans were led to believe, and it ultimately still looks utterly pedestrian from a graphical perspective.