PULSE GAMINGCall Of Duty Campaigns Ranked Worst To Best
Pulse is ranking ten Call of Duty campaigns by one thing only: the strength of the single-player story mode. Multiplayer, Zombies and Warzone don't count. The original Modern Warfare trilogy sits this one out and gets its own episode. And yes, a futuristic campaign lands higher than plenty of fans will like, while a 2005 classic misses the top four.
Modern Warfare III arrived in November 2023 as a direct sequel to the rebooted Modern Warfare II. Its signature idea was Open Combat Missions, sandbox levels that let you tackle objectives your own way, but many felt like reworked multiplayer maps. Makarov deserved a grander return than this. On Steam the full package sits at Mixed, 48 percent positive across more than 24,000 reviews. As a campaign, it's the thinnest story here, so it anchors the bottom. Sledgehammer Games took the series back to Europe in 2017 with Call of Duty: WWII. You play Ronald "Red" Daniels of the First Infantry Division, starting on the beaches of Normandy. The campaign swapped regenerating health for health packs and squadmates who hand out supplies, a bold call that shook up the pacing. Still, the story plays it painfully safe, and its characters rarely step past the archetypes. Competent, handsome and forgettable.
Infinity Ward's Modern Warfare II landed in 2022 with Task Force 141 back together, Ghost and Soap leading the charge. The standout is "Alone," a tense survival mission where a wounded Soap crafts tools from scraps while hunted through a hostile town. Its set pieces rival the series' best, and the partnership with Alejandro Vargas gives it real heart. A lopsided final act and a cliffhanger ending keep it in the lower half. Few Call of Duty stories are as strange as Black Ops III's, released in 2015. Treyarch built the campaign for four-player co-op, with cybernetic abilities and a rogue AI called Corvus warping reality around your squad. The last-gen console versions shipped without the campaign entirely, which says plenty about its ambition. It's dense, baffling and occasionally brilliant, but the story collapses under its own ideas. Steam players still rate the overall package Very Positive at 85 percent.
Here's the pick that will start arguments. Infinite Warfare, released in 2016, puts you in the boots of Captain Nick Reyes, commanding the warship Retribution with optional side missions and Jackal dogfights between story beats. E3N, the robot squadmate everyone calls Ethan, became a fan favorite for good reason. Backlash to the reveal trailer buried it at the time, and Metacritic sits at 73, but in Pulse's view this is one of Infinity Ward's most heartfelt campaigns. Call of Duty 2 arrived in 2005, and on Xbox 360 it was a launch title. This was the entry that brought regenerating health to the series, changing how shooters played for years afterward. Scaling the cliffs of Pointe du Hoc with the Rangers remains a classic sequence. It falls just outside the top four because its story is a string of battles rather than characters, but as war-movie campaign design, it's foundational.
Treyarch and Raven Software leaned hard into eighties spy thriller with Black Ops Cold War in 2020. You build your own operative, Bell, and work alongside Russell Adler, Mason and Woods to hunt a Soviet agent called Perseus. The "Desperate Measures" mission lets you scheme your way into KGB headquarters. Then the twist and the choice-driven endings turn a short campaign into one players happily replay. Compact, smart and confident. Splitting its story between the eighties and a near-future 2025, Black Ops II landed in 2012. Raul Menendez is one of the series' best villains because the campaign makes you understand him. Choices genuinely matter, with Strike Force missions and key decisions shaping several different endings. Not every experiment lands, but no Call of Duty campaign took bigger narrative swings and connected more of them.
World at War took the series to the Pacific and the brutal Eastern Front in 2008. Gary Oldman's Viktor Reznov owns every scene, especially the sniper mission through the ruins of Stalingrad. Treyarch made it darker and angrier than anything Call of Duty had tried, and it debuted Nazi Zombies as a bonus. With a Metacritic score of 83 and 92 percent positive on Steam, its reputation has only grown. Black Ops arrived in 2010 and turned Call of Duty into a psychological thriller. Alex Mason is strapped to a chair, interrogated about numbers he can't stop hearing, and the story unfolds through his fractured memory. The Vorkuta prison break with Reznov is the series at its most exhilarating. Then the final reveal reframes everything you just played. Steam players rate it 91 percent positive, and as a campaign it has never been topped.
Our pick: Black Ops wins because it's the one campaign here where the story, the set pieces and the twist all hit at once, and you want to replay it the moment it ends. The hardest call was second place. World at War has the rawer atmosphere and Reznov at his best, and on another day Pulse might flip them. Infinite Warfare at six will draw fire too, but its campaign earned the spot.
The full ranking
- Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III
- Call of Duty: WWII
- Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II
- Call of Duty: Black Ops III
- Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare
- Call of Duty 2
- Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War
- Call of Duty: Black Ops II
- Call of Duty: World at War
- Call of Duty: Black Ops
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Call of Duty: Black Ops
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Call of Duty: World at War
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Call of Duty: Black Ops II
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Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War
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Call of Duty 2
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Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare
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Call of Duty: Black Ops III
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Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II
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Call of Duty: WWII
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Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III
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