The Call of Duty franchise is now 20 years old and it has had a lot of ups and downs. The franchise has seen many different eras from when it was nothing more than a World War II shooter to its progression into the modern day and then its evolution into the far future. It’s one of the most popular franchises not only in gaming, but all of entertainment. Almost every entry in the series has managed to top the sales charts every year for over a decade and it shows little signs of slowing down. It’s a total cash cow and is part of the reason Microsoft was willing to drop nearly $70 billion on purchasing Call of Duty publisher Activision.
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With all of that said, now that the series has turned 20, it seems like an appropriate time to go back and rank every mainline Call of Duty release. We’re not going to be looking at spin-offs like the PS Vita Call of Duty: Black Ops Declassified, we’re not going to rank expansions or things like the Nintendo DS versions of games like Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. This is purely the mainline series. Without further ado, let’s start with number 20.
20. Call of Duty: Ghosts
Call of Duty: Ghosts had a lot of potential to be one of the most interesting games in the series as its the first one to really break away from the typical military story. While you do play as soldiers, the story revolves around the battle for a near-post-apocalyptic America after it has been invaded and devastated by foreign forces. The story is like Red Dawn meets Call of Duty, but unfortunately… it’s not executed in the strongest of ways. Not only is the game visually very ugly due to a bleak, brown/grey color scheme, but the characters lack the stature of other Call of Duty heroes and the drama lacks urgency most of the time.
On top of that, the multiplayer mode failed to capture an audience beyond its first year due to mediocre gameplay and even then, it felt like Ghosts lost a lot of its player base fairly early on. For Infinity Ward’s first endeavor post-Modern Warfare and the first Xbox One/PS4 era Call of Duty, Ghosts was a big let down.
19. Call of Duty: Vanguard
Call of Duty: Vanguard is one of the first times it became visibly clear the Call of Duty machine was not as well-oiled as it used to be. It was heavily reported that Call of Duty: Vanguard was the result of new games in the series being internally delayed/canceled and developers being moved around on projects. Since a new Call of Duty is expected every year, Vanguard appeared to be something that was slapped together to hit a release date. The campaign was largely forgettable and while not anything awful, it was uninspired and missing that cinematic Call of Duty flair. The whole story is told largely through flashbacks as you see individual stories for each member of a team, but you don’t get to see said team in action until the very last mission. It feels like a bunch of missions that were created in a vacuum and then Sledgehammer Games had to try and stitch them together.
In addition to that, the multiplayer felt like a World War II version of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (2019) with a lot of cheap innovations to make it feel new. There were things like some destructible walls, but these were so selectively implemented that it didn’t feel very exciting or worth hyping up. On top of that, the Zombies mode was a disaster and didn’t have any round-based content for months after launch. All in all, Vanguard was clearly rushed and a signal to Activision that it needs to be more careful without pushing things out the door.
18. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (2022)
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (2022) may have been one of the most commercially successful Call of Duty games, but that doesn’t really mean much for its quality. Given the game (and the marketing) evoked the name of one of the greatest shooters of all-time, it had a lot to live up to. Unfortunately, the story features a weak, lackluster story that fails to utilize any kind of dramatic tension, features poor attempts to recreate big moments from the original Modern Warfare 2, and has too many missions with some poorly fleshed out gimmick at the center of it. It’s a big mess and that continues into its multiplayer as well.
The multiplayer features some of the worst maps the series has ever seen, the time to kill is inconsistent and way too fast, the movement is heavy and slow, and the weapon progression system is borderline incomprehensible. The fact that the game makes you level up entirely different weapons so you can unlock the things you want for the gun you actually want to use is sort of inconceivable. It’s a pretty rocky Call of Duty game and it’s hard to imagine anyone willingly playing it over Modern Warfare 3 (2023).
17. Call of Duty
Call of Duty was a great game for its time and an absolute game changer, but when you compare it to how far the series has come, can you really put it that high on the list? We respect it for what it is, but this is a pretty dated shooter 20 years later. It was one of the most impressive, cinematic shooters at its time and it’s hard to imagine where the series would be today, but if a Call of Duty fan tried to go back and play it today, they may not bother finishing it given its a relic of a bygone era in gaming.
16. Call of Duty 3
Call of Duty 3 is a bit of a weird game in the series as it tried to do a lot of the things that the series wouldn’t attempt again for over a decade. I personally have a bit of a soft spot for this game thanks to the bombastic single player, but there’s no denying it’s an oddity in the franchise. The game featured a lot of quick-time events for cinematic close-quarters fights in the campaign, vehicles in multiplayer for the first time, and significantly larger maps than most would expect for Call of Duty. Had Call of Duty 3 been a massive hit, it felt a bit like the series could’ve gone the way of Battlefield, opting for much larger scale battles with loads of vehicles instead of a more fast-paced, tight focus on 6v6 multiplayer.
Call of Duty has sort of dabbled with these ideas in recent years with the Ground War mode in the new Modern Warfare games, but it’s still a bit of a far cry from Call of Duty 3.
15. Call of Duty: Black Ops 4
Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 was yet another attempt to shake up the Call of Duty formula. For the first and so far only time ever, a Call of Duty game was launched without a campaign, something a lot of players were pretty upset about. It was just Zombies, multiplayer, and Blackout, the first attempt at a battle royale in the franchise. For what it was, it was a worthy attempt. Blackout is a much more arcade-y battle royale than Warzone, but it didn’t find the same level of success given it was paywalled to Black Ops 4 and Warzone is free and very accessible.
The multiplayer itself was fun, but it didn’t fit into the vision of what Call of Duty should be for a lot of people. It continued to focus on Specialists, a system from Black Ops 3 that gave characters special abilities that they could charge up and use for maximum effect. Black Ops 4 also increased the health 10 150 and took away auto health regen, so players had to manually heal themselves. It was an interesting idea and showed that the series was willing to experiment. However, given this was the last time we saw anything like this, it may have strayed too far from the Call of Duty formula and started to feel like it belonged in a different franchise.
14. Call of Duty: WWII
Call of Duty: WWII was the franchise’s return to World War II for the first time in close to a decade. Fans had been yearning for this for quite a while and it was actually pretty serviceable. While it didn’t blow anyone’s socks off, it was the return to boots on the ground gameplay fans had wanted after a few years of futuristic titles. The Zombies had more of a horror focus than previous years, the campaign provided more of a Band of Brothers angle on a war the series had covered in-depth many times, and the multiplayer tried to take things back to basics, providing for a standard, but solid Call of Duty experience.
WWII doesn’t do a whole lot to notably innovate beyond a social hub space in multiplayer, but many players found it cumbersome and obnoxious when they just wanted to load directly into a match without having to watch 20 people open crappy loot boxes on the side of a beach.
13. Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare
Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare is one of the more underrated games in the series, but it also has plenty of faults. The game was probably not given a fair shake as it was immediately hated with the reveal trailer being most disliked gaming video of all-time. Part of this is because players didn’t have any interest in a space-based Call of Duty game, but this turned out to be one of its biggest strengths. Infinite Warfare continued to evolve the advanced movement of Black Ops 3 and Advanced Warfare with jet packs, wall-running, and now, zero gravity gunfights.
The campaign is arguably the best in the franchise as you go across the galaxy, getting into massive space battles that have the epic scope and scale of a Call of Duty single player story. You could even take on side missions which allowed you to take down high ranking enemies out in space in special operations. On top of that, the narrative itself was rich and filled with great characters and emotional moments. It was a real surprise, but we’ll likely never see any kind of follow-up.
The multiplayer was a bit less exciting as it felt like it borrowed too heavily from Black Ops 3 and didn’t do enough to set itself apart beyond having some maps set in space. The maps the game did feature weren’t anything to write home about and it was easy to abandon Infinite Warfare‘s multiplayer within a couple of months, if not a matter of weeks.
12. Call of Duty: Black Ops 3
Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 is probably the inverse of Infinite Warfare where it had a really strong multiplayer, but a painfully bad campaign. The multiplayer felt like a breath of fresh air, taking the baton from Advanced Warfare and pushing the new movement forward with wall-running. On the back of Titanfall, it was exactly what the series needed at the time to feel new and exciting. On top of that, the Specialists felt well implemented in this game and allowed for new kinds of gameplay such as utilizing an explosive bow and arrow.
As for the campaign, it was convoluted as hell and needlessly obtuse. It felt like the game was trying to be too smart after the Black Ops series had developed a reputation for having slightly more elevated storytelling than its Modern Warfare counterparts. However, Black Ops 3 tried too hard and failed miserably. This was also the first time players could play the campaign in co-op, but it didn’t seem to gel well with the narrative and the feature was never seen again. Despite the story, Black Ops 3 had a lot of right ideas and pushed the series in exciting new directions, even if it wouldn’t maintain course for much longer.
11. Call of Duty 2
Call of Duty 2 is still a banger to this day. Of course, it does show its age in some areas, but it is one hell of a game. Infinity Ward brilliantly captures the scope and scale of this historic war, having you storm the beaches of Normandy, fight in the cold winter of Russia, and more. It proved Call of Duty would be a contender in the shooter genre going forward and the fact that this game still holds up quite well as a punchy FPS almost 20 years later continues to highlight its worth.
10. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 (2023)
The newest game on this list, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, is an interesting one. A lot of complaints have been understandably raised about the game being aesthetically very similar to 2022’s Modern Warfare 2. Some have suggested it’s nothing more than a DLC repackaged as a $70 game and that’s more than fair to say. However, for Call of Duty lovers, the multiplayer does make a lot of gameplay changes that fans have been demanding for years. It’s incredibly fast, smooth, and also brings back all of the classic original Modern Warfare 2 maps in all their former glory.
The campaign is probably the biggest detractor for Modern Warfare 3 as its the shortest in the series and is clearly yet another rushed story. It does a great disservice to some of the franchise’s greatest characters and leans way too hard into half-baked sandbox missions using the original Warzone map. However, the multiplayer is so strong this time around that it’s hard to let the campaign bring it down too much.
9. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (2019)
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare is the first time the series has ever done any kind of “reboot”. After a handful of years of futuristic games, fans were demanding a new Modern Warfare game. Instead of doing exactly what had been done before, Infinity Ward opted for a more “realistic” approach, prompting a story that was smaller in scope, but arguably a bit more tense in some regards. The developer was interested in a game that more closely reflected the times we live in, where terrorist attacks can happen without someone wearing their flag on their sleeve. Anyone in the crowd could theoretically be an enemy and that is a truly terrifying thought. While some of its themes are a bit surface level, it’s a worthy attempt at a new take on the Modern Warfare name with an excellent new interpretation of Captain Price.
The multiplayer also laid the foundation for Warzone, one of the most popular and beloved battle royale games out there. While some innovations such as doors could be done without, Modern Warfare came at the right time for the Call of Duty series and was exactly what a lot of people were looking for.
8. Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare
Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare is yet another deeply underrated Call of Duty game. After fans had complained for years that we were getting the same game every year, Sledgehammer Games took the bold approach for its first original game of changing everything as we knew it. Movement became more advanced with jet packs, allowing you to slide around at high speeds and leap high above your foes and rain bullets down on them. Gunfights became more vertical and traversing the map became more exciting and strategic, there wasn’t really an opportunity to stand still and camp in this game due to how fast-paced everything was and players’ ability to move around in more creative ways.
The Advanced Warfare story was also quite strong. It had a great performance from the now-disgraced actor Kevin Spacey as a CEO of a private military company, manipulating his way through politics to achieve all-out war. It also featured some really unique set pieces such as a moment where you have to use your exosuit to jump across traffic on a freeway, a battle on the Golden Gate bridge, and more.
It was the most innovative Call of Duty game at the time and it may still be. Whether or not we ever see a return to this era remains to be seen, but it’s a game that took a risk in one of the biggest entertainment franchises out there and it largely paid off.
7. Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War
Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War took us back to the subfranchise’s roots after a handful of entries in the far-flung future. It once again returns to the world of political espionage, allowing players to immerse themselves in one of the most suspenseful times in American history thanks to the constant threat of nuclear war. The story was filled with great moments such as when you infiltrate the KGB HQ and must maintain your undercover status while making choices both in and out of dialogue. The game also had multiple endings, including one where you become the villain and set off a series of nukes across the world and frames America and the CIA as being responsible for it.
The multiplayer also provided a strong contrast to Modern Warfare, which came out a year prior. For those looking for a more arcade-y experience and something less tactical, Black Ops Cold War was the perfect solution. It felt like a nice throwback to the multiplayer of early Black Ops games while still moving the needle forward to feel “modern” and keeping the pace of the Call of Duty franchise’s evolution.
6. Call of Duty: World at War
Call of Duty: World at War was and still may be the darkest Call of Duty game ever made. It was the first game in the series to really use gore, allowing you to blow someone’s legs off and witness the carnage. This was absolutely necessary for the story being told as Treyarch wanted to highlight the atrocities of World War II in a new way. Simply seeing the death toll wasn’t enough, you had to feel it and that required making the player feel a bit dirty.
This is a game where you hide in a pit of dead bodies as German soldiers shoot any stragglers, witness a man get a cigarette put out in his face, and much, much more. It’s a very violent game, but it’s impactful and smart. It also gave us Gary Oldman’s brilliant and memorable performance as Reznov, a cunning and hardened Russian soldier fighting with every ounce of strength to take back his home.
The multiplayer was still a bit primitive compared to what it is now, but the gunplay was satisfying thanks to the gore and there were even some iconic maps that have returned in other games throughout the years.
Perhaps its most notable contribution was the inclusion of Nazi Zombies, a secret mode that would change Call of Duty forever. Players could team up with friends and try to survive endless waves of the undead, something that would only grow to be more elaborate with subsequent DLCs and games.
5. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 opted to refine instead of completely evolve the Call of Duty formula at the time, but it did so rather perfectly. The campaign provided an emotional conclusion to the trilogy, the multiplayer used the foundation of its predecessor and made a number of welcomed additions such as scorestreaks, and it provided a ton of content post-launch to keep players invested. It may not have been as revolutionary as the last few games before it, but it was a rock solid experience that sent the Modern Warfare trilogy out with a bang.
4. Call of Duty: Black Ops
Call of Duty: Black Ops was the first time the series had gone anywhere outside the modern era and World War II, allowing for yet another exploration on a dark period in human history: the Vietnam War. The game layered itself in conspiracy theories, allowing players to fill the shoes of characters in the CIA as opposed to your typical grunt on the front lines. You were there to do the dirty work whether that be killing Fidel Castro or torture someone by feeding them broken glass. The story is mindbending, twisty, and quite risky for a series that had previously been seen as nothing more than United States propaganda. While Black Ops doesn’t completely demonize the United States government/military, it does raise questions and even implicates its protagonist as the possible killer of John F. Kennedy… it’s a wild game.
The multiplayer also pushed things forward by allowing players to customize their character for the first time with things like face paint. You could also earn in-game currency which you could use to buy items and even bet on party game modes known as Wager Matches. Modes that are now staples of Call of Duty such as One in the Chamber and Gun Game found their beginnings here and allowed for a nice variety from the typical multiplayer offerings in Call of Duty. Zombies also evolved in a significant way with larger maps, elaborate Easter eggs, and much more interesting gameplay opportunities.
3. Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare
Arguably, the next few games in the series on this list are completely interchangeable as we’re now looking at the golden age of the franchise. Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare completely changed the course of history for Call of Duty and likely shooters at large. We saw the introduction of killstreaks, the first M-rated game in the series, our first departure from World War II, and more. Call of Duty 4 features one of the best stories in an FPS as you go across the world trying to stop Russian ultranationalists from starting World War III. Some of the most jawdropping moments in gaming come from this game such as when a nuclear bomb is detonated, crashing your helicopter, leaving you to stumble out of the wreckage before dying to the radiation exposure. Of course, we can’t forget about All Ghillied Up either. It’s a game that just builds constant momentum and leaves you on the edge of your seat start to finish, making it an all-time classic.
2. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 somehow managed to top its predecessor in just about every way. The story goes bigger, gets even more shocking thanks to No Russian, and features one of the most defining multiplayer experiences of its generation. In addition to possibly one of the most over-the-top and theatrical campaigns in an FPS game, Modern Warfare 2 evolved the multiplayer in massive ways. Killstreaks were more than just UAV, an airstrike, and a roaming helicopter. Now, you could choose from 15 different streaks which allowed you to control helicopters, AC-130s, and even call in a nuclear bomb which would automatically end the game. The map selection was so iconic, Sledgehammer Games used it as the launch rotation for 2023’s Modern Warfare 3.
Modern Warfare 2 also featured a really fun co-op mode called Spec-Ops which let players take on short missions with a friend. It was nice to have something cooperative and it was a welcome change of pace from the other usual content in the game.
1. Call of Duty: Black Ops 2
Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 is top-tier Call of Duty. It inched the series toward the future just enough to keep things feeling fresh without being jarring, introduced the pick-10 system, had an incredible campaign with branching paths, a multiplayer that remains iconic and fun to this day, and a Zombies mode that featured some of the best maps and experiences the franchise has ever seen. There is a reason people flocked to this game repeatedly over the last decade, even years after its release, and still long for a remaster/remake.
Whether or not Call of Duty ever sees these heights ever again is a mystery, but Black Ops 2 is easily one of the best shooters of its time and remains a banger a decade later.
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