How Dare They Put This Many Parries in a Call of Duty Game

Last night, I started the campaign for Modern Warfare 4, the latest Call of Duty game. I fully expected the usual things one expects from a Call of Duty campaign: shoot some bad guys, hide behind cover, maybe even blow up a tank or parkour through a busy city. What I didn’t expect: Parries. And not just an errant parry here or there, but an entire parrying mechanic, as if it’s a first-person Soulslike.

Modern Warfare 4 starts traditionally enough. You play as part of a group of soldiers stationed in Hajin, a fictional city in South Korea. The North Korean regime bombs the city. You shoot some bad guys, hide behind cover, and blow up a giant truck. Then comes the second mission, “Out in the Cold,” which casts you as longtime Modern Warfare protagonist Captain John Price. You’re tasked with infiltrating a Manhattan nightclub and extracting information from a Russian asset. Price intentionally enters the club without any weapons. Almost immediately, a lumbering giant of a bouncer raises a fist, and a string of terror-inducing words splash across the screen.

“Press L to block just before being hit to parry.”

For the first part of the mission, combat plays out like this: pressing L to parry bouncers, then following it up by pressing R to punch them in the face. You eventually get a pistol, and the rest of the mission plays out with unabashed John Wick influence. You punch and shoot your way through a series of neon-lit nightclub rooms. Quintessentially 138bpm deep house thrums through the speakers. The mix of melee and pistol combat in the setting is genuinely quite entertaining. There’s even a chase scene at the end, replete with (hell yes!!!!) a parkour segment through Midtown that’s as smooth as anything from Mirror’s Edge. Then, when you corner your mark, a Russian operative named Makarov, it’s clear you’ve entered a nightmare.

A boss fight.

Image: Infinity Ward/Activision

The boss fight against Makarov commits two grave sins: you need to parry to win, and it’s an instant-fail fight if you miss a single parry. Yes. In a Call of Duty game. Really. I do not want to publicly admit how many times I missed the timing on parry #3. (The fight does, at least, grant you a checkpoint between phases.) It’s a slog, one that completely halts the momentum built up by the action-packed set pieces that precede it.

Then comes the next mission, “Following Orders,” during which you play as an unnamed soldier in the North Korean army. Along with a squad of soldiers, you ransack an unassuming rural hamlet in search of a regime dissident. When you finally find him hiding in the bathroom of an abandoned house, he barges through the door and tackles you to the ground. Those horrifying words show up again.

“Press L to parry.”

Image: Infinity Ward/Activision

I won’t proclaim to be a Call of Duty expert by any means, though I do generally end up playing through the modern campaigns for the taste of interactive Fast and Furiousness they offer. (I’m even the rare defender of Black Ops 7’s maligned story mode, which made that game easily one of the best co-op shooters of 2025.) So I can’t say with 100% certainty that parries have never appeared as a central mechanic in any previous Call of Duty campaign, but the presence of it in Modern Warfare 4 feels extremely out of place.

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Part of this might be due to perspective: As seen in the recent action game Valor Mortis, parries in first-person just don’t feel as natural as parries in third-person. But it also comes across as trend-chasing. To be clear, this is not a screed against parries as a mechanic. (Yes, they are a scourge, but fine, I recognize some of you sickos actually enjoy them.) This is more situational commentary — there is a time and place for carefully making sure you push the right button at the right time. Putting parries in a turn-based RPG? When done well, the result is an innovative genre mashup that leads to record sales and a well-deserved wave of Game Awards, like Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. Putting parries in an expensive first-person shooter? That’s little more than a roadblock for all of the good stuff.

Break it down, and Call of Duty campaigns really only need three things to succeed: solid shooting, carefully designed levels, and intense set pieces. Modern Warfare 4 hits full marks on all of those. It doesn’t need to tell players to press L to parry. I’d rather press F to pay respects.