Back when the original Call of Duty was released, it was met with overwhelming acclaim by players and critics alike. The sequel also excelled, but unfortunately this streak of genius was knocked back by the sorely average Call of Duty 3. Do Infinity Ward have what it takes to put the series back on track, or has the Call of Duty series been KIA?

World War III

The storyline is your standard wartime extravaganza, involving the United Kingdom and the USA and their attempts to stop Russian ultranationalists from destroying the world via WMDs. Technically the story is pretty well-structured and doesn’t get too political/ridiculous to follow - although there are certain parts in the game where we found ourself shaking our heads in disbelief… but I’ll mention those a little later on.

You take control of two soldiers in two different stories which come together for an explosive finale – Sergeant John “Soap” MacTavish of the British 22 SAS Regiment and Sergeant Paul Jackson of the United States Marine Corps 1st Force Recon. Both characters are under the command of their superior officers and at one point you actually get to play as Soap’s commanding officer, Captain Price, in a flashback, something which has not been tried before in a COD game.

It's Like a Warzone Out There

But enough about the story – let’s talk gameplay. As you would guess, Call of Duty 4 plays pretty much like it’s predecessors (because if you have a good thing going, why not stick with it?). But now there’s an added twist – for this is the first COD not to be set during World War II. This is definitely the right way for the series to go – one of the reasons that the third installment didn’t go down so well is that the whole WWII scenario just didn’t feel original anymore, which is a problem with using the same formula over and over again. I mean, come on, if I had to count the number of war shooters based during WWII, I’d need more hands. A lot more.

The ‘Modern’ bit of the name is what makes this Call of Duty special, and places it miles apart from the others. Where the original Call of Duty was a breath of fresh air in a mainly abysmal range of ‘war sims’, COD4 has taken the genre into the 21st century with an almighty bang. The look and feel of the landscapes; The weapons you get your hands on, with laser sights and built-in grenade launchers; Never before has a war game involved darting through a Russian-ridden television company building, trying to find the room from which the ultranationalist enemy is broadcasting his messages of terror to his people.

The action is insanely breath-taking and at times it feels like Infinity Ward have reinvented the whole genre all over again. From the word ‘go’ you are thrown straight into the hectic battlefield and the bullets won’t stop flying until you’ve killed every last one of your foes. It’s fast-paced, it’s adrenaline pumping, and it’s what every first-person war shooter – heck – what every first-person shooter should feel like. Everytime you think you’ve just seen the most dramatic scene the game has to offer, COD4 will throw yet another original encounter in your path – be it an epic battle with some mean-looking helicopters, or a mushroom cloud engulfing your own team in smooth, horrifying slow motion.

Keeping It 'On the Low'

Of course war isn’t all bullets flying and people dying – some missions require you lay low and keep quiet. One particular mission has you lie in long grass completely still while a troop of enemy soldiers passes right over you, missing your frozen body by inches. It’s extremely intense, and we even found ourselves holding our breath just in case they could hear us… it really drags you in.
Other missions sit you in the gunner’s position in a low-flying helicopter, destroying the land below and generally helping out your troops who are fighting on foot. These missions help to space the bang-bang-move levels out and keep the whole game feeling fresh. And, of course, they are a lot of fun – who wouldn’t want to play God above a battlefield!

Unfortunately, it does all go a bit O.T.T. now and then. At one point, your team is racing towards an enemy encampment when two WMDs are launched high into the sky and Intel reports that in exactly 15 minutes time, the whole of the east coast of America will be rubble. What follows is a race against time to bust into the base, locate the missile control room and input the abort codes (which Intel conviently extract from the enemy with only minutes to go before impact). Then it’s ‘Congratulations, you just saved approximately 41million lives. Who’s next?’. It’s all a bit too much and just a little far-fetched. Not that this is a bad thing as such. It just feels a little out of place with the rest of the game’s realism.
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Teamwork is For Winners

One aspect of the gameplay that is spot on is the teamworking element. It has become commonplace in the first-person shooter world to begin a game with a team, for them to all get picked off one-by-one within the first ten minutes, and then for the ‘hero’ to kill all those evil baddies all by his self… Probably not very historically correct, I would imagine. Even though this game could have gone ahead and followed this formula (and it would have got away with it too, since it’s set in the future, so being historically correct doesn’t affect it), Infinity Ward have decided to reward our courageous one-man killing sprees with a game where – wait for it – your squad is actually vital to your progression!

No longer are we the Master Chief of the real world – we now fall in line with a group of men who are all in the same boat as us – and it feels fantastic. Throughout the game you really do actually feel like you are bonding with your teammates and we found ourselves feeling relief that we had these other men to help us along. Each man in the team has their own skills, and so whenever your speciality is needed, your friends will look to you to deal with the path ahead – just as you will look to them for support when it is their time to shine.

Artificial; Slightly Intelligent

This generation of games boasts some very smart AI and Call of Duty 4 is no exception. Your allies know exactly when to get out of the way of incoming bullets/grenades/helicopters and are quick to move when they see a good spot they could be shooting from. We only ever experienced a couple of times when they seemed quite dazed and confused about where exactly they were meant to be.

The enemy AI is a mixed bag. Upon taking a quick look, they seem to work very efficiently to keep you and your team at bay, taking up clever positions and lobbing grenades, smokes and flashes where needed.

There is still one little problem though which still hasn’t been addressed, even though it’s been hanging around like a bad smell for quite a while. Let’s say I kill an enemy soldier who, before he met his death, had taken up his position behind a big old machine gun and was blaring away. My aim is still positioned directly over the exactly location where he was stood, because I know that, within five seconds, another ‘intelligent’ adversary is going to put himself slap bang in the middle of my sights in an attempt to finish off where his dead buddy started. And once THIS guy is dead as a dodo, his other friend decides to take over… as you can see, it’s quite easy to score multiple kills in a matter of seconds without as much as the click of the mouse pointer.

Dragging It Out

So for the most part the gameplay is outstanding and a wonder to play, but of course, it has it’s downfalls. One huge problem is the parts of the game where Infinity Ward decided they wanted to drag the game out a little bit instead of filling it with worthwhile gaming. Their method for unnecessarily forcing the player to play a section for twice as long as they need to is simple – make the enemies keep respawning for, oh, I don’t know, say… much too long! Throwing one wave of enemies into the battlefield is great and even throwing two waves in is fair enough – many games do this, so we can’t exactly say it isn’t acceptable. But time and time again, COD4 just takes it too far and by the fourth wave of drones, we’re left wondering how on Earth we’re meant to find this stimulating?

To top this off, the game actually punishes you for trying to move forward to early. If you kill over a wave, then rush forward, you’ll be halfway across the battlefield when a troupe of helicopters will come swooping in, dropping a dozen fresh, new enemies off… right on top of you. It’s like the game is actually asking you to just sit back, chill, enjoy picking them off from a distance, we’ll tell you when it’s OK to move, trust us. This ‘boxing in’ feels far from the rest of the game, which on a whole is quite a free-roaming experience.

Obviously, as we’ve pointed out, COD4 is in a sense just another COD, but with the added ‘bonus’ of modern day guns and technology. The pre-rendered video clips before each mission are nice to look at, but as with its predecessors, they don’t mean much at all to the player, who just really wants to get into the action. Of course, to all the Call of Duty fans, veterans and communities, this is probably exactly what they wanted anyway, so we’re pretty sure there won’t be that many complaints.

The final, MAJOR complaint about the COD4 Single Player is its length. Someone invented the word ‘abrupt’ just so they could use it to describe the length of this game (true story). Playing on Medium difficulty and going at what we considered to be a moderate pace, we had the game beat after just under 5 hours. For a game so publicised and anticipated, this just is not enough at all. We actually found ourselves saying outloud ‘Is that it?!’ as the ending credits rolled. Infinity Ward try to make up for this in the way of ‘unlockable modes’ when you have completed the Single Player campaign – but these include playing through that game again with a time limit and playing for ‘score’… both of which are complete gimmicks and should really just come as standard for a game like this.
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Taking It Online

But enough about the Single Player – you can be sure that the majority of COD fans are working themselves up for the Multiplayer. Fortunately where the Single Player dropped the ball in gameplay terms, the Multiplayer makes up for it and then some. It is not an exaggeration when we say that this game is worth getting just for the Multiplayer.

It’s very big and it’s very clever. With over 10 different game modes, more than 15 hugely detailed maps which play to perfection and dozens of different weapons, weapon attachments and explosives to play with, this is Online Play Heaven. The gameplay feels really slick and really puts you in the middle of a battlefield, even more so than the Single Player. It all technically works the very same as the main game – a couple of shots will kill an enemy and when you get hit yourself, hiding round a corner to get your health back is the name of the game.

A ranking system has been integrated into the Multiplayer and it’s a beast. Players start at level 1 and through killing, completing objectives and completing challenges, they rise up through the ranks. As you gain levels, more guns, attachments, ‘perks’ and equipment become available. You’d think that this would make the experience very unfair for a beginner surrounded by veteran players, but it actually works rather well.

The challenges are a mix of the obvious and the downright silly. Kill 25 people with the M4 and you’ll be rewarded with a laser sight to attach on top. Kill another 35 and you’ll get a silencer. On the other side of the spectrum, jump from 30 feet and plung to your death and you’ll be rewarded with tons of experience points. Challenges add a whole different reason to play and help keep it fresh. Perks you will receive include ‘Deeper Penetration’ for bullets, extra health and the aptly named ‘Last Stand’, which lets you take a couple of pops at your killer with a pistol before you pass through the pearly gates. Players can only have 3 perks activated at a time, so choosing which suit you best can be a tough decision.

Small details make playing so much more enjoyable. After meeting our end, we are subjected to the ‘Killcam’ – a 5 second clip from the point of view of our killer, showing exactly how they popped us. Often humiliating, yet we always found ourselves wanting to watch it, just so we could whisper expletives to ourselves about how we should have dodged that. It’s the little things that make gamers tick and Infinity Ward have crammed ‘little things’ down our throats in bucket loads.

There’s also a great feature which rewards killing sprees. Get 3 kills in a row without dying and your enemies will all appear on your radar to give you a nice chance to hunt them all down. Get 6 kills and you’ll be allowed to choose where to order an airstrike to bomb the hell out of the land and hopefully some foes. And just a few more kills will get you a helicopter which will follow your adversaries around until either they shoot it down or they’re all lying in the mud.

Blemishes on a Nearly Perfect Record

Just like the Single Player, the Multiplayer isn’t without its faults. Generally the maps are brilliant and exactly what the doctor ordered, but a couple are just too damn small and when you’ve got 32 players in a server all bunching up together because they’ve got no-where else to go, you’ve got a problem. Also we found now and again whole games were ending within 5 minutes and we were onto the next map. This is possibly the fault of team-stacking with all the good players on one team and will probably be solved very soon, but it still got very annoying when it happened.

Our final gripe is the teamworking element. This game begs for players to work as a team and when a group of players do play together, they will find themselves winning more often. However, 95% of the time no-one even considers working with their teammates and it just all becomes a free-for-all. Most of the time, no-one even cares if their team is winning or losing, and everyone is just trying to get the best score on the server. This is fair enough and it’s still loads of fun, but you just can’t get that great feeling of watching each other’s backs that way. Of course no one can force COD4 players to work as a team, which is a shame, because a whole element of this game is being missed.
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The Beautiful and the Ugly Side of War

So how does Call of Duty 4 look? It’s unsurprising that it boasts some of the most spectacular visual effects we’ve seen in a game, creating the kind of scenes that before now have never really been possible to produce. Many missions begin with your team flying over the surrounding area in a helicopter and these intros are blissfully gorgeous in every way – gunfights, explosions and people rushing madly all over the place line the streets below – and it really does look the part. When a game instantly takes your breath away each time you start a mission, you know you’re in for one hell of a ride.

However… get into the game and you’ve got a different story altogether. In comparison to these idyllic moments, for the most part, the rest of the game is somewhat lacking. Even set on maximum graphical detail, COD4 just doesn’t compare to this generations wonder games.

Now and again we see textures that look like they’ve been reused from past games; Surroundings that don’t seem to have had much effort put into making them look good; And don’t even look into the distance, else you’ll spot mountain ranges that look REALLY bad. We’re talking 90’s bad. It’s not all terrible though – the character models, the vehicles, the important bits that actually matter and that you will, as the player, will be paying most attention to have been drawn to perfection. It’s a case of colour in between the lines, but don’t bother with outside them – no one’s going to be looking there anyway.

War Never Sounded So Good

The booming sound of battle drumming from your speakers is an essential part of any warfare shooter and COD4 does not disappoint. Its glorious orchestral soundtrack is simply stunning and fits perfectly with the atmosphere, helping to drag the player even closer to the battlefield than they already felt. Most of the time the musical score will keep itself on the low, offering perfectly mellow yet dramatic harmony, until suddenly the whole scene changes, danger is looming and the melodious beat turns to fury and terror, sweeping you and your team into a whirlwind of action and vigour.

Along side this, the wartime sound effects are exactly right and capture the frantic battle flawlessly. We could really hear and feel the shots whizzing past our faces as we lay in the dirt, with our own projectiles firing back in the opposite direction, our weapon sounding like a disgruntled cannon. Then there’s your team screaming to you for help and sounding exactly how you are feeling. Everything put together into one neat package really does make COD4 stand out where your headphones are concerned.

If we were to voice one grumble about the sound effects, if would definitely have to be the voice acting. We’re not sure if this is just standard when it comes to wartime gaming, but the British voice acting is utterly terrible and, being British myself, made me want to rip my own voice box out and then attempt to say ‘Do I really talk like that?!’. The answer, after I’ve managed to ram it back down my throat, is no – the majority of English men do not talk with such a ridiculous accent and we never have. Fortunately, as we get to know the characters a little better their accents become slightly more bearable.

Roundup

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare isn’t without it’s faults, but for the main part it is a solid wartime shooter packed full of incredible gameplay and explosive scenes, with an extremely addictive and well implemented multiplayer to boot. If it weren’t for it’s insanely short Single Player mode and the sometimes ugly-looking surroundings, Infinity Ward would have been on target for nothing more than a full-on Steamfriends recommendation. As it stands, we still do recommend you check it out – as long as you don’t pay the $70 asking price Steam users are being ripped for. Just take a walk down to the shops and pick it up there – you won’t be disappointed.

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