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.