Adrenaline junkies need look no further.  Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare is the game for you.

Warning: there may be some minor spoilers in this review.  Read at your own peril.

I recently finished Call of Duty 4 and I have to say I really enjoyed it.  I have a few minor nits, but overall it was a very positive experience.  And suffice it to say, any game I actually finish, I must have loved it.

As per standard, Call of Duty 4 is a FPS game, but this one isn’t set in WWII.  It’s modern-day.  The story line is nothing new; some disgruntled Russians seize control of some nukes and go ape.  But this game goes just that much further, the bad guys actually set one of the nukes off!  And it is spectacular to see, albeit painfully destructive!

Okay, a little overview of the game.  You play as one of several people, but principally two people: an SAS operative known as “Soap” (odd name) and a U.S. Marine Sergeant by the name of Jackson.  There are a few other characters that you play during the game, but we’ll get into that later.

As most of these games do, there’s a sort of orientation mission.  But it’s cleverly done in the guise of an SAS training op where you run through a maze of corridors shooting cardboard cutouts of baddies.  From there, the action starts in earnest, and never stops!

The first mission has the SAS infiltrating a cargo ship looking for… something.  The game really shows its stuff here because even while you’re below deck, the stormy seas rock the ship back and forth.  It’s a great effect.  And at some point in the mission, the ship is hit by enemy planes trying to prevent you from completing your job.  From there, it’s a running panic to get topside and off the doomed vessel.  My heart was pounding after this one.  And that was just the first mission!

Many of the missions are just as wild and woolly, with the Marines trying to save a damaged tank from assault, and then escorting it through the city to safety.  There are also helicopter missions where you man an airborne mortar launcher, punctuated with landings and firefights.  The most notable mission is where you man the guns of an AC-130 Spectre Gunship.  Remember that footage that everyone’s seen of the Spectre circling an area in Afghanistan and then wasting the bad guys?  Well, it’s exactly like that.  And you may think that there’s no way to lose that mission, since they can’t shoot you down, but the goal is to help the SAS team get safely to their extraction point.  You also have to avoid damaging a church.  It’s not so intense a mission as the others, but it was very well-done and a fun mission to play.

While on SAS missions, your commanding officer is Captain Price.  There is a flashback mission where you take the place of Lt. Price 15 years in the past.  That’s an awesome mission where you are all suited up in a gilly suit and sniping baddies from a distance, while avoiding detection.  Your commanding officer in that mission gets hurt and you actually have to carry him, stopping to put him down periodically to fight off the bad guys, and then picking him up again to continue the flight from the area.  Oh, and did I mention, it takes place near Chernobyl?

In the last few missions, the SAS team is tasked with taking back an ICBM launch site.  As you approach, two missiles launch.  As it happened, all I could think was, “oh… that can’t be good.”  So then, you have to get to the control room to enter the abort codes, so it becomes a timed running firefight through the compound and then underground through the silos to the control room.  Crazy!

And finally, as per standard for Call of Duty games, there is the flight to the extraction zone where you are on a truck and the bad guys are pursuing you.  Totally manic!  And as my buddies were getting hurt in the finaly mission, I realized, I actually cared about them.  I’d been through the suck with them, thick and thin, and I’d grown fond of them.

I won’t betray the ending, but it’s as climactic and thrilling as any movie I’ve ever seen!

But it’s not all perfection.  If anything, I think the missions are too frenetic.  There’s no time to stop and plan, much less enjoy the scenery.  You’re mostly herded from place to place, told what to do, and directed where to go.  There are some minor differences in the way you may do things.  Do you go through that building, or around it?  But I got the feeling that the game was constantly pushing me.  And if you don’t move forward, the game just throws more and more bad guys at you.  Case in point, there was a building with one entrance.  I was covering that entrance while shooting the bad guys on the second floor.  To my astonishment, even though no one was entering the building, there were more and more bad guys on the second floor.  So I realized that I either had to assault the structure head-on, or eventually run out of ammo shooting more and more evil-doers.  I didn’t like that because sometimes the better avenue of combat is to pacify an area before you enter it.  In the end, the game brought me back to reality several times with events like this… I was reminded that it is a game, not a simulation.  As well, the AI of your allies also bring you back to reality on occasion.  Like they will queue up to enter a room or structure, but they won’t enter until you get there.  As well, there are missions where you have to go house to house looking for someone.  Your buddies will stay in one cleared house until you yourself get to the next one, and then they join you.

While we’re talking about the friendly AI, they can bring you to reality too.  Occasionally, you will watch them get fragged by a grenade and escape unscathed.  Or maybe they get shredded with automatic rifle fire at point blank range, and live to tell about it.  They also don’t do much damage when they fire.  In the end, they become just scenery around your killing spree.  Any combat between AI opponents is largely cosmetic.  But that being said, the animations for the AI are awesome.  They give hand signals, look around, lip sync to what they’re saying, run, dive, roll, all very realistically.

As well, it is really frustrating that whenever you get hit by a bullet, it upsets your aim.  That’s okay, from a reality standpoint, after all, because your aim would indeed falter.  But I cannot count how many M203 grenades I wasted because I couldn’t even get a half second to aim and fire before a bullet hit me and made the grenade launch high of my mark.  That’s a minor nit, but it is a little frustrating.

All in all, I would give it a 9 out of 10.  Excellent game.  Great graphics.  With the settings turned down, it ran fine on my Macbook Pro at 1440×900 and still looked really good.  I am going to be purchasing a new gaming rig in the next few weeks and I look forward to replaying CoD4 on it just to see what gravy I get with the settings turned way up.

Now, on to Crysis!

This entry was posted on Monday, November 19th, 2007 at 10:53 am and is filed under Games.