Call of Duty 4 Review

With a franchise like Call of Duty, you know what you're getting. All of the main games have been exceptionally good; The original had a tough job to do to beat the renowned EA stomper, Medal of Honour, and from there, CoD2 and CoD3 went on the improve on the series both with its intense single player missions and with its brilliant multi player competition. The one question that was on my mind when CoD4 was announced, how long can a World War 2 FPS keep going?

But that's the catch. This one isn't set in WW2. Alright, its pretty obvious. The subtitle to CoD4 is Modern Warfare. All the trailers showed scenes of SAS style soldiers in Middle-Eastern scenery. This is modern warfare and its Call of Duty. The game is fantastic!

Let me deal, first of all, with the single player mode. What you get here is the next gen CoD that we were waiting for. That's not to remove anything from Call of Duty 3 but this is really something. The first mission is with the SAS, they take you through training, which is what you'd expect, taking you through all the old stuff and all the new stuff (of which there's plenty). You are then thrown into the most involved mission in the entire game. Your mission is to raid a cargo ship in the middle of a violent storm. There's rain lashing on the deck, storage crates are sliding everywhere and it all looks incredible. You aren't expected to do much in the lower difficulties; the AI takes care of a lot of the hard work but you are kind of glad its there, after all, you are a rookie to this experience. The heart of this mission gives you and even better look at the rest of the game. The ship is hit by a torpedo and starts sinking. In an extremely panicked and frantic turn, you have to run back through the ship to the helicopter that awaits to rescue you. The ship is filling with water, knocking you over as it starts turning on its side, making it very disorientating. As you run through the ship, following your comrades, a wrong turn will end in death and the mood is very tense. It got so tense that as I ran to the helicopter, I actually started to stand up, and as I made the jump into the helicopter, breathed a sigh of relief

This is what you get all the way through the single player campaign. This is something that the CoD games do best and its even better here. I don't know whether its because, being modern day, I felt more in touch with the characters but I genuinely cared for the characters that I was introduced to and that's a hard thing for a game developer to accomplish. The missions are varied in style. There are slow and stealthy missions and there are frantic, shoot anything that moves kind of missions (and I mean anything, the dogs are vicious!). You take control of guns mounted to planes and utilise huge rocket launchers to take down helicopters; every mission is different and exciting because of this variety.

The graphics are stunning and some of the visual effects are very pleasing to watch. There are moments where you just want to stop and appreciate the scenery but can't because there's too much else going on. The sound is good, the voice acting especially, including some very good British voice acting which doesn't sound Americanised at all. The classic whistling in the ears if a grenade goes off near you and foreign cries of enemies mix into the sound of the battlefield which makes for a very impressive soundtrack.

Online, the game goes somewhere different. They've adopted the class based fighting that was used in CoD3 but they've made it customisable, a feature which I welcomed with some glee. This means that you can choose your primary weapon, secondary weapon, grenades and such. The other thing that has changed is that your class has certain attributes, or perks as they're called in the game, that change the way you can play the game. For instance, you can choose to be faster, cause more damage or have more health. You can also have things like martyrdom, which means you drop a grenade after you're killed, or the ability to see enemies c4 and mines. You can call in an air strike after three kills in a row, have a rocket launcher as a third weapon, have more grenades, in fact, the list of possible combinations of weapons and perks is so high that it really makes for an outstanding system. The game types have changed too. While there is still the standard games like Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch and headquarters, there are many more and these make for a very different gaming experience!

All in all, its safe to say that any game that manages to bring together stunning single player and classic multi player action is going to be a good one but I would go further with CoD4. This isn't just a good game, it sets the bar for all first person shooters out there. This is better than Halo, hell, its probably better than Half Life 2 (did I just say that?). All I know is, this game is fucking brilliant.


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