Intense. If there was ever a word in the English dictionary that can sum up Call of Duty 4, that word would be it. It took a hold of your hand in the beginning chapter and tossed you into a wild rollercoaster that never hesitated or stopped until the very last bullet was shot. Calling Call of Duty 4 Call of Duty 2 in modern time is an understatement. I have played quite a bit of war FPS. My favorite before this game was Medal of Honor: Allied Assault and my favorite mission in that game was the Normandy invasion. Nevermore, said the raven. I now have a new favorite. And a new mission to go along with that. Care to find out? Read along dear friend.

Storyline

Perhaps its weakest part would be the storyline. Now, when I say weakest, it does not automatically mean it’s bad. Instead, it just means that compare to the attention put into other facets of the game, the storyline probably didn’t get that much attention. There is no twist, no sudden surprising revelation here. You play as soldiers of the United State Marine Corps, and of the S.A.S, switching off between the two sides on various missions. It deals with conflicts in the Middle East that has ties to Russia. I can go on and spoil some stuff, and even though they’re not really that much of a spoiler, it’d be best to experience it rather than read it.

However, if there is one good thing I can say about the storyline is the realistic nature of it. In an effort to resemble what happens in real life modern warfare, the heroes do not always live. Indeed, there are a couple of moments in-game in which I felt was extremely powerful because of such notions. I won’t spoil it but you’ll know it when you get there.

Presentation

It’s a common saying in that you can usually tell how much a developer love their game through their game’s presentation. If such saying is true, then Infinity Ward must love Call of Duty 4 than their spouse and kids, because this game just oozes presentation. From the get go, the loading screen is done through a satellite trick which I extremely like because it takes away the watching of “loading” and instead served up neat information and images that actually makes you feel as if you’re still playing, and that is never a “loading” time. Indeed, because of the unique loading screen, I was so immerse into the game that I never once asked myself, “Why is this game loading so long?” I actually didn’t realize the game had loading until a few mission in when I realized that the info screen was the loading screen.

The voice acting can’t be complained about. They all do their jobs accordingly. However, how the voice acting was portrayed was just awesome. When playing the game, and you hear your squad mates talking to you, the distinctiveness of their voice over the com sat immediately gives you a feeling of supreme immersion. What is that immersion? That you are a soldier, but you are just only human, and therefore, are never alone.

That’s what makes Call of Duty 4’s presentation so great. Everything that goes into presenting the game is to immerse the player. It’s to show them how very frightening war is. Death occurs extremely easy. Your squad mates will sometime get hit and die, or ask for cover so that they can reload. You are not a single player trying to destroy a common evil. You are a soldier that is working with those like you to achieve a common goal. The best way to describe this is if you’ve watched the movie Blackhawk Down. That’s the same amount of camaraderie and emotion you can experience from Call of Duty 4.

Running on an unbelievable physics engine, Call of Duty 4’s attempt to simulate real life warfare can be considered a far greater success than most recent FPS that had been released. The bullets travel a certain trajectory, and depending on your weapon and range, it can either be stop by a wall or go directly through it to the other side. The varieties of weapons are just icing on top of the cake. I have not handled an M4 Carbide in real life, but I can only assume it recoils the way it does in the game.

And then there’s the night vision scope. I believe this is the first game I’ve played or seen that makes night vision battle so awesome. Although the opportunities to use them aren’t that many; the time when you do can only be described in one word: Exhilarating.

And that’s only the single player. The multiplayer offers quick, intuitive menus that allow for fast pace change for this fast pace game. Change how so? Say you do not like how some of your custom class settings are, you can just as quickly go into the class, edit it, and come back out to see the game about to start a second away without missing a beat.

As for complaints, I have two. The first is occasional frame rate drop. I will have to say that although the game runs at a brisk 60 FPS for most of the time, there were times in which I encountered slowdowns. This only happened when things got really extremely hectic though, so I wouldn’t worry about it too much.

The second is the scripted events. If there was one thing that totally broke the immersion for me, it was the scripted events. IW could have really gone the adventurous route here, and come up with a way to have random events happen every time the game is played, but unfortunately, they went the safe route. Just as was in previous Call of Duty game, there are quite a bit of scripted events that occur when you get past a certain point of the stage.

It was fine when I first play through it, but when you die (which I did a lot, and I warrant you will too), and you see the enemy doing the same thing 95% of the time, and being in the same place 95% of the time, you then realize you are only playing a video game. Of course, having a game run on random measures would have completely taken more time for IW, and for that, it’s understandable that it was left out. However, a part of me can only wonder how great Call of Duty 4 could have been, and how revolutionary it could have been.

Graphics & Sound

Call of Duty 4 has great graphics. No, scratch that. It has freakishly awesome realistic graphics! If you’ve read my review of Uncharted, you know I called that game the benchmark of console gaming graphics. Well, to a certain degree, I will stick by that because of both its art direction and technical prowess. Call of Duty 4 on the hand, what it lacks in art direction it impressively made up in pure technical awesomeness. There will be time in this game in which it is hard to tell whether you’re playing a game, or watching a movie unveiling before you. It’s that real! I do not know what trick IW did to get the game this good on all platforms (Xbox 360, PS3, and PC), and kept it at 60 FPS, but whatever they did, they must share said secrets to other developers!

Everything about this game’s look is great. The snow that falls on the Russian stage, and the fire burning in the Middle East stage. Again, everything that is done is to make sure the level of immersion is there, and the game does not fail here.

The only complaint is the lack of attentions to the small details. No, not the gameplay. Even the smallest ounces of detail were poured into the gameplay. Instead, IW tried to approach the game in an over-the-top graphics, in that, the greater world graphics make up for the lack of the micro-graphics. When crawling through the grass, it does not bend to allow your body to crawl through and so on. But that’s only a small complaint that is more of a perfectionist approach than a realistic approach. Again, it does have details that you would expect from a war game. When bullets hit walls, stucco would shatter from contacts. Windows would break from incoming gunfire.

And by the way, you owe it to yourself to play this game on a 5.1 or more surround sound system. The sound of bullets flying pass, of fleshed being pounded with bullets, of explosions, of gun fire. The sound work is just amazing! With the volume turn up, it would be hard for someone that does not see you play the game to not think that you are watching a Hollywood blockbuster. The sound effect of Call of Duty 4 is just godly, and I believe every other game that follows will be match up to it.

The lack of music is not a fault. It wasn’t right in the intro stage of Saving Private Ryan, and it wouldn’t be right here. But when there is music, it fits the scenario extremely well and does their job to convey the emotion present.

When the Bog stage was shown in its pre-alpha form, I knew the game was going to look good. But to actually see it in motion, and be a part of it is a whole different story. Now, I can only imagine what IW would do next with Call of Duty 5.

Gameplay

If you have played previous Call of Duty games on the console, you’ll feel right at home here. If you haven’t, you’ll be fine, as the controls are extremely intuitive. Shooting and zooming is done on the shoulder buttons, and grenades are down with the trigger. There is a melee attack button, and a stance attack. Weapon selections are done with the triangle, while optionaries (C-4, night vision, etc) are done with the D-pad. My last FPS before this was Resistance, and at first, I thought it would be a little difficult to get adjusted to the CoD4 gamepad, but before I knew it I was already shooting down tanks with Javelin missiles.

Remember how I mentioned you are never alone and that you’re always with at least one other person? Well, there aren’t any squad commands, ala Rainbow 6, but why would you need any? Your squad mate’s AI can completely handle for themselves. They know when to take cover, when to flush the enemy out, and when to provide covering fire just in case you decide to charge foolishly into a nest of waiting Russians. In fact, you will rely on them more often than you think. Remember, you are not the hero. You are only a soldier. You cannot take out a squad of enemy by yourself. Only if you work with your teammates will you stand a chance to survive.

The enemy’s AI isn’t that bad as well. They take cover behind buildings and obstacles, and occasionally pop out to shoot you. However, if you’re zoomed in on them, sometimes, they would stay hidden until you look somewhere else. How they know you’re aiming at them without looking at you is impossible to say, but still, they know how to stay alive, and how to flush you out of a hold, like with grenades.

Speaking of grenades, dying is extremely easy in Call of Duty 4. A simple grenade can kill you, so when you see that grenade indicator, you better hightail it out of there because if you are caught within the blast radius, you are as good as dead. Besides grenades, you will also have to watch out for cars that could explode, dogs that can attack, and explosive barrels. Basically, always be aware of your surrounding. It’s easier said than done, because there are times when you are pinned down and you think you can just turtle by sitting there and waiting for your teammates to pick them off. Unfortunately, IW rectified that by making it so that the enemies kept respawning on certain stages until you’ve reached a checkpoint.

I would say that’s a bad and a good in its own way. It’s bad because it’s extremely silly as to the numbers of soldiers that would keep appearing after the others have died. Sometimes, it is wiser to just run for it to make it past a certain checkpoint so that the enemies will stop spawning, but there is a better way to approach it. All you gotta do is slow advances. Kill the enemies, move onto the next obstacles, kill the respawn enemies, and then move up. Just like how real life soldiers do it! (Or so I think). In any case, it’s good in that it forces the player to really think as a soldier, and to sometime move forward, even at a snail-pace, instead of sitting back and picking off the enemies one by one until they’re all dead. Thus, the intense war pace is kept without hampering forward progress.

Still, the game is pretty linear. There are no alternate routes or path to take and everything tends to go from A to B to C. There are really no options as how to approach a path, and this goes back to what I mentioned earlier about scripted sequences. For those who want an open gameplay world, you will not find it here.

And oh yeah, Call of Duty 4 is not all about running and gunning with the same type of gunplay. Instead, it mixes it up with a variety of situational gameplay. My favorite mission out of the entire game would have to be the AC-130 Gunship mission. There is something about it that just makes you drop your mouth in amazing and shout the word “cool” and “awesome” every few seconds or so! Besides that, you will sometime find yourself behind a sniper’s rifle, or a Blackhawk’s side rail gun. The pacing of CoD4 is pitched perfect. It is short and swift. Although, unfortunately, besides the brief diversion in gameplay, the core of the game is still mainly to run into a place, and kill something or find someone. But thanks to the great pacing, even though looking back you’ll see that it’s somewhat repetitive, while playing, you will never even think of it.

And that’s only the single player. The multiplayer is a whole different story. When you first start, there isn’t much that’s available to you. However, as you play matches, and earn experience point, you’ll slowly move up in levels, akin to that of role playing games. As you move up in levels, things will slowly start to open up for you, and after level 4, the depth of the multiplayer begins to show itself. As you gain higher levels, you’ll open up varies classes and can create custom classes of your own.

Each class consists of a main weapon, and a secondary weapon, and more will open as you rank and level up. Each main and side weapon have their own attachment that can be used to assist you while you play, like a red-mark scope, or a scope that zooms in on a target, or a silencer that does not reveal your position when you shoot.

Besides your weapons, you’ll have access to perks, which you’ll gain as you level up. In a nod toward pure balance between hardcore and casuals, you can still compete with the best of them with the perks you have at the beginning. However, the later perks have their own distinct advantages that you might give up the early perks for. The perk that I like yet dislike enormously at the same time is martyrdom. The “death” blast radius of the single player of grenades unfortunately carries over to the multiplayer as well. What does that mean? It means dying to a grenade is extremely easy. In fact, unless you see the grenades right away and immediately sprint out of its range, there is a very high chance you’ll die when it goes off.

There are plenty of times when I’ve killed someone, only to die by their grenades because I couldn’t escape fast enough. But hey, what someone can do to you, you can do back at them.

The level up and the ranking system is pure genius. What’s there in the beginning is definitely enough for casuals to get in, play a few games, and then get out. But for the more hardcore, there are enough options there to last a few lifetimes. Besides perks, there are challenges for each weapon, like say, get 10 headkills, and you’ll unlock a new camo for the gun. Other challenges reward experience point that’ll go toward your total experience, for example, killing with people with grenades or falling from a high height and surviving.

There are also real time rewards for killing sprees. Get 3 kills in a row, you get to call a UAV that acts a radar and tell you where your opponents are (however, if you use a UAV jammer perk, your opponent still can’t find you on the map). Get 5 kills in a row, and you can call in an air strike somewhere on the field. Good for killing masses of campers in a spot. Get 7 kills, and you can call in a helicopter. I am going to go ahead and say the helicopter is a little bit overpowered. Not overpower in the difficulty it takes to kill it, but more so in the fact that its guns are extremely accurate. If you are out in the open, it will find you, and shoot you, and kill you extremely fast. So then, the first reaction is to hide. But if you hide, you cannot shoot it down with a rocket launcher or your guns. However, it could be that I just suck at shooting it down, because out of all of my attempts to use a rocket launcher, I’ve only hit once, and when I’m using the main gun, it tends to kill me before I can kill it (or we can kill it with regards to my teammates).

There are 16 maps and 13 play modes for the online part. The largest game mode allows up to 18 players, while most other mode allows 4 to 16. My favorite game mode would have to be domination. For the CTF freaks, there is no capture the flag. However, there is a mode in which I think it’s CTF in reverse. In CTF, you are asked to take a flag, and return it back to your base. However, in CoD4, there is a mode call sabotage, where you must take a bomb and bring it to your opponent’s base. My favorite is by far domination, because it allows up to 18 players. The maps are nicely designed, and do not feel large enough that you might get lost in them. And because a lot (all?) of them do not have set spawn points, there will never be a point in which your spawn point is at a disadvantage, unless your team fails to hold a part, and even then spawning occurs all over the map.

Lag in the online mode is by far, sporadic. There will be times when you will experience no lag, and others you will just want to rip out your hair for how much it lags. But fortunately, my playtime has shown that for most of the time, the game is lagless.

Thus, for the lack of a better word, Call of Duty 4 puts the game in gameplay. And rightly so, because it is just too awesome to describe in a few paragraphs.

Replayability

The initial single player mode, at the normal difficulty, took me about 5 hours to beat. It was short, but like I mentioned before, it is a short and sweet single player campaign. Once you’re done, you can always try the challenge mode, in which you can go through a stage to see how many kills you can get total and other challenges.

On harder difficulty, the game might take awhile longer as the gun battles might last longer, but still, do not expect a 10-15 hour single player campaign out of this.

The challenges might give you another 5 hours in replayability, but that’s just the appetizer. Instead, the main course is indeed the multiplayer function for reasons mentioned earlier.

I find myself playing with each weapon to open each of their attachments and to progressively level up to the higher ranks to open up more options. In other words, this game is extremely replayable! However, that is only if you can play the multiplayer mode. If you can only play the single player, or does not like MP, then replayability is not like that of Uncharted.

Final Remark

My first Call of Duty game was actually Call of Duty 2 on the PC, and I loved it. I failed to pay attention to the first game because I was still playing Medal of Honor at the time. It is funny sometimes how the gaming culture works. Before, when the Medal of Honor franchise was the benchmark for war FPS with its incredible Allied Assault, Infinity Ward took up the challenge and created the Call of Duty franchise. Overtime, as the quality of CoD went up, Medal of Honor suddenly started declining. And now, we’re at Call of Duty 4, which is going to be the benchmark for future war FPS to come. In fact, I do not see any other FPS in the near future that can come close to achieving the intensity that is present in Call of Duty 4, save perhaps Killzone 2 (and that’s a big maybe), and maybe Metal Gear Solid 4 (if you can even call it a war game).

Infinity Ward loved this baby, and it shows. Call of Duty 4, when you get beyond the lingo, and the jargon, is just a fun game to play. It’ll make your heart beat faster, it’ll make you say, “Oh damn” more, and will just wet your appetite for things to come. Buy it. Love it. And see programming at its finest.

The Good: The pure beauty of the game. The amazing sound effect. Variety of game play styles in both the single and multiplayer mode. The presentation that just draws you in for the 5 hours that the game last and never let go. Intense gameplay. Incredibly deep multiplayer. Great physics engine. Good teammate and enemy AI. Lack of loading besides the one before a mission.

The Bad: Realism seem to take precedent over gameplay as some things, like grenades, are often too powerful and can quickly kill the mood to play through a mission when you keep dying to the same grenades. Linear gameplay. Simple storyline. Some of the multiplayer perks might make it difficult for casuals to effectively “win” in the online matches. Scripted sequences.

The Ugly: The razor blade thin paper that Infinity Ward would like you to believe is the instruction manual. I mean, seriously? Insane lags on some maps on the multiplayer mode (The Bog anyone?). The poor quality of the PS3 network when it was released (Party wasn’t working, people were having a hard time connecting), although I believe it has been mostly fixed by now. Nothing revolutionary was done gameplay wise, which was a shame, because nothing evolutionary was done either (you can argue that the night-vision goggles might make up for it, and on certain days, I would incline to agree).

Final Score: 18/20