Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare

"A tiny, unbalanced, and spam filled, yet brilliant game."

Behold Call of Duty 4, the newest God of video games, joyfully spitting on most other games graphics and game engines, and also scoffing at their pathetic range of weaponry and multiplayer options. Unfortunately, this God is lazy. Yes, the graphics are stunning, and yes, it runs smoothly despite looking so beautiful. Yes, it's got some amazing levels and indeed the multiplayer basically surpassed BF2 as the most time consuming online FPS, not to mention it plays very nicely with respectable AI. But everything about this game is pathetically short, which is where this game starts to fail me.

First thing I must say is that if you don't want to play this game online, and just do the single player campaign, do not under any circumstances buy this game. Download it illegally, steal it from the spoilt rich kid who lives up the road, rob a store, hell, start up a crime ring focussed on making counterfeit video games, just don't fork over money for it. Why? Because you won't get 5 minutes of gameplay per dollar.

The single player takes about 4 or 5 hours to complete, in fact I got bored of the game and didn't play it for while after about 4 hours of playing, and after telling someone where I was up to a few days later, I was informed I was actually playing the last level. That's right; it's so short that even when the story is coming to an end, you can't believe it's actually finishing then because you've only just started. In its defence it is a pretty good, and fairly depressing story, there just wasn't a whole lot of content to fill in time. Sure, you could play the game on the hardest settings and stretch it out to 10 or 12 hours, but really this is the dwarf of gaming, although it is the incredibly beautiful dwarf of gaming.

The beautiful thing about this game is how goddamn nice it is to play. The guns are easy to use and smooth, the sound is engrossing, there are weapons for days to try out, and you can successfully maneuver around quite agilely climbing walls and cars on the press of button. The AI is not completely moronic, but still straight forward enough to not have to deal with them awkwardly trying to walk around behind you, like many modern AI heavy first person shooters. In fact, there's only two control elements that Infinity Ward have gotten wrong here; while in prone you will be crippled by the mighty "Prone Blocked", which causes you to get stuck crouching in the open, unable to lie behind your cover. And on a much more serious level, collision detection with level objects. Which ever character you are at the time, you'll quickly realise that everyone on the modern battlefield wears suits made of highly adhesive Velcro, which sticks like a weld to most surfaces, which I assume to be covered in Velcro too. This is actually a little annoying, because it leads to getting caught on door frames, tiny (2 brick tall) ledges, and other players, again, leaving you as a sitting duck.

The way the campaign functions is generally alternating between interesting missions with varied objectives and styles, and the same old "enemies spawn infinitely until you cross an invisible line" style that has been used in every single Call of Duty game in existence. The former of the game types are truly awesome, such as the well known sniper level, the bonus level, the tactical bomber mission. But unfortunately the old formula they've been doing for the last half of a decade is growing thin. The huge array of stunning sniper rifles are useless, as is your ability to shoot moving targets at distance, because bad guys spawn forever unless you charge them, you are rewarded for being good at charging and killing people at close range, no other skills are of use. Basically, the missions, no matter the guise of the listed objective, are to charge mindlessly at your opponents until you get to a point where they stop spawning, then killing the remaining people. I simply can't stand this type of gaming anymore; I've done it enough times already, and now I just want to continually bash my head against the wall because it's so boring and dull. This is what eventually led to me abandoning the single player game, and only resuming after I was told I had basically finished it. With that said, the missions that avoid this are brilliant, although they are again, horribly short. The sniper mission, if you think about it, only has about 6 guys to actually kill, and two major avoidance things, only one of which you can really fail at, hell you only see ONE person at all in the last few minutes of it where you just run non-stop.

However, there is one way this game manages to make itself worth owning, and that is the multiplayer. And this is what I'll be focussing most of my review on, because honestly, it's the most important part by far with this game. Call of Duty 4's multiplayer is basically the guys from Infinity Ward hoarding together every successful multiplayer idea from other games and using them. Do you like counter strike? Search and Destroy is the mode for you, hell, if you ever wanted to know what counter strike was like with respawns you've got sabotage. BF2 seems good to you? They stole the scoring system and made a game mode called "Domination", although it is admittedly slightly different. Headquarters is another game mode which lends some similarities. Add in the easy to implement modding system and you've got an infinite well of ideas. Where BF2 has made its mark by giving people numbers to strive for with a great ranking system, designed to make up for the sub-par game play, CoD4 has tried to steal the scoring ideas, while combining them with a solid game engine. Which is why, until I finished every single challenge on CoD4, I hadn't felt the need to go back to that game.

But of course, since the Call of Duty God is lazy, there are flaws with multiplayer which are at times difficult to overlook. Again, it's short. That may sound odd, considering multiplayer games really don't have ends as such, but it actually makes sense. The game uses a fairly Battlefield-esque ranking system of a main rank, which goes up as you score points, and then a bunch of minor challenges which are unrelated, but unlike that, which takes years of constant play to reach maximum rank (which is admittedly far too long) this takes about two weeks to reach to top rank of 55. The other challenges take longer, really, about 4-5 months of casual play. Which in some ways could be seen as a good enough amount of time, but again, that's merely a side effect of the God being lazy again. While there are heaps (about 50) minor challenges to complete. Most of them will occur within a month without actually trying for them, the other 5 which don't occur naturally, will take roughly one to two rounds of consciously trying to get. Where the time frame for these challenges goes up is by adding in the horrible idea of making everybody get 150 headshots with each gun. There are about 25 guns in the multiplayer game, and as a rule, you'll get about 10 shots in the cranium per round with most guns. Now you see why this takes a while. Not to mention that some are utter rubbish at accurate shots which makes moments where you force yourself to use these weapons depressing and infuriating. The final error in the scoring and challenges system, is that they're only stored on your computer, unlike BF2, where you had a ranking, and were able to have something to strive for, you don't here, it's all just locally stored. It's just a little disappointing considering how much effort went into the system.

Weapons have a lot of problems too. There isn't any balance from weapon to weapon; The M4, P90, any LMG, 50cal and R700 are considerably better than everything else. There are some other respectable weapons available, but they're still dominated by the ones I've mentioned. Which leads to another problem… The people playing the game. Sure, most people are nice, and actually give a lot of entertainment, the game almost feels like a chat room at time. Where people become annoying in the game is when they exploit the many ill-conceived ideas that this game is loaded with. Some people feel that some of these guns (namely the P90) are horribly over powered (personally I find its lack of range makes it inferior to the M4, but that's a whole different issue) and will whine and complain non stop about it. But even then, whining about things that aren't real problems, while annoying, is a dream in comparison to times where whining is appropriate. From the darkest minds the world has ever known comes the explosive. The humble explosive is more than just a mere a way of dishing out some damage at enemies you cannot see, it's a cataclysmic weapon of mass destruction, grenades have huge explosions, but it's not just a large spread, the kill zone of a grenade is huge. This results in spamming. 3x grenades basically guarantees a top 10 score, most players would agree that close to 40% of all deaths that you will suffer are direct results of grenades, most of which come from random spamming. But nay, the grenade has a bigger meaner cousin, the noob tube. Imagine a world, where didn't have to really aim properly at your opponent, you just need to hit within about 20 feet. The tube is highly accurate, easily the simplest to aim mounted grenade launcher I've used in any game, and considering it removes the wait time of the grenade, it becomes one hell of a hassle.

But wait, there's more!

The God of CoD4, had a clever idea to make the game more exciting by allowing players to have special abilities to make the game different for each player, which he didn't think through well enough. Basically, everything that sounded brilliant as a feature on the box eventually becomes a curse. I'm sure, if you've never played the game the idea of being able to launch air strikes, and call in helicopter strikes when you kill enough people sounds great. And it is, those things can rack up an extra 20 kills per round no problem. How about the ability to pull out a pistol when you die to take a few last ditch shots like in action movies? Or think of how much you could dominate with ability to drop a live grenade when you die. Now think about playing against 47 other people who are all using these things. Yes, it's horrible. And if you're any good, which doesn't seem hard, because I'm usually top 5 or 6, despite not really being all that good, you'll be getting murdered by ridiculously accurate and unfair helicopters constantly because it (supposedly) targets the good players more than the pathetic ones. Most deaths, I'm talking over 50%, come from cheap sources, and if you include deaths by the better weapons in that calculation, it'll be likely that you'll only die a fair death once every few days. It gets tiring. There are far too many things that this game curves the amount of damage a skilful player can do, due to the fact you'll be killed by somebody who didn't see you every three minutes.

Finally, in the laziness complaints list is the level design. Some of the maps are brilliant with countless ways of going about your business. But most aren't. Most of the maps are tiny, as in only one or two grenade lobs in any direction, which leads to a lot of spam death. Added to the increased threat of being killed by some losers blind luck, is the limiting of options you are usually faced with when it comes to get from your spawn to the other team. Basically, most maps are either weighted towards one team or one type of weapon approach.

Call of Duty 4 is still a very good game, in many ways poorly designed, and in other ways painful, but it still managed to hold my attention for the better part of year, although the lack of ranking takes away the desire to play so much, the single player is at times brilliant, but still horribly reliant on the old formulas. The game play is brilliant, and it is immersive, so you can look past the fact it's still pretty much just another Call of Duty game with different skins. Don't spend money on this game unless you want to play online, and even then, you better hope you're thick skinned.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 06/23/08

Game Release: Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (AU, 11/07/07)