Infinity Ward's latest is hands-down one of the best shooters of 2007, both in terms of its single-player adventure and multiplayer mayhem.
There are people who will tell you Call of Duty 4: Modern Combat is no big deal, just a prettier version of the last shooting gallery that was released last month or last year. That it's just a big interactive movie, a game where everything from explosions to enemy rushes is all carefully scripted.
Those people are wrong. Ignore them.
That's because Call of Duty 4 is arguably the finest first-person shooter of 2007, from its gripping have-you-ducking-in-your-seat single-player campaign to its addictive I-just-need-a-few-more-kills-to-get-this-cool-weapon spin on multiplayer. If you don't like it, there's a good chance you simply don't like shooters.
As implied by the title, Call of Duty 4 marks a shift for the franchise, leaving World War II behind for a modern-day story set in a fictional version of the Middle East. There are these terrorists, and this Russian ultranationalist... well, really, the particulars are irrelevant. All you need to know is that you play a few different characters chasing down bad guys in an effort to save the world.
Most of the time, you play as "Soap" MacTavish, a British SAS agent, and for a brief period, his commanding officer, Lt. Price. You'll also fill the shoes of Pvt. Paul Jackson of the Marines, as the story routinely shifts back and forth between different POVs. Part of the action happens in the aforementioned fictional Middle East setting, while other missions take place in Eastern Europe, and sometimes even in the past.
While the settings have changed, the basic combat model has not. CoD's "no man fights alone" mantra remains in force here, as you're always fighting as part of a squad, whether it's a small four-man team or a larger infantry unit attempting to rescue an M1 from hostile territory. The game is indeed tightly scripted, but as you move from location to location, you're often thrown into large-scale firefights that offer a great deal of freedom in how you approach them. In the mission "War Pig," for example, you can fight in the streets using rubble and cars for cover, or you can sneak through the collapsing buildings on both sides (at the risk of running into a few more enemies). Many of CoD's missions are worth playing through multiple times, as you'll discover new paths from point A to point B that you didn't realize were available to you.
Like the previous games, CoD4 does an amazing job of bringing its battles to life in a way that will have you crouching in your chair to duck from the constant hail of bullets. Adding to the constant feel of uneasiness is a bullet penetration system that lets you shoot through walls. If standing out in the open dodging makes you nervous, imagine how you'll feel when you think you're safe inside a building and bullets start coming through the walls. Thankfully, enemies don't abuse this ability (at least not on the standard difficulty), so it's more of a benefit to you than the other side.
CoD4 also contains a number of impressive set pieces. Without giving anything away, some are on rails, where you're just along for the ride and shooting anything that pops up in front of you, others put you on the clock and turn you loose with a time limit to achieve an objective, creating even more tension within the missions. To Infinity Ward's credit, these set pieces aren't just fun to play through, but often lay the groundwork for several interesting gambles within the story, and by the time you reach the finale, there's some doubt as to how it'll all turn out. It won't take particularly long to get through the single-player game -- maybe six or seven hours for average players -- but it's satisfying all the way through. (Be sure to stick around after the final credits roll for a little bonus.)
While the single-player campaign is outstanding in its own right, Call of Duty 4 contains one of the most addictive multiplayer modes we've ever played in a shooter. At its core, it's the same modes you've seen before -- Team Deathmatch, Domination, Search and Destroy, etc -- but it's wrapped up with an experience and achievement system that is bound to keep players up all hours of the night advancing their character.
If anything, CoD4's multiplayer reminds us of
These unlockables are all rolled into COD4's "Create a Class" system, which allows you to build preset characters with different weapons, gear and abilities. For example, you might create a stock soldier with an M4 Carbine, laser sight, and deeper bullet penetration, and then a stealthy sniper class with the ability to steady his heartbeat or not appear on enemy radar. There are three categories of "perks" you can unlock: equipment (C4, special grenades), passive abilities (higher health, faster fire rate) and special abilities (make less sound when you move, or drop a grenade when you die). Combined with a wealth of weapons and gear all the way through level 55, it's hard to imagine running out of combinations to experiment with, adding an extra layer of strategy to the game.
Otherwise, the different modes will seem familiar to most players. In addition to the aforementioned Team DM, Domination (control capture points), and Search and Destroy (one team has a bomb and attempts to plant it while the other defends), there's our favorite, Sabotage, in which both teams fight over a single bomb and try to plant it at the opponent's base; it winds up playing out a little like football, with both teams scrambling to pick up the bomb and pushing back and forth. There's also the Headquarters mode, which isn't entirely unlike King of the Hill: a location on the map is randomly picked as a capture point, and both teams rush to control it and protect it for a period of time before the HQ switches locations. There's already a good number of servers up and running, there's been little lag to speak of, and most servers seem to be rotating through different game modes, keeping the games from feeling too repetitive. In all, it's one of the most impressive multiplayer shooters we've seen on the PC this year, and will undoubtedly give games like Team Fortress 2 a run for its money.
On the PC, we tested Call of Duty 4 on a pretty hefty machine with 2GB RAM and a GeForce 8800GTX video card running at 1920x1200, and the game never stuttered once in either single-player or multiplayer. It's one of the more attractive games we've seen this year, from impressive shadow and lighting effects to slick loading screens to particularly impressive character animations as your squadmates hurdle fences or dive to the ground for cover.
In fact, it's hard to find fault anywhere within Call of Duty 4. The single-player is a fantastic combination of cinematic scripting and large-scale free-form combat, and multiplayer's so addictive that it was hard to pull ourselves away just to finish this review. For those of us who like these kinds of games, they just don't get better than Call of Duty 4. That makes a perfect three-for-three for Infinity Ward, and if you've missed out on its previous Call of Duty titles, do yourself a favor and check this one out.
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