Imperium

Sorry for the slightly longer wait on this one. Here’s my review of Call of Duty 4:

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Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare

It has always been the case that I favour a particular campaign in each installment of the Call of Duty series. In Call of Duty 1, it was the Russian campaign. I have vivid memories of the seemingly suicidal crossing of the Volga, the mad dash up the hill toward the German fortifications, and then the glorious charge through Stalingrad’s Red Square, all the while haunted by the ‘not one step back’ mentality enforced by the uncaring commissars, who lurked behind you with their automatics.

In Call of Duty 2, the Russian campaign failed to woo me to the extent that the American one did. More so than in COD 1, I was reminded of the titanic Band of Brothers, and of course its progenitor, Saving Private Ryan. There was something more real about the American soldiers in COD 2. The commanding officer, Sgt. Randall, was a bastion of clear thinking in amongst the chaos of mortar attacks, tank advances and flanking maneuvers. And the campaign started with one of the grandest and most stirring battles in the history of war games, the assault on Pointe du Hoc.

Because of all the console nonsense that’s happened since COD 2, the series has returned to the PC not as number three, but as Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. This time, there are just two campaigns instead of three: one for the USMC, and the other for the SAS (my favourite).

In keeping with tradition, the game starts with a big bastard of a bang. Following a brief training exercise, in which you get to try (over and over again, in my case) to match or even beat the set record for a timed assault on a mock-up cargo ship, you’re sitting opposite the bushily bearded Captain Price in a UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter, on final approach to a cargo ship that is, in comparison, very real.

What follows is a superb first level, and an introduction worthy of standing alongside the opening sequence from your favourite Hollywood action blockbuster. I’m thinking that Goldeneye or Tomorrow Never Dies are very similar; the one salient difference being that James Bond is replaced by a much cooler elite squad of SAS troopers, and you’re one of them.

You play ‘Soap’ McTavish, a newcomer to the 22nd regiment, in the SAS missions, and Sergeant Paul Jackson of 1st Force Recon in the USMC missions. Depending on who you’re playing as, your experience will differ substantially. Soap and the SAS are all about secret night attacks and stealthy infiltrations: catching the enemy (this time around, either Russian ultra nationalists or Arab rebels) with their pants down, or in one particular case, in the middle of a game of chess. Jackson’s missions lean more toward Apocalypse Now style invasions, followed by street fighting reminiscent of Black Hawk Down.

Despite their differences, all the missions share the visceral, gritty atmosphere that COD games have as their trademark. Whenever combat is joined, a hail of bullets fills the air, shards of concrete are blown off of walls by ricochets, your comrades shout warnings and commands and grenades are lobbed in all directions. If you’re at all like me, you’ll enter into each confrontation pretending to be Jack Bauer, and very quickly be dealt a series of hard slaps to the face.

Of course, how many slaps and how hard those slaps are depends largely upon your choice of difficulty setting. My first time through I chose to play on ‘hardened’ – against the recommendation of the game itself, I might add – and there were places where I was so totally beaten over and over again that I would have no recourse but to alternate between states of despair and rage, occasionally slamming my fist on the desk or mashing my keyboard. Don’t even get me started on my current run through on ‘veteran’. I’m thinking I might need to stop before I break one or more of my peripherals.

You don’t have to be a masochistic fool like me though; you can always turn down the difficulty for a more enjoyable, though less challenging, experience. And what enjoyment there is to be had! The combat is unfailingly thrilling, but at the same time it has a strong sense of authenticity about it; a sense of authenticity created in no small part by the state of the art character animations.

The soldiers in COD 4 – both friend and foe – move more like real human beings than in any action game in history (perhaps with the sole exception of Crysis). The way they vault over low walls, take cover, clear rooms, return fire and throw grenades back at the enemy without a second thought: all of these actions and others are portrayed convincingly.

Granted, the AI, like all contemporary AI, has its limitations: often you’ll see your comrades striding out into the middle of a killing zone, or standing tall in the midst of a storm of machine gun fire. But for the most part, I got the very clear impression that I was fighting with trained killers, the best of the best, and that they knew what they were doing.

However, the enemy are trained killers as well, and I wouldn’t have hoped for anything less. After all, in previous installments in the series, I’d been facing the devastating German war machine. For the enemy in COD 4 to jump (or rather, fall) from the Wehrmacht to a swarm of cannon fodder would’ve been far from satisfactory.

Both the ultra nationalists and the rebels are adept users of flashbangs (a new and most welcome addition to the COD arsenal), so you can’t expect to just dish them out and not expect any coming back your way. They use smoke screens occasionally, and they also love frag grenades and the RPG-7. Throw into the mix a convoy’s worth of AK47 assault rifles, along with an assortment of nasties including the Uzi, the G3 and the awesome Dragunov sniper rifle, and you have yourself a recipe for hell on Earth.

There have always been vehicle sections in COD games, and COD 4 is no exception. The first is when you’re arming the Mark 19 grenade launcher bolted on to a Chinook. The Mark 19 is precise, but at the same time powerful enough to take out an APC. Like the various vehicle sections in Quake 4, the Mark 19 spree is a pleasant interlude between long periods of close quarters combat. As is a similar stage later on, when you take the place of a gunner on board an AC-130 Spectre gunship.

In a stroke of artistic brilliance from Infinity Ward, you get to see the near indescribable destructive potential of the cannons on board the Spectre from the ground, through the eyes of Soap, before you’re firing them. When you’re high in the sky, scanning the countryside in thermal vision, the fiery death you’re unleashing seems insignificant; but from the perspective of a footsoldier, bolts of fire descend from the clouds, smashing buildings and tanks to bits and decimating infantry in an inferno. Search for “spectre gunship” on YouTube and you’ll find real life footage that bears a striking resemblance.

Unfortunately, the single player in COD 4, like its predecessors, has some systemic faults. Occasionally there are moments, like the aforementioned AI stupidities, when the mechanics of the game become visible, warts and all. Enemy soldiers tend to focus almost all their fire on you, neglecting their flanks, and your fellow marines and SAS troopers rarely take the initiative and actually advance, instead leaving it to you to push forward. Battles seems to stop and start depending on your actions; not the actions of those around you.

The single player is also quite short. It’s nowhere near as short as Portal, but short enough that the game’s price can only be justified by some damned fine multiplayer.

Fortunately, apart from a few shortcomings, the multiplayer is indeed damned fine. There are six games modes: free for all, domination, search and destroy, sabotage, team deathmatch and headquarters. For me, unless you’re playing with a select few friends, free for all is a waste of time, because COD 4 is all about one side fighting another side; not a bunch of paranoid loan wolves aimlessly moving around a map, constantly looking behind their backs.

My favourite mode at the moment is domination, a capture and hold mode similar to Battlefield 2. Team deathmatch can be fun, but the objective based modes (domination, search and destroy, sabotage and headquarters) are more involving.

As with any first person shooter on the market, the multiplayer is far more challenging than the single player. Playing COD 4 single player on veteran difficulty is insanely hard, but playing against human beings brings entirely new and different challenges and threats. In multiplayer, you’ve always got be prepared for flanking maneuvers, it’s not as clear where the enemy is and there are passages and back-alleys for sneak attacks. You’ve also got to keep an eye out for airstrikes and attacks helicopters, both of which can be called in by players who have managed a long enough kill streak.

As a reward for struggling through this bedlam, you’ll gradually accumulate experience points (another derivative from BF2), get promoted and gain access to previously hidden weapons and attachments. As in BF2, these rewards don’t create a rift between new players and those who have ranked up; rather, they enrich the multiplayer experience for those who have put in the time.

I can’t help thinking that more could’ve been made of the multiplayer though. There are no vehicles to hop into and no tall buildings for snipers to set up shop in. The maps are all fairly small in comparison to the levels in single player. There’s no wider scale assault mode with objectives that have context, like “disable the enemy radar” and “detonate C4 charges in the bunkers”. And there are no teamwork options built into the game, like the squad options in BF2.

Also, there’s no cooperative mode, which I think is a great shame, and an especially noticeable shame now that Gears of War (with its coop mode) has been released for PC. Certainly, I can understand that the campaign revolves around the two playable characters, but surely it wouldn’t take too much fiddling with code to change the dialogue that refers to Soap or Jackson so that it refers to “someone” instead? COD 4 is one of those games that would be amazing to play with a friend.

But now I realise that my once razor sharp knife of criticism has been blunted. I have been chipping away at the bumps and dents on an otherwise perfectly sculpted masterpiece.

The fact of the matter is that I rank COD 4 highest in the series. I had my concerns about the new fictional setting. I thought that Infinity Ward might lose the plot; but the reality is very much to the contrary. The same qualities that made COD 1 and COD 2 gameplay so gripping have been maintained and in some ways built upon. And it looks fantastic. It’s not a Crysis beater in the graphics department, but nothing is at the moment.

The game is more driven by its story and characters than ever before, particularly in the SAS missions. Chaps like Captain Price and Gaz create an even greater sense of camaraderie than I felt in COD 2 – and that’s saying something, believe me. Before the credits rolled, I was overcome with a sense of belonging. I was ‘one of the boys’, and I hated Imran Zakhaev (one of the two villains) with a passion. Any game that makes you experience those emotions has to be considered for game of the year awards.

If you’re a fan of the previous games, buy COD 4 without hesitation, if you haven’t already; if you’re scouring the land for an FPS that plays like an action movie in single player and like a slimmed down and refined BF2 in multiplayer, do the same.

✓ Gutsy combat
✓ Fast paced narrative
✓ Excellent characters
✓ Thrilling and moving
✗ Poorly hidden gameplay mechanics
✗ Limited multiplayer

94%

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I think the next few reviews I do will be brief and snappy ones. Watch this space.

Thanks for reading,

- Chris