Call of Duty 4 is bloody awesome
Well, it is. Thanks to my brother’s steady income, the pile of games I need to try out keeps growing faster than I can work through it, and at the top of it was Infinity Ward’s Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare.
I was well aware that COD4 had a decent amount of hype surrounding it, and I’d really not heard anything but good things about it. I had even played through COD2 - and enjoyed it for that matter - a few years ago… but still I really did not have much interest in it. Hype means nothing to me after games like GTA, Halo 3 and Bioshock failing to impress or entertain me to any great extent, and in the last couple of years my interest in first-person shooters had waned dramatically; leaving me even less enthusiastic.
Looking to try one of the newest additions to our games collection, I didn’t feel compelled to play Mass Effect - I had just seen my brother play through the first 45 minutes and wasn’t dying to go through the exact same thing again, only with myself at the wheel - or Assassin’s Creed - a friend had brought it over a few weeks ago so I had at least seen it… so Call of Duty it was.
I had no reason to feel sorry for “having” to play COD4 though, as it turned out to be one of the best god-damned action games I’ve played in a long time. Everything about it positively oozes quality, and despite its difficulty at times, it is a lot of FUN. The narrative and level design are absolutely fantastic, and make for an extremely compelling singleplayer experience, made even better by the astounding amount of variety in the different levels. FPS games have a tendency of being repetetive to the point of being mind-numbingly dull, but COD4 - in spite of its never-changing camera or control scheme - manages to provide more variation than most action or platform games, let alone an FPS modeled after real-life war.
Having finally finished the single player campaign yesterday, I ventured into the online multiplayer mode. I had enjoyed the single player game immensely, but I honestly wasn’t expecting too much from the online portion of it. I guess I was kind of expecting more of a slower-paced squad based game, but that really couldn’t be further from the truth. Sure, it’s not Quake, but I felt it was a lot closer to that type of game - the fast, simple, arcadey FPS games of yore - than anything like Rainbow Six or Counter-Strike. The gameplay is great in single player, but it’s in multiplayer that it really gets to shine. It’s fast, simple, and never bogged down by waiting times or obtrusive user interfaces. The controls give you just the amount of freedom without being annoying or complex, and the feeling of the weapons is truly unmatched. Add to that an insanely addictive system of experience points, challenges and achievements, and you get what is in my mind the best FPS game in years, by far.
I could write more, but I feel I’d be wasting your time. If you own a 360, PS3, or a modern PC, I urge you to get this game and start playing it. If you even remotely enjoy action games, you won’t regret it.