Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare wakes us up faster than a cup of coffee and plunges us into over the top combat scenarios in which terrorists launch rockets, unload countless rounds of ammunition and chuck grenades faster than Kobe Bryant fires jump shots. Just peeking around a corner results in five, sometimes ten evildoers assaulting our location with more lead than Chinese toys, and although we died numerous times, we never aborted the mission, because no matter how frustrated we became, COD4 is too damn good to ignore.
Unlike previous Call of Duty games, which take place during World War II, this fourth installment occurs in modern times, where a psycho named Zakhaev intends to revive the collapsed Soviet Union by nuking the U.S. Your tour of duty features two intertwining campaigns that have you controlling a U.S. soldier in the Middle East and a British grunt deep inside Russia, the former drawing parallels between itself and the war in Iraq, with you laying waste to an insurgency and hunting down Zakhaev's crony, a terrorist named Al-Asad. Battles take place across a host of beautiful locations, including a large ocean tanker, dilapidated Middle Eastern cities, inside a TV station and a Russian village. Sometimes, you'll go in guns blazing with stereotypical American bravado, or you'll patiently sneak through an abandoned Russian city, not only avoiding enemies, but also the packs of wild dogs that'll rip out your throat within seconds of tackling you. The entire campaign, all six to seven hours of it, rests within a slick presentation, a story told through satellite images, holographic pictures of military equipment and dramatic music. It looks amazing.
Instead of fighting alone, you'll have fellow soldiers at your side that actually prove useful. Yes, your actions push the story forward, but your buddies are smart enough to take cover, flush out the enemy and, for the most part, avoid getting killed, though you'll soon learn that casualties are inevitable, thanks to ruthless artificial intelligence with almost perfect aim and a hatred for westerners. Stick behind cover and they'll follow or toss grenades, sometimes three at a time right into your lap. Or perhaps they'll snipe you through cover, because as you'll discover, there's a huge difference between hard cover (walls of stone, tanks) and soft (sheet metal). Oftentimes, we found ourselves waiting for an enemy to show us his head for a clear shot, and then remembered we could simply blast through the wall.
Combat is visceral and unrivaled. You've never experienced anything more vicious and unforgiving. Rockets zip past your head, attack choppers shred nearby houses with gunfire, jets carpet bomb an area, tanks blast through walls and soldiers fall by the hundreds. The insanity, coupled with your character's inability to absorb as may hits as in other games (Halo 3, Bioshock), causes you to question your actions and rethink strategies. Bottom line, if this game represents even just a fraction of the hell actual soldiers deal with on a day-to-day basis, we have a newfound respect for the armed forces.
Although Call of Duty 4's single player campaign takes less than ten hours to complete, it features excellent pacing and a solid conclusion. You'll want more, but that's only because the game's so amazing, but there's other things to enjoy including the now unlocked Arcade Mode, where you complete missions (in order or out of sequence) to rack up points with each kill. Point totals vary depending upon the action, so getting head-shots or melee kills (a wicked knife slash) earn more than just shooting someone's chest. Upon completion, you can upload your high scores to the online leader boards and compare them to the rest of the worlds'. It's a simple mode, but it adds several hours of replay value. Of course, then you have the multiplayer to deal with.
Modern Warfare's multiplayer campaign is a game all its own, a beast with so much depth that you'll play it well into next year. At its core lies the usual assortment of modes, such as Team Deathmatch, Free-For-All (every person for him or herself) and Sabotage (grab a bomb and destroy the enemy base), among others. But developer Infinity Ward makes things interesting by locking away much of the game. This includes many of the weapons, equipment (scopes, grenade launchers), perks and play modes. To unlock them, you must level up, by earning experience points through playing games and getting promoted. Each rank (Private, Colonel, Gunnery Sergeant, etc.) has levels, and the more you play/kill people, the more goodies you uncover, which in turn allows you to branch away from the game's five primary classes (Assault, Spec Ops, Heavy Gunner, Demolition, Sniper) and create your own, choosing your soldier's primary weapon, side arm, special grenade and the aforementioned perks, which give you a battlefield boost. Last Stand, for example, enables you to fire off some extra shots before dying. Sonic Boom, on the other hand, gives you higher explosive damage, while Deep Impact increases bullet damage. With that said, it's best to play well and often, lest you encounter high ranked players that'll quickly put your brains into the nearest flower patch.
You also get bonuses for multiple kills. Five straight, for instance, lets you call in an air strike where jets slaughter anyone caught in the open. In addition, you can block enemy radar and call in a helicopter that sprays an area with bullets and missiles.
To that end, multiplayer is just as adrenaline charged as COD4's single player missions, if not more so, since you have 17 players with human brains hunting you through 16 varied maps, which include a nuclear test site, a dreary Russian village and a host of other locations.
To play COD4 is to admire it. Not only does it play remarkably well, but it looks and sounds gorgeous. Its powerful scenes of civilians getting executed and buildings crumbling strikes deep in the hearts of anyone that pays attention to the daily new. The way soldiers clear rooms and the mission in which you safely bomb terrorists from hundreds of feet in the air reminds us of the shows on the Discovery Channel. We find ourselves both amazed and terrified at the detail, how characters move like actual human beings, how weapons look and sound exactly like their real-life counterparts and the screams of pain, anger and joy.
At the same time, it's only a video game, reminding us with its somewhat irritating conventions. Enemies are unfortunate lemmings, programmed to take the place of their fallen comrades, one after the other. It gets annoying because it's predictable; drop a sniper and then wait for the next poor bastard to take his place. In addition, the linear mission structure and general limitations hold the game back. No matter how "open" an environment looks, you're always on a set path and the game sacrifices logic to keep things moving at its own pace. This is why you can jump over some fences but not others, even when the latter are of equal height. Finally, and this only happened once, we had to restart from a checkpoint because the AI didn't follow us to the intended location. Without its help (it was programmed to breach a door), we couldn't proceed. Restarting once, however, corrected this issue.
Call of Duty 4 is 2007's must buy shooter, an over the top and amazing tour de force that delivers the adrenaline charged experience action fans crave. It's easily one of the Xbox 360's must own games, as well as a testament to the modern problems we face in an ever-changing landscape.
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