(andPOP) - Over the years war games came and went, I usually didn’t pay much attention to them. Not often enough do we get a game that utterly blows our minds and makes us come crawling back for more, especially with a sequel. Luckily this year we got Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. Developed by Infinity Ward and published by Activision, this first person shooter (FPS) is the first of the Call of Duty franchise to be placed in modern times (hence the name, Modern Warfare) and while most fans of the series thought this might be the end of their beloved Call of Duty (COD) series, it was more of a rebirth into the mainstream gaming spotlight.
As the first COD game to take place outside of World War II, Modern Warfare is set in today's world, and you play as three separate characters. You begin your training as a British special operative in Russia, then move to an American Force Recon operative in the middle east and even play as a flashback of Captain Price (from Call of Duty 1 and 2) as a lowly frontline soldier in the Ukraine fifteen years earlier. As you progress through the game, you find yourself bouncing between these three characters.
The game begins with high energy gun firing, explosions and people dying all around you. The sense of action and chaos can seem overwhelming at first, but hey, it's war. The game is intense beyond words, and you will feel the adrenaline immediately.
The graphics are as realistic as they can be without actually being there. From extremely detailed level and landscape design to the realistic and elaborate models, this game will take your breath away. You may be on the offensive, pushing enemies back and seeing the way they move and hide for cover while other times you are being pushed back yourself and as you hide behind a ravaged crate you can see bullet sparks whizzing by, allies flying overhead due to grenade attacks and bullet holes coming through the walls progressively closer to yourself. The player HUD doesn’t clutter the screen and gives just enough information to keep you aware of your surroundings without distracting you in the heat of battle. The continuously high frame-rate never so much as flickers. During one part of the game, you control a helicopter. My jaw literally dropped at the animation and detail given to this in-air fire fight. I felt like I was watching a live feed from an army report. The weapons are all modeled after modern army issued weaponry. You can watch how the gun fires and understand the real life mechanics of guns from the comfort of your seat (or at least the edge of it). At other parts of the game, story takes precedence and you're thrown into a very intense, detailed and emotional cinematic experience unlike any other realistic game out there. The colours are crisp and are perfect for the type of game Modern Warfare aims to be.
The sound effects, musical undertones and use of voice in this game are equally amazing compared to the visual stimulation to the eyes. Infinity Ward utilizes the Dolby Digital sound in this war game help bring the hard gripping, teeth clenching, sweat dripping virtual battle to life. If you have a surround sound setup with subwoofer, this game will have you on edge; as you creep towards your objective you will hear screams from enemies and allies alike, mortar shells falling all around you, commands being shouted, and quite possibly the most intense aspect of this game, you will hear bullets coming at you from all directions. The use of head set communication in online play is also great. Communication is crucial for planning attacks and notifying allies on enemy positions. Modern Warfare utilizes this with easy to use, crisp clear communication and even takes it one step further by allowing you to eavesdrop on nearby enemies.
COD's controls are fast, responsive and simple. Call of Duty 4 allows players to carry two types of guns (most of the time, a side gun and a main gun), a knife, and two types of grenades as well as several other tools and weapons. You have a choice between different standard layouts for controls, some more traditional, while others for fans of different FPS's (like Halo for example) and you can choose your axis intensity or invert it all together. Something that is missing in this title is squad commands. Thanks to the eerily intelligent AI, your allies already know exactly what to do to help you out of a jam or press forward when your busy hiding behind a wall. Taking the controls of this game one step further, you have the ability to customize your player for online play. You can give your character specific guns, grenades, camouflage, and three perks such as more frag grenades, eavesdropping, and faster reload.
This game is by far the best army game I have ever played. It is not perfect however. This game would be utterly amazing if there was a four player co-op story mode, or even a two player co-op story mode. However since the game is pressing the limits of the next-gen systems, it seems you can only handle the chaos of war alone. When playing offline multiplayer, the graphics are scaled back a little and there are only a few modes of play. With no AI running around, it can get pretty lonely looking for your other friends. A second flaw of this amazing shooter is the length of the single player mode. The story can easily be completed in a weekend (but you won't be disappointed by the ending). Now onto the good stuff!
The game plays astoundingly. After a little bit of learning, training and testing, the game will feel like an extension of your body. The AI has been revamped and both enemies and allies are smarter than ever, not to say that every once in a while there might be a small glitch in their logic leaving them exposed or facing the wrong direction, but more often than not the enemies will team up and pin you down in a corner, then your allies will in one way or another find a way to help you out of the jam or maybe even win the war for you! Modern Warfare also tries to take into consideration the realism of army conflict. Depending on your distance, and the caliber of your gun, you can actually hit enemy targets behind cover. Since COD 4 has a large variety of modern realistic weapons, it's up to you to educate yourself on what gun to use for the specific occasion. At points you may take up a cannon on a helicopter but other than that, the game is without vehicles for you to control. This brings out the important role you play in the fight as you take down enemy tanks with your squad mates and infiltrate buildings. The game keeps itself fresh with a variety of mission types such as infiltration, intel gathering, saving allies, defending positions, assaulting enemy bases and so forth. You pretty much do everything one would think a super soldier would do and every minute of it is intense. The game can feel like an arcade shooter every now and then as it moves fast but still seems realistic overall. You can sprint to cover and hide to regenerate your health. A headshot or a couple of shots to the body usually takes you down though, as Kevlar and helmets don’t seem to do much in the way of protecting.
Once you complete the story mode, there are plenty of reasons to go back and play again. You can unlock cheats and an arcade mode that gives you a set of three lives and scores you per mission. You can also go back and try to find all the intel laptops strewn across the game to unlock new cheats (such as inverting gamma, cluster grenades and my personal favourite, olde tymer mode). As well, there's the basic yet fun offline multiplayer match set up.
Playing online is fun, playing online is challenging, playing online is addictive. You could pick up the controller, plug in your headset and play for hours. The game works on a ranking system in which you gain experience for kills and scenarios won. As you gain ranks not only does your title become cooler but you also unlock new perks and weapons to use. As you may be winding down a session, you hit a level, unlock a new gun or perk and decide to reconfigure one of your custom set-up slots. Along with new weapons for leveling up, there are challenges specific to your weapon, game mode, or skill as a player. These challenges can unlock things such as skins for your weapons, modifications for your guns (like scopes or silencers), or just give you a boost to your experience.
There are over ten modes to play online from death matches to team tactical matches to one on one cage matches. For whatever type of fight you're looking for, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare has you covered. Another interesting difference between this game and other online shooters is that you are rewarded for killing streaks. After three kills in a row without dying you can send out a UAV radar to see where opponents are, and this radar is shown to your entire team. After five kills you can call in an air strike to a specific location. After seven kills without dying you get an automatically piloted helicopter flying around picking off any enemy out in the open, and yes, these kills count as your own. Once you have reached the highest level of 55, unlocked all the perks, all weapons, finished all the challenges and got all the skins and scopes, you can enter prestige mode. This mode lets you trade in your rank, your experience, weapons, everything and start over again at level one, but with an insignia beside your name, letting everyone know you were once at a high level but are giving it all away to play with a challenge all over again. You can enter prestige mode up to ten times with different insignias each time.
Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare by Infinity Ward. Available for the Playstation 3, Xbox 360, PC, and Nintendo DS is a realistic modern day war masterpiece that sets the standards high for all other war games. Amazing graphics, sound, control, gameplay and replay value make this game a contender for game of the year and definitely a contender to steal the spotlight from Halo 3 in people's living rooms this year.
Graphics: 5.0 / 5.0
Gameplay 5.0 / 5.0
Sound 5.0 / 5.0
Replay value 5.0 / 5.0
