Look, I’ll be honest (as I always try to be, rest assured) with you. I had precisely zero expectations for Call of Duty 4. Yes, I’d seen the trailer, and yes, I knew it was going to be different, but really and truly I’d become heartily sick of the Call of Duty formula after the near terminal dose of tedium that CoD 3 delivered via my Xbox 360. It, like the second incarnation, offered nothing really new and it bored me mightily. I had given up hoping for anything remotely new in the CoD canon. And then Infinity Ward went and only blew me away.
Call of Duty 4 gets a million bonus points to start with simply for not having anymore Nazis in it (and this is coming from someone who thinks Nazis can improve nearly any video game experience, with the possible exception of Animal Crossing on the DS). The setting is, well, about now – the player alternating between filling the shoes of green SAS recruit ‘Soap’ McTavish and U.S. Marine Paul Jackson. Instead of battling the massed ranks of the Wehrmacht you now face various flavours of dirty foreign terrorists and beret-wearing insurgents in locations ranging from the Bering Strait, through eastern Russia and on into the ‘Middle East’. That last one is a bit inexplicable. It could be a stand in for Iraq, but it seems like Infinity Ward bottled it when it came to actually naming that particular theatre of war.
Anyway, despite the time travelling this is a game that doesn’t do much to break free from or revolutionise the CoD mould. The player is still part of the rank and file with plenty of comrades in arms battling along side you. The idea of the resolute, lone, gun-toting hero is still absent from CoD and I’m pleased to see that. The friendly team A.I. is competent enough to maintain the illusion and constantly having orders shouted at you by NPCs plays further into that. You never have command of a situation. It’s an aspect that has always helped the games stand out from the competition, and it’s put to good use here – you always manage to feel like your part of a wider war, a fragile cog in a machine that probably wouldn’t notice too much if you got ground up in the rest of the gears.
And it’s got a single-player campaign that will try its best to do just that. Setting aside the SAS missions (the less populated and less frenetic levels) for a moment, those levels that see you play the part of a U.S. Marine showcase some stunning urban combat in locations that will put you immediately in mind of the likes of Black Hawk Down. It’s loud, claustrophobic and fast-paced – sticking you in the middle of a full-scale U.S. invasion to try and stop… well, I could tell you that I don’t want to risk any serious spoilers, but to be honest the plot of the game is largely lightweight Hollywood action thriller stuff, the action of both sides of the campaign tenuously linked through some incomplete exposition. The main thing to take away is that it’s fun. Tremendous fun, and I’m of the opinion that the specialist SAS missions are even better, packing as they do the best set-piece missions in the game.
And that’s where the developers have tried to mix things up a bit. It would be easy to dismiss a game like this as having all the socio-political depth of an episode of CSI: Miami, but the two most inspired sequences in CoD 4 (a first-person cinematic and a Spectre gunship play segment) leave you with the niggling feeling that maybe the game is actually trying to say something. Infinity Ward have remained coy, but the sequence where you take the role of a gunner on board the AC-130 Spectre is a masterful staging of emotionless, detached violence. Aside from going disconcertingly “meta” at that point, the SAS missions offer the most creativity in terms of mission design and gameplay, sadly peaking before the finale with a flashback assassination mission in the desolate city of Pripyat (home of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster).
So there’s excellent creative and design talent on show here, the whole thing covered in a layer of polish as thick as my thumb. However, it fails to hide the odd time when the game decides to cheat or take a short cut. It’s easy to spot the regular infinite enemy spawn points and their triggers – park yourself behind some cover on some of the US missions and the game will happily spawn disposable bullet soaks at you forever while your A.I. comrades faff about without you leading them on. It all feels a bit cheap considering the level of expertise evident in the rest of the game. I encountered a handful of clipping bugs too, and a ragdoll or two frozen in mid air, but nothing show-stoppingly bad. By way of extending the perilously short campaign there’s an Arcade mode that is unlocked upon its completion, letting you replay each mission to set a high score, earning points for multiple kills and the like.
The multiplayer I had more of an issue with. Nine times out of ten I failed to make any kind of connection, and when I did stumble onto a server I usually had to force a disconnect due to appalling lag (this on a machine and net connection where I regularly indulge in prodigious amounts of Team Fortress 2 with no issues.) I did manage some limited play time and liked what I saw. The perks system (unlockable bonuses that grant new equipment and abilities) is a great little innovation that adds a bucketload of variety and depth. Players accrue XP as they play which lets them level up; unlocking things like access to more classes and the ability to create a custom class (the game has five defaults, three of which are available to a beginner). As you’d expect each class has their own weapon and equipment load out, but with more XP and perks the potential for customisation is vast.
So by now you can hazard a guess at the kind of score I’m about to award. I’m truly torn between an 8 and 9 – besides the multiplayer and certain single player missions there’s little that’s really new here when you strip away the gloss. It’s also a little on the short side as a solo experience. On the other hand the whole package is amazingly solid, good looking and I enjoyed every minute of the campaign and what little of the multiplayer I could manage. Bugger it, you should buy it anyway.
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