REVIEW: Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare

Ahh the holidays pass like bullets wizzing past your ears.. As now is the time for Call of Duty 4. Of course i am a first person shooter fan so naturally i picked the console best for this game, THE PC! Does this call of Duty live up the hype of those before it? In a nutshell, yes.

Okay So if you played any of the other call of duties you’ll know what to expect here. Guns, war, bad guys, death, great effects and graphics, and a moderately smooth frame rate. I reviewed this with my 8800 GTS on a Q6600 intel machine. It ran 60fps+ (except with certain smokes on the screen) and had most details on max, at 1600×1200. The game is really a pleasure to look at! I enjoyed the level graphics and honestly the level design and object placement is very well done! You’ll see tires on the floor, bags of crap, barrels, missles, its all there! It never feels like it was just put somwhere to sceneary, the levels feel like they are real places that have a purpose.

This call of duty, like the others before it, has many scripted sequences. Some would say becuase of this the game is very linear, but I am allways impressed by these sequences because they interject our gaming with a sense of hollywood. you’ll see helicopters get shot down and come crashing inches within you, actually, i’m not sure that the helicopter wouldnt’ have killed me if i hadn’t gotten out of the way. These sequences are kind of what make call of duty stand out from just a generic ‘war’ shooter.

I dont like to give away storylines in my reviews, but just think of it as tracking down a ’sadam’ type character, along the way rip off some ’sum of all fears’ a little ‘air force one’ maybe a little ’sniper’ influence and heck maybe even some ’shooter’ and probably some other movies i haven’t seen yet. These guys get great scenes out of the movies and turn them into playable levels. Speaking of levels let me bitch right now, there are 2 levels in this game which pissed me off fearce.. Its probably my fault, I let the game recommend to put me on ‘hardend’ mode, and i find i enjoy games more when i just kick ass on ‘normal’ mode and get through them fast, i never complain something is too easy, I prefer to kill guys get story line and continue, not get frustrated on a level 49 times. Which is exactly what happened to me. One of the levels has you defeneding a sniper buddy by a ferris wheel and bad guys are coming out of choppers, coming out from behind buildings, from the left, from the right, behind.. It was really pissing me off how difficult this was, and my sniper buddy i was trying to defend? he was ABLE to shoot, but he didnt kill shit.. What a waste, I’m sure this wouldn’t have been so hard on normal mode, but on hardend this was a BS level. The second bs level has you on top of a hill with about 3 minutes to get back down to the bottom and call of duty 4 employee’s a system that has guys constantly respawning untill you advance forward, but in this damn level when you advance they have PLENTY of guys coming from literally EVERY single direciton ready to ambush your ass.. AGain on normal mode it probably wouldn’t have been so bad, but on hardened I swear i tried 20 different things to get past this level on time, ultimately (and ashamed) I had to cheat with god mode, you know what? even on god mode i only made it down with 15 seconds to spare, thats a little pathetic, I think this section was just too hard personally, WAAAAY to many guys..  After about my 30th or 40th attempt i just gave up and went god mode. I turned it off after, and the rest of the game i did fine with, I die a few times here or there some area’s where a slight challange, but when i die 30 times, thats not a challange, thats just frustrating.. And these two levels were not fun, (i only got past the sniper level because i found a nice little area i could sit where the bad guys couldn’t hit me easily without me raping them first, but i’m SURE the designers had not intended it to be used this way).

After my intiail anger of these areas I started to settle back into the idea that the game REALLY is a great game. When i played those 2 massively hard levels, I was ready to give it an 8.0 but the game really does deserve better. There are so many really cool sequences you’ll see here, and I dont want to spoil them. So I wont! IF you are like me, and dont mind games that you kill well in and dont want to be frustrated on these 2 levels, just leave it on normal, you’ll be glad you did.

Guns are represented masterfully here! I love the zoom mode on handguns, I’ve wanted a first person shooter to do this since Metal Gear Solid 2 on the PS2, Behind the gun with sights up is masterful! the only issue i have with the guns.. they are really unbalanced in Multi player. The saw m249 is WAAY to accurate with not nearly enough kickback, actually with most guns you can merely hold the mouse button down and they will fire in a fairly equal circle. Also handguns.. are SUPER accurate at about 100 yards, This is annoying when you’r trying to use a sniper rifle (which also doesnt ALLWAYS kill in one shot) and someone is sniping back at you with a pistol and hitting you more than you hit them!.. Talk about frustrating.. but the WORST thing.. the ABSOLUTE WORST thing they did to this game was the HUGE NERF of the Colt45.. What did you do to this classic IW??? In call of duty 2, i could go up against my friends and ‘bap bap bap’ kill em dead in 3 shots… now, it takes a FULL CLIP and even then sometimes they wont die.. Its frustrating and utterly worthless.. the USP seems to have taken its place and this is unfortuante as i’m a huge fan of the colt 45 1911.. Also In multiplayer there’s achievements you can earn to unlock guns and modes and other powerups, this is cool (tho i’m not a big fan of powerups, since everyone wants juggernaught and it starts to throw off the balance of the guns even worse), but whats with no hand gun achivement? as far as i could tell there isn’t one for getting kills with handguns.. its like they dont like people using them or something.. Unfortunate.. I also HATE game developers who make me use guns with burst mode.  I HATED FEAr becuase every single gun had a 3 burst fire, even the godamn rocket launcher, who wants to fire 3 rockets at once? that was absurdly stupid, and they do that with the the m4 in this game.. Why cant i just select it? I know how to controll my own fire, let me … Thsi leaves counterstrike just a notch above this game since they don’t force me to use burst fire, i guess thast just too hard to progam for newbs.

 Overall I enjoyed the game it really reminds you how a call of duty should feel, and multiplayer is still pretty fun, tho using the ‘lurch over this’ feature is retarded, and ladders being 3 feet higher than the object you want to climb on pretty much ensures you’ll die every time you try to use one, other then that, this is a classic call fo duty with new current weapons! I highly recommend this one to first person shooter fans.. You wont be dissapointed!

My verdict is…

9.2/10