Review: Call of Duty 4

I was able to finish COD4 on Veteran sometime last week, with the opportunity to play the last few levels on a 50″ LCD with a stellar sound system to boot. Needless to say, it didn’t hurt the experience. I don’t have much to say about multiplayer right now, because with friends and family around now, I’d much rather be playing a game that supports online multiplayer from one console.

Overview

From Wikipedia:

The story is centered around a fictional near-future conflict involving the United States, the United Kingdom, and Russia, who are fighting against Russian ultranationalists in civil war torn Russia, and rebels that have staged a coup d’état in a small Middle Eastern country. It is told from the perspectives of a United States Marine and a member of the British SAS, and is set in multiple locations, including the Middle East, Azerbaijan, Russia, and Prypiat, Ukraine. The multiplayer portion of the game features various game modes, and contains a leveling system that allows the player to unlock additional weapons, weapon attachments, and camouflage schemes as they advance. The game was in development for two years. It uses a proprietary game engine, and includes features that include true world-dynamic lightning, HDR lighting effects, dynamics shadows, and depth of field.

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare received considerable praise and has won numerous awards from gaming websites, including IGN’s “Best Xbox 360 Game”. It was the top-selling game worldwide for 2007, reaching over seven million copies as of January 2008.

Overall Reaction (Possible Spoilers Below)

I am continually impressed with the success of this game, both in my own eyes, and in the eyes of the entire gaming community. I’ve mentioned time and time again in a few of my more recent speaking engagements how successful COD4 has been – especially on XBOX Live, and how it could have the potential to be the next “Counter Strike” series, with the large amount of gamers already hooked to the series, especially the last iteration.

Furthermore, the campaign provides an incredibly immersive experience, which lays out the gritty details of war, and in no way glorifies the violence necessary in warfare. By the end of this game, if anything, the player is left with a sad realization of the major casualties that war creates. In the same way that I praise SOTC, I have caught myself time and time again comparing FPS titles to COD4.

Overall, the entire package of this game both campaign and online multiplayer has really raised the bar in the genre for developers to look to imitate and improve off of what Infinity Ward has delivered.

Campaign

The campaign in the game takes you through the experiences of a member of the USMC and the British SAS. The two characters give a collectively rounded story of the sad situation the world is in, and a broad range of experience from two of the different groups. As I mentioned earlier, this game does a great job in detailing the pains of war without once glorifying it. There were on multiple occasions where the game leaves you feeling helpless, lost, disparate, and generally frustrated about the positions you find yourself in, and what must be done to escape the situation.

COD4 takes some hints from the great experience I had with the ending of Shadow of the Colossus, where you’re left to control a player before his ultimate death. The frustration and realization that this emits from a player is always a strong one, and this game executes it well. Experiencing the death of your character after you aborted an escape maneuver to save a downed pilot, only to die alongside your entire team after a nuclear explosion is devastating. Everything in this scene is incredibly well done, from the controls, to the coloring, to the scenery (including wreckage, fallen buildings, and children’s toys) adds to the sinking feeling of exactly how much war truly destroys in its wake.

The Veteran difficulty frustratingly (and enjoyably) gives experienced players some levels which test the ability of the gamer, making you rethink your routing, the order in which you clear hallways and rooms, down to the timing and placement of grenades. There were two or three sections of the game where I had to play over fifty times in order to finally succeed. If you’ve played the game up to the last “Epilogue” scene, I swear that my beating that level was a fluke.

One thing that really impresses me about this game is how diverse it is in letting the player get a full experience of some of the things involved in wartime. From being airdropped on a ship, to infiltrating buildings, to operating mounted guns from a helicopter to a bombing run, to a covert ghillie-suit level, not once did I feel that some content of the game felt out of place, or thrown in. The flow from level to level was smooth, enjoyable, and coherent with the context of the story.

There were a few times where this game really had an impact on me. In the “All Ghillied Up” scene, where you jump back 15 years as Capt. Price was just a Leftenant doing some “wetwork” as a covert sniper, I was constantly enjoying the scene, where you could make the choice of either staying stealth, or taking some well aimed sniper shots (seriously, who turns down shooting someone in these games with a sniper rifle?) before continuing. At the point where you need to crawl in the grass to avoid the oncoming tanks and walking guard, I became incredibly paranoid, and even felt myself scrunching up in my seat, worrying that the computer AI will hear me breathe.

The second instance of this intense immersion into the game is an experience I had at the end of the game. I tell this to everyone who has played the game, and thus I think it merits its own paragraph. At the end of the game, where you see Griggs die, and Captain Price struggling for his own life, you yourself are injured are dishelved just like the Marine was before he had died. Watching Zakhaev assassinate a comrade in cold blood right in front of me, I figured, “I’m done for.” Just then Price slides the pistol over to you, and you pick it up. Figuring I was dead anyway, I took out Zakhaev with one shot and let his guards kill me, figuring it was a honorable way to go out. Then I got ripped from the story as the game made me play it over. “What?”, I thought, “What did I do wrong?” I then realized that I would live if I killed his guards. This was awesome though; the game had brought me to a point in the game where I felt my situation was so hopeless that I had no choice but to die, and that I had given up my characters will to live but to at least accomplish the task in taking out the last target that we had in our achievements before I died. A game put my mind in this position! Not a critically acclaimed movie, or a prized work of literary accomplishment, a video game.

It blows my mind. The writing and execution of this game are so well done, that if this is the direction games are going to be taking from now on, I am so happy to be in the position that we are as gamers.

Online Multiplayer Experience

The online experience is very enjoyable, and well done from what I’ve been able to experience so far. I don’t have too much to say about the experience itself because I don’t feel I’ve spent enough time to truly evaluate the bits and pieces of the COD4 multiplayer yet. I enjoy the level-system and equipment increases you get, which allows the game to increase its depth as you spend more time playing it. Hopefully down the road I’ll be able to revisit the online multiplayer to check back about my total views about this aspect of the game.

Weaknesses (What I’d Change)

AI

My first and biggest frustration of the campaign came from the AI of your supporting teammates throughout the story. Since I was playing on Veteran, the levels were considerably hard, and there were many times where I was playing a specific section over and over again, and I would be dying because of dumb mistakes a freaking twelve year old wouldn’t make, let alone a Marine or SAS agent. Covering my back when I move forward or take a turn, covering fire, using flashbangs and grenades just to name a few of the things that weren’t present when playing through this. At points, the presence of the teammates just gave me a false sense of security that if I went one way down a path, that the other would be covered and taken care of, yet time and time again, I would be killed by enemies that I considered to be my teammates responsibility. Many times I would be cussing the teammates out, wishing that I would have been doing the mission on my own, since at least I would know that no one is covering my back. Not only that, but especially in close quarters, the AI seemed to be moving slowly along scripted paths, and was non-responsive to any nudging by the player. In my fifty-sixty tries at the “Mile High Club”, there were about 15 times where I was too slow, and got behind one of my teammates who were crawling through the aisles in the airplane, and were killing the mere 60 seconds I had to clear an entire 747. Sadly, I needed to restart these levels because apparently “Friendly fire will not be tolerated.” Know what else shouldn’t be tolerated? Crappy AI that gets in your way. Intelligent? Yeah right. Artificial? Definitely.

Animations

While I’m no expert, I have watched clips and some short shows on the hand-signals for SWAT teams, and it’s pretty cool how the game’s animations do a good job at putting these into play in the characters that are playing with you (regardless how stupid they are). I did notice though a few times where the movement of your teammates was very scripted, and seemed choppy towards what I would consider a in game cut-scene. This wasn’t incredibly prevalent, but when it was there, it was noticeable and took me out of the moment, if for a few seconds.

Modern Weapons

When you’re moving up the coverage for a tank in the Middle East, and your tank pulls up to a corner of the building and says “switching to thermal”, and then blows the crap out if through the side of the building, I became a little jealous. This is “modern warfare”, we’re using positioning for air-strikes, battling nukes, using guided rockets to blow up tanks, and the most advanced weapons we get to use is sticky C4 and night vision? Where’s my thermal imaging, and other neat technology that these counter terrorism groups get to use nowadays?

GUI

This isn’t that big of a complaint, but the GUI doesn’t always lend to letting you know what you’re holding onto. The air-strike logo looks more like a bayonet attachment to your rifle, and there was no way for me to know what type of grenades I’m holding, until I’ve thrown one. The one scene where you need to fight your way up to the farm, then fight your way down back the hill to get to the landing zone annoyed the crap out of me, and was pretty hard, until I realized I wasn’t holding onto flashbangs, but smoke grenades. After that, it only took me two more tries to figure out the best placement of the smokes before I was able to get to the bottom of the hill to the helicopter. Small thing to nitpick on, but it’s important to properly convey this information to your players.

Keybinding

With a game that is presumably feature rich, why do you force me to a specific set of button choices for the game? I stuck with the defaults for the game, but switching between this and Halo has been annoying, and I wish I could have moved some of the buttons on my own to fit my own play-style.

Sniping

Sniping in this game was fun, and probably had a perfect balance with everything else but I wish there were some bonus features that let you play with the gun a little more than what the game offers. Moreover, when you needed to snipe Zakaev, you’re told to remember about the “Coriolis effect“, and that threw me off guard. Some sniping practice like the initial training in the game would have been pretty fun.

Local Online (Multiplayer)

I’m not sure who to blame for this, because I’m sure internally, stories could differ from department to department. COD4 has online play, and it has split-screen local play, yet it doesn’t have split-screen online play. Maybe we could attribute this sole reason to why COD4 has had consistently more players playing on XBOX Live than Halo since Janurary. So, you’re not going to tell me its hardware/software limitations. This is just unforgivable, and incredibly annoying to me, as I can’t enjoy a game – which is preferably the best FPS out there right now, with my friends unless they’ve got an XBOX hooked up too, which means we can’t be playing in the same room unless we’ve got two TVs as well. Come on!

Match Searching (Multiplayer)

While I’ll talk about it a bit more next week, one of the few redeeming things about Gears of War is that you can filter your online search for maps and gametypes that you want when you play online. Halo and COD4 have a veto system, which is not as feature rich as things could be. This frustrates me when playing online, because there are definitely enough players that would allow for the filtering to exist in a fun manner that allowed players the choice of what they wanted to play, rather than forcing a seemingly normal distribution of map-play.

Own this game, it’s worth every penny.