Written by Jeff Buckland, 11/7/2007
Played on:
Xbox 360
When developer Infinity Ward and publisher Activision announced that Call of Duty 4 was going to take place in a modern-day setting rather than World War II, I breathed a sigh of relief. First person shooters and Nazi-killing have gone hand in hand since the invention of the genre, but it was really getting tired. But then I asked myself - if the only thing Infinity Ward has been doing for most of the last ten years was WW2 games, can they actually pull off a game that takes the signature cinematic action they're famous for and do it right in a totally new setting? I'm happy to say that yes, they most certainly can.
Call of Duty 4 takes place in both the former Soviet Union and the Middle East as the many nuclear weapons start to disappear from those Russian countries and appear in the hands of terrorists not too far south of them. As is in Call of Duty fashion, you'll be playing as multiple soldiers in this new fight on nuclear terrorism, from the U.S. Army and Marine Corps as well as the British S.A.S. But the tours of duty of each of the soldiers you play as don't go quite as smoothly as they have in past Call of Duty games, and I think you'll find that the level of emotion in this one really gets turned up since it's possible for some of this stuff to happen today - and what happens will make a much bigger impression on you than any WW2 game would.
CoD4 doesn't directly mirror real-life events, but it does pretty much start out with a worst-case scenario for our next decade or so. There's a military coup in some random Middle Eastern country, one that happens to be holding a ton of ex-Soviet nukes, and the Americans and British are sent in to intervene. The Ukraine is one of the targets for the British S.A.S. as they try to track down the source of the nukes, while the U.S. forces are on the front, right there in these dirty, realistic cities in the desert. Few games have captured the detail level of a modern-day Middle Eastern city, at least when compared to photos from over there, but Call of Duty 4 does that well. And its depictions of snowy Russian rural areas - including a trip to Pripyat, the city which housed many of the people working at Chernobyl - are very convincing and do a great job to immerse you.
This series of games has always done a good job pacing the action with slow moments along with fast-paced ones, and you also won't just get to see the action from the perspective of a ground soldier. Sometimes you'll get to man the side-mounted grenade launcher in a troop transport helicopter, or in one of the game's best moments, even get into the gunner's seat of an AC-130 gunship to have the spotter calmly point out targets as you click a button here and there to take out buildings, vehicles, and troops. It's ironic to me that when videos first surfaced of the real-life AC-130 in action in Afghanistan, that people criticized the plane and said it dehumanized the killing aspect of war too much - that the AC-130's "TV" system of taking out people was too much like a video game. Well, here we are, doing it in an actual video game. It's a ton of fun, but it also gets you thinking, too.
When you're not controlling multi-million dollar killing machines, your arsenal will consist of a nice mix of modern weaponry: semi-automatic shotguns, a range of rifles, light machine guns, grenade launcher attachments, night-vision goggles, silencers, big chunky things that I can't even describe but make nice flaming husks out of enemy tanks, that kind of thing. All of them sound great and look excellent, and you'll have a blast using them. But the biggest thing is that Infinity Ward is one of the first developers to truly embrace the wall-penetrating properties of today's weaponry.
Yes, Counter-Strike has allowed people to shoot through walls and doors for many years now, but it never worked quite the way it does in real life. Here, the many types of surfaces you'll have enemies hiding behind offer a lot of tactical choices you'll have to make that you never had to make before. Sometimes the only thing separating you and your enemy's body is a bit of drywall, but it might be a long way off. With a basic sight and no sniper rifle around, it's often best to just hit your enemy behind the wall rather than wait for him to to pop his head out for a pinpoint shot. They might be hiding behind some tougher cinderblock walls and you may have to get up closer to toss a grenade in. It's not long before you, as the gamer, will be constantly taking into account how penetrable your enemies' cover really is, and it's a nice addition of depth that gamers will get accustomed to very smoothly.
