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66 of 69 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
War is Hell. But it sure is Good, 11 April 2008
Fun:5.0 out of 5 stars
It's fair to say, I have have never been in the army and hence never been to war. On the strength of this game, I don't ever want to be near the front lines.
Call Of Duty 4 is a seriously good game by any standards. I was new to the Call Of Duty series prior to this, not being a huge fan of WWII sim games and I was attracted by the modern setting, and very realistic graphics. I'm going to review the game on the single-player campaign, having not yet tried the online multiplayer, which I'm assured is fantastic.
You play 3 distinct characters in seperate, but interwoven, campaigns; "Soap" McTavish of the SAS, Sgt Paul Jackson of the US Marine Corps and eventually Lt Price of the SAS in a series of flashback missions. Each section handles completely differently. The US Marine ethos of rushing in en masse, all guns blazing is present; the SAS method of dodging from cover to cover, avoiding fire and picking your targets carefully in the dark; but the ghillie suited sneak-em-up mini-campaign is just sublime.
Being a walking shrub feels brilliant. Especially as an entire tank division rolls past you, so close that it almost flattens your fingers, without them detecting you. The tension that is ramped up as you are approached on all sides by hoards of bad guys or as you sneak under a truck while five men, mere inches away, have their backs to you is unsurpassed in any game. You can't help but break into a panicky sweat, whispering "they're gonna see me, they're gonna see me.."
The main campaigns are great too - bullets from your weapons genuinely feel like they connect. There is nothing cartoony about the punishment that your enemies can take as you visit death upon them. Shoot them, they die. You can absorb a bit more flak than they can, but this is probably a good thing from the perspective of making the game too damn hard to play. You can probably crank up the difficulty if you are hell-bent on suffering an early and lonely death, but for me that would make the game maybe a tad too realistic for comfort. If you're stuck in a firefight here, it's scary, disorienting, noisy and brutal. Just, I would imagine, like actually being there. Bullets hit you from all sides. Crouching behind cover does not help when they are behind you so you panic and try to move, then you're just pinned from all sides and nowhere is safe. There's no other game out there that can touch this scale when you are stuck in no-man's land and guns are blazing, literally everywhere around you. One sequence in particular, awaiting an evacuation in the abandoned radioactive city of Pripyat (see also STALKER) is incredibly intense as you are steadily overrun by what seems like an endless tide of assailants.
So that's the action. But the story is really very good - much better than you'd imagine, and (in certain moments) truly surprising! A lot of it develops around a conflict in "The Middle East" (somewhat non-specifically) which is a tad dubious but despite this you do still get a few properly jaw-dropping moments.
Slightly more morally dubious is some of the violence. You might enter a darkened room with your night vision on and see a panicked enemy soldier, shivering on the floor in a corner, yelping at shadows and firing random shots at thin air. But one sequence in particular makes you feel very uneasy; when you are in charge of the weaponry of a US warplane, all rendered in the grainy infra-red that we've all seen on news footage of smart bombs being dropped down chimneys. Wipe out a tiny enemy soldier and be rewarded with voice-overs such as "That's a good kill", or "watch it, we've got a runner", or worse still "Heh heh, I can see parts down there". To me that's just a bit inhuman and unnecessarily desensitising. But then again, if you've always wanted to be rewarded for killing from afar with vastly a ridiculously superior arsenal then I'm sure it will float your boat. It's just that, for me, the game feels a little too close to reality already, so this is just maybe a little too cold, even cynical. This is a very adult theme and it's worrying how many kids will play this. Perhaps I'm just eulogising though.
Despite this misgiving, I do strongly recommend Call Of Duty 4 as a gaming experience. As modern warfare shooters go, it's just about peerless in terms of what it puts you through. It looks outstanding, tension is almost unbearable, and these are the least wimpy guns I think you'll ever use in a game. Above all, it plays very, very well. You won't be disappointed in the single-player mode, but it's fair to warn you that you might well feel, at times, more than a little uncomfortable. To be fair though, I do believe that a good game should challenge you, and not necessarily just in terms of difficulty.
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25 of 26 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Better than Crysis, 26 Jan 2008
Fun:5.0 out of 5 stars
I was excited about Crysis - and disappointed. The graphics are spectacular if you have a beast of a PC but any other machine and they are merely 'nice'. Game play isn't that slick...
Call of Duty 4 has superb graphics and superior sound even with a relatively modest spec PC. The attention to detail is truly amazing and puts all other FPS's to shame.... stand next to the Abrams when it's firing - the ringing in your ears (I recommend using good headphones to maximise the effect)... the heat haze from the exhaust.. when in enclosed spaces your focus adjusts when you look at near and far objects.
Gameplay is excellent - yes it's linear but the 'get to cover' injury recovery is far better than med kits and, should you fail you get set back a couple of minutes at most - unlike Ghost Recon where your last checkpoint could be half an hour ago.
It's hectic, it's mental, it looks superb, it sounds amazing. It's not 'politically correct' and we have to suspend how we might feel about global conflict etc. The C130 gunship level is enormous fun - but the 'command' voices are saying things like 'get that guy' and 'I see little pieces everywhere'... hmmmm.... strictly a game for the adults who can take all that with a pinch of salt..
The cut scenes are the best I've seen, imaginative and atmospheric.
A great game - better than crysis...
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50 of 54 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Possibly the greatest FPS ever?, 15 Nov 2007
Fun:5.0 out of 5 stars
The dramatic return of Call of Duty to the PC makes a bold step forwards as the franchise breaks away from its World War Two mold and steps into the era of modern combat. Fortunately "bold" is something the Call of Duty franchise has always been good at, and COD4 is no exception.
Probably the most impressive element of the COD games has always been the gameplay. Ever since the days of Doom FPS fans have longed for a game that can bring to their desktops the carnage, chaos, mayhem and intensity of a genuine battlefield. The ability to bring this is what has always made this franchise one of the best in the business, and this latest installment does not dissapoint. The game plays and feels much like its predecessors, yet with some exciting additions. Obviously the 60 year change in setting brings with it an array of new weaponary and vehicles to enjoy, but more exciting are the changes in warfare these technologies have brought with them. You can storm buildings like a SWAT team (complete with some very realistic flash bangs), take out tanks with JAVLIN missiles, call in airstrikes, and perhaps the most exciting addition is the gillie suite that renders you almost invisible as a sniper.
Some other exciting improvements include the latest rendition of COD's AI, particularly noticable in friendly NPC's. Just watching them move around the battlefield is almost transfixing, they no longer look like robots with guns but move like you expect a soldier to move. And the graphics..... To be frank the game looks beautiful. Of particular importance on this point is the fact that you don't need a super computer to make it look beautiful like you do for quite a number of other recent FPS's. Obviously the meatier your graphics card the better it will look, but even on low settings the game renders well provided you can get a decent frame rate at your native resolution.
At this point I'm caused to ponder whether I've ever enjoyed a game more? Of course no game is without its drawbacks and there are inevitably a few areas in which we hope to see improvement before COD's next release. I think the game's biggest failing is its length. Various reviewers are reporting total gameplay times in the region 3 or 4 hours which I must say I find hard to believe, but I'm fairly sure the average gamer will have no trouble completing the game within a week of spare time (its probably about 7 or 8 hours in total for most players). This isn't helped by the game's pure addictivness which makes it nearly impossible to pull yourself away from once you start playing. The other major let down I found was the plot. This is the first time the COD franchise has stepped away from depicting real historical conflicts into a fictitious modern one, and the difference is noticable to say the least. Its not exactly a bad plot, its just that it feels entirely too much like its been ripped straight out of the next season of 24. Its good fun but at the same time entirely unbelievable, especially when the game starts to give enourmous emphasis to certain fictitious villainous characters. Of course we shouldn't let this spoil our enjoyment of the game as a whole, the plot was always going to be secondary to the gameplay (which is undeniably fantastic). Its just that you can't help but walk away with the feeling that what the game's producers really wanted to do was make a Call of Duty game based on the Iraq war, so they made it and then came up with a slightly ludicrous storyline (complete with dodgy Russians and an undisclosed Middle Eastern country - it really is like a storyline out of 24) to disguise it as something else so not to cause offense.
All in all, the game is fantastic. Even if it is a little on the short side its well worth the money (note; buy it here rather than off Steam, you save a tidy sum) for some of the most beautiful and intense FPS gameplay you'll ever have experienced
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