GB Review: Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare Single Player (360)

Blog Style or Sort By Most Bumps This... Day Week Month Life

GB Review: Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare Single Player (360)Posted 3:20pm Thu Nov 08, 2007 by Aaron Dunlap Tags: review, 5 stars, aaron dunlap, Call of Duty 4 Modern Warfare, Xbox 360

Terrorists are bad. Shoot bullets at them.

The best first-person-shooter of the year. Better than Halo 3. If you need me to say more: Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare is nearly perfect on all accounts. Instead of picking a few gimmicks and rubbing our noses in them, weakening the rest of the game, this game just gets everything right. Unless you were expecting a tactical shooter like Rainbow Six and will cry if that's not what you get, this game should thoroughly entertain and enthrall any curious FPS fan.

score:

Click here for an explanation of our review and scoring format.

“The WW2 market was already well-established when we came in, and we stomped all over those guys. We're going to do the same with this."

That's what an Infinity Ward developer told me at this year's mini-E3 as I watched him play Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. He's right, on both accounts. Before Call of Duty was released on the PC, games like Medal of Honor and countless strategy games had already swept up the World War II gaming field. With much trepidation I loaded up the demo for that game, but 30 minutes later I was blown away.

What made the original Call of Duty and its sequel, Call of Duty 2, so great was that it didn't rely on gameplay gimmicks or trends to stand out. These games stand out because they are good -- in every possible way. There's a visceral sense of immersion in Infinity Ward's Call of Duty games, Modern Warfare included.

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare is an excellent game, even though it lacks many of the elements we've grown used to in our shooters. Lately, for a game to stand out it has to have its own special element. Some games tout their super-duper-advanced enemy AI, Call of Duty 4's enemy AI isn't remarkable but it's good enough. Other games smack you in the face with their tactical elements like using smoke grenades and flash-bangs to clear rooms; these are present here but only as options, not as the only way to play. When a game has one of these features it becomes a one-trick-pony, cramming the developers' bright idea down your throat as if there would be no way to get along without it. Cover systems, blind firing, squad commands, crazy goggle effects, and spy gear like snake cams and motion detectors are all things we've come to expect from any game not taking place in 1944 Normandy. None of those are present in COD4, and none of them are missed. What is in many ways a straightforward shooter somehow manages to get it right.

Ghillie suit? More like Silly suit!

The story is not important, or altogether very interesting. What needs to be known is that you play as both a British SAS operative and an US Force Recon Marine, two organizations that collectively represent some of the most bad-ass humans on earth. Your enemies are terrorists with no affiliation to any actual capital-t Terrorist outfits. The game is polite about not shoving the story down your throat, but players interested in participating in it can find plenty of depth by paying attention to dialog.

Unlike previous Call of Duty games, which have all had players taking over a variety of different soldiers from different countries, the stories and paths of the two main characters you play as influence and intersect each other as the game progresses.

Be you SAS or Force Recon, gameplay is entirely the same. Follow your squad mates, shoot the bad guys, don't get shot yourself. The variety comes in how the missions unfold in front of you. Sure, you're not allowed to roam around freely (a common and confusing complaint against Call of Duty games; what were they expecting, Grand Theft Auto: European Theater?) but it rarely ever feels forced. There are safeguards in place to keep you from wandering off-path, but this is War; if you strayed away from your squad-mates you'd just die anyway. The loadout of weapons is pretty realistic, with the Special Ops protagonists being equipped with the types of guns they would be and the terrorists all carrying inexpensive and ubiquitous AK-47s. There were a few times where I picked up expensive, Special Forces-style weapons like the G36 and P90 from dead enemies, leaving me pretty confused.

I wasn't entirely impressed with the "feel" of the weapons as I have been with other games like Black. Unlike the MP40s and Thompsons from Calls of Duty past, these are beefy, extremely powerful weapons that only very well trained people can use effectively, but I just wasn't getting that feeling from the game. The assault shotguns especially felt weak and ineffective. Models, sounds, and animations for the weapons are all superb, however.

One thing I've seen a lot of games try and fail to pull off is material penetration. In this game, a person hiding behind a plaster wall or a wooden box is not safe from your bullets. There's an unnatural satisfaction that comes from seeing an enemy duck behind a corner, shooting a few rounds into that wall, and seeing his legs slump out from behind the corner. This system is effective but, again, doesn't shove itself down your throat. You aren't constantly put in situations where you have to shoot someone through a wall so the game can say, "See? See what we did?" and removing all the fun of it. Instead, it just feels natural.

Instead of trying to assault us with its genius gameplay features, this game assaults us with cinematic beauty. If Call of Duty had any trademarks, it would be those cinematic moments that put you into an incredible moment instead of just showing you. Some things like storming the field of Stalingrad with hundreds of comrades and no weapons or shooting down bombers with a flack cannon just can't be forgotten. There are elements of Call of Duty 4 too where the visual beauty and scope of my actions just overpowered me. Running through a war-torn city at night, in the dark, with night vision goggles on and IR sights and beacons dancing from my squad-mates while smoke trails from enemy RPGs cascade overhead like party streamers with explosions and gunfire in the distance while I try to keep sight of the red flares being shot by a stranded tank I'm supposed to find and protect, it is a defining element of the game not because of any story relevance but for how well this game can suck you into its gunpowder-laced atmosphere. It may sound silly, but instead of feeling like I've done these things in a game it feels like I've done them for real.

I feel like I've really carried a javelin missile launcher on my shoulder and fired damn near half a million dollars worth of anti-armor warheads at enemy tanks that I couldn't see but were not out of targeting range for the launcher. I feel like I've really stared down the scope of a .50 caliber sniper rifle and watched the wind sweep a flag so I could compensate my aim as I waited for a green light to take out a high profile target from an impossible distance. I feel like I've manned the cannons of a AC-130 gunship and, well, I don't want to spoil it.

The incredible graphics, controls, music, and 6.1-optimized digital surround sound all come together to make this game more of an experience than an activity.

Get to the choppah!

Looking back at the game, I start to notice a few things that other games have tried to do cinematicaly and failed. I've seen other games slip into slow-motion to emphasize an important action you're supposed to perform, but never have I seen it done (before this game) without being annoying. Other games have tried having attack dogs, but none have seen so vicious as in this game; for some reason I have this moral qualm about killing dogs, to the point where if I were escaping prison and they sent dogs after me I probably wouldn't be able to kill them to protect my position, but I was unusually eager to blast the little buggers in this game. Other games have had small moments where you can make a small decision about whether or not to kill someone with some immediate effect, but never so subtly as here.

There's even an element that reminds me of a rather ham-fisted late moment in Splinter Cell: Double Agent but works much better here in the climax of Call of Duty 4.

It's important to remember, though, that this is not a tactical shooter. As I've said, there's no squad commands and you don't have to flash-bang every damn closed door you reach as in Rainbow 6: Vegas (my favorite Xbox 360 shooter up until now). Some people may be disappointed by that, but I came to enjoy it. Your characters aren't leaders, anyway, they're taking the commands, not giving them. This makes everything feel much more participatory and less invulnerable. Towards the end, however, things did seem to stray into Tom Clancy territory as far as one elite squad needing to save the world, but I guess when you're writing your own stories instead of cribbing them from history books it doesn't hurt to crank up the stakes.

Another problem I'd been having is the uneven difficulty at times. A little bit of a challenge is a good thing, but the ends of some levels just seemed ridiculously hard to me until I figured out that the game really wanted me to play it one certain way. My biggest problem with difficulty was that the enemies all seem to have near-mythical accuracy with their grenade throws. They never miss, they never over-throw or under-throw. Even if you can't see an enemy, his magic grenades will find you. I sometimes wondered if this was done intentionally just so you'd discover the ability to pick up and return thrown grenades, but it seems a little over-the-top to me.

The single player campaign mode is short but dense. I was able to power through the game on Normal difficulty in around five hours, but I had a deadline to meet. Beating the game unlocks three things: a final bonus level that is a recreation of a common special ops exercise, a terrorist siege on an airplane with a VIP hostage (I think this may only be available if you don't skip the closing credits), Arcade mode, and cheats mode. Arcade mode is the campaign mode with the addition of points, a nice fun way to replay the game without feeling like you're just replaying a game. Cheats mode is kind of what it sounds like: the ability to enable cheats while playing. Cheats are unlocked by collecting enemy intel items scattered throughout the game.

I could go on (and on and on) about the good things in this game point by point, but I'd just be wasting both of our time. All that needs to be said is that this is the best single player shooter of the year. Is it better than Halo 3? I think a drunken stumble through a knife store would be better than Halo 3's single player campaign (relative to its hype, anyway). Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare beats it and anything else this year by a longshot, Half-Life 2: Episode Two included. You cannot be let down by this game.

Another thing that Infinity Ward developer told me at E3 was, "We're going after Halo 3 with our multiplayer mode." The multiplayer in Call of Duty 4 is arguably bigger than the single player, and the multiplayer beta really caused a stir a month ago. Does it have what it takes to compete with Halo 3's massive online experience? Find out in our review of Call of Duty 4: Modern Combat's multiplayer mode coming shortly.

Be sure to check out our multiplayer review of this title, located here.

Won GameBump's Best Shooter of 2007