So Saturday I decided to sit down and give Call of Duty 4 a spin. (I know, I am several weeks late to the party). It has been sitting in my gaming room for a week since it arrived from Game Fly, however I have been putting it off while I work on wrapping up Orange Box. I needed to get started soon though, because I have a lot of games I need to rotate though if I am going to win the 360sync.com gamer score challenge over on www.360voice.com.
Right now my gamerscore is dictating my playing, and while this is generally a bad thing, I must win, there is no other option. I need to win that best buy card so I can replace my fried out 360 HDD. This made me decide I would sit down and see just how far I could get in the game in one day, for the sake of entertainment. So I threw it in and fired it up around 11am, and decided I would play though on medium difficulty, and replay later for the extra veteran points if I felt like I really needed them. I got far… I beat the game actually in around 9 hours. Here are my thoughts on it as such.
The visuals, are stunning. The game is glorious, greatly so. We are not talking UT3 engine stunning Gears type here, but they were awesome to look at and at no point did an environment or scene make me go “ugh.. that looks like crap”. I could tell they had done some great justice when the first mission drops you on a cargo ship rocking around in the Bearing Strait like a sadistic roller coaster, and the entire environment is rocking the whole time. The outdoor environments were beautiful, and you really had a sense of open-ness when outside. For example, the stage set at Chernobyl was incredible. You felt like you were out in the open in the town, and not in some artificially walled off zone. I have seen many pictures of the town and the surrounding area in the post meltdown times, and the graphics and level design were intensely accurate and believable.
The sounds are great, the radio coms, background noise, ambient effect are all keyed in nicely to make a harmony of what you would hear in the real world. The chatter with team mates and the calling out of targets and general military speak was perfect, it wasn’t overdone and there was enough variety that the repetition never got on my nerves like some games where your teammates have about 4 sayings at their disposal. The guns were some of the more accurate sounding models I have experienced, and I learned to really fear the sound of bullets pinging metal near me.
The story was.. well.. dark. I don’t want to ruin spoilers here for everyone but it was VERY dark. You are in an upbeat mode moving along kicking ass and taking name, but there are three places in the game where things happen that make you sit there and go “wow…um.. I feel a bit awkward right now”. A prime example, (and this is not a spoiler) is given away in the opening video sequence where rebels have kidnapped the president of this middle eastern country, and hauled him off to the rebel leader. You are watching this entire sequence from HIS point of view, where you can look around with the look controls, but that is it. Once you are driven to their base, they haul you out of the car and tie you to a post. Then, from a first person point of view you watch the rebel leader make a TV broadcast, turn to you and put a gun in your face, and watch as he shoots you. It gave me chills, no games cut scene has ever given me chills. This is not the last time this happens either. I think that deep down Infinity Ward used this game as a quiet tool to share some political opinions of their own. This doesn’t really bother me as to me games are art, and any true art expresses the inner creativity and thoughts of the artist, not the consumer. While I cant help but see striking resemblances that point to modern day issues, I don’t mind it and took it all in stride.
Game control was as accurate as you could want without being overly complex. The traditional FPS style of left and right thumb sticks to move and look applied as normal. The targeting was reliable when using your iron sights, and the nice touch to compensate for lack of a mouse was that if you used your sights with a target near your crosshair zone, it would auto lock in on him when you did it. However they countered this bonus with the fact it would only lock on where they are as you pull the zoom trigger, and not track them if they moved. The environment played nicely with your ammo. Certain items like plywood and boxes would not stop bullets, which would cut right though them to the guys crouching behind, however this worked two ways and you needed to be equally careful. Interestingly enough though, you could fire off wildly all day long while inside the missile silo’s in the missile base and nothing would happen. “Be careful Dr. Ryan… some things in here don’t react well to bullets”
In all, I am glad Infinity took the helm back in the CoD series. CoD3 was a terrible abortion of game design by its makers, and its a good thing Activision moved the IP back to them. They wrote a stunning story, captivated you with some intense battle sequences that really immersed you into the conflict, the brought the game home in a present day feeling that made it scream like it was ripped right from cnn.com’s headlines, and they threw in some absolutely fun moments that made you feel like you were the worlds biggest bad ass. (I am talking about the level where you are controlling the guns on a big ole AC-130 gun ship). Nothing says I own your ass like dropping 110m rounds down on a pack of guys from above in night vision mode while the navigator and spotter are relaxed and calmly commenting “whoaaaa he’s dusted”.
So if for some reason you are an even bigger slacker than me and have yet to play, pick it up and give it a spin as soon as you can. I plan to run back through it sometime soon and work on getting all of the veteran/hard achievements for each mission, as well as all 30 pieces of Intel this time around. I think it might take me significantly longer, but its worth it.
