Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare

The Good
Oh no!, not another Call of Duty! How many times do the Germans have to say they are sorry for WWII? Why can't the videogame industry forgive them once and for all? Wait a second!, "Modern Warfare"? What does this have to do with Call of Duty at all? Well, it has to do that it will sell millions thanks to the name. At least Activision doesn't have any shame on calling things by their name. Anyway, let's forget about the commercial over-exploitation of the art of videogames, thanks to the oligarchy of publishers that rule party and let's leave Infinity Ward develop Call of Duty 6 (yes, I said 6), while we concentrate on Call of Duty 4.

I criticize rabidly Call of Duty 4, but, ironically, this 4th, incoherent part of the series is easily the best FPS of the year (take that, self-esteem!). Call of Duty 4 has it all, it renews the franchise, is technically perfect and the level of spectacle will orgasm your teenage brain and lock up your need for a more intellectual society.

After hearing all those hyping reviews and even reading some positive commentaries on the game of people I consider intelligent here at Moby I gave it a try. I haven't played Call of Duty 3, since they didn't released it for PC (even if they did release it for 5 different platforms, :( ), but many reviews were not very positive. In addition, Call of Duty 2 was little more than a boring copy of the first game sinking in an ocean of WWII games. The series was pretty dead for me.

But everything changes when you play Call of Duty 4. After the mandatory tutorial mission, as necessary as boring, where you take the role of a S.A.S. soldier of the British Army, the setting changes to one of those big cargo boats full of big metal boxes in the middle of a storm. The objective is to find and secure a nuclear bomb, and, if you want to stay alive, you better do as you are told. And that's the magic of the game - if you follow the orders, everything looks amazing. If you play a random non-CoD4 FPS, once in a while you live some situation that looks very realistic or exciting. In CoD4, the script is full of these situations, and the player only has to follow it as a good actor to enjoy them. For example, what is the possibility of hitting a helicopter pilot with an sniper rifle in the head? Well, CoD4 puts a helicopter right in front of you while you operate a sniper rifle so you can live this unusual war experience.

And this is the key of CoD4's excitement, the script is hard worked so you can watch and live all type of spectacular situations in modern warfare like a tank riding over a pick up truck, helicopters heavy firing against enemies barricaded in an apartments building, missiles being launched, an execution in first person, shooting an enemy while he fights hand to hand against a comrade, the blowing up of an electric tower, the reaction of enemies at darkness, and many other things. In addition, CoD4 includes enough new features (at least, if you haven't played other war games which included them before) to make the more repetitive missions more exciting than the average FPSs. As an illustration, you can throw grenades back, cars can explode if hit too many times, bullets can go through slim walls or even bodies (and kill another guy behind the first one), you can cause friendly casualties (which implies automatic mission failure when playing as a S.A.S.), you can use night vision and take advantage in dark areas, use special modern weapons with exotic behaviors (like the javelin missile launcher, that goes over obstacles to hit a distant target), etc. Sometimes you won't know what is scripted and what is random, but, if you want to enjoy the maximum possible, you should just not care. But, in general, missions are enough exotic to what we are already used to, that most of them feel very fresh.

In summary, most of what you experience in this game is fresh, varied and enough exciting to make the experience a nice ride from the beginning to the end. Unless you get stuck in an area because it's too difficult and you have to repeat the same scene 10 times, which is an inevitable problem when games are only based on killing and avoiding to be killed.

You may think: "Wow!, this all sounds pretty good, I will pay tens of € for it"; but wait, there is still more. The technical aspects of the game are way over the standards. When it comes to graphics, for example, I've heard from people that compare it to Crysis. Of course, graphics are not better, but they do an equivalent job. If you don't look at every texture in detail, you may easily have an equivalent visual experience as with Crysis, but with much lower hardware specs. It can run very smooth even with two-years old cards.

As for the sound, I never know what to say, because I don't really know how weapons and explosions sound in real life, but everything seems to sound correct in CoD4. I specially remember the "Death from above" mission, about which you may have heard already. I'm only telling you that you play it from an airplane. Once again, I don't know what do you hear in these situations, but it really felt like being there shooting all those... oh! sorry, better find out by yourself.

And there is even more. The guys from Infinity Ward have paid a lot of attention to the characters and to many details that make the player's immersion a very easy task. Not only is the voice acting perfect, but the animation are also something to mention, specially when enemies are hit. They don't behave as the usual ragdolls that, as soon as they are hit they become dead lifts. Even when an explosion throws an enemy (or a teammate) in the air, they don't die at the moment. Sometimes they'll die shooting the last burst or they'll stay in the ground wounded shooting with their pistol, all these "final breath" animations depending on where did you hit them.

And thanks to many other realistic features of the game, you may still enjoy a lot of variety even in the most repetitive levels. I was surprised, for example, when I decided to carry for a while a sniper rifle in the streets of..., well, this unnamed country you fight in. Due to the proximity of the targets, you can expect that high caliber bullets would pierce their bodies, but I was positively surprised that you can even kill two guys with the same bullet, :D And there are still many other realistic curiosities to discover in the game.

Finally, there is another very good reason to play Call of Duty 4: just 7 letters, P-r-y-p-i-a-t.

The Bad
But all this comes with a price.

There are two major drawbacks in CoD4. On the one hand, the reason for this game to work so fine is that the philosophy behind the gameplay is that the player has a role comparable to that of the "play" button in a movie. On the other, that it sinks (like 95% of war games, actually) to US military and political propaganda.

Let's start with the first one. Before you play CoD4, you should ask yourself: Do I like freedom and interactivity in games? If the answer is a determined "yes" you should ask yourself yet another question: Do I like good, accurate serious action movies with plenty of killing and explosions? If the answer is another "yes" or the answer to the first question was no, you can go on and play this game. But if you like freedom and interactivity in games too much, even if you like CoD4, you will feel unpleasant playing this game. Summarizing, this game is a movie, and you better accept it from the beginning.

As Call of Duty tradition commands, you play the role of a low rank soldier who is only there to obey orders, usually about killing every enemy in sight, putting explosives and handling heavy weapons against big shots like tanks and helicopters. Actually, the rest of the troop doesn't look like doing anything apart from holding positions. I will tell you a secret (that you will discover sooner or later), in some parts of the game the protagonism of the player is so exaggerated, that enemies will respawn infinitely until you advance against the enemy lines, o_0 At least, Captain Price is a nice ol' chap to receive orders from, and he also did have to receive pleeeeenty of orders back when he was a low rank soldier trapped in an action movie of the early 2000's.

Related to this, I also want to talk about the "achievements". I'm not sure what is the point of it because I'm a PC gamer, but, apparently, many console games rewards the player for achieving absurdly hard tasks in these games. Most of these games are already a stupid pointless way of wasting many children's time to make them replay them again and again to unlock even more pointless secrets. It is kind of wrong. In CoD4, you are encouraged to find 30 hidden laptops with "intel on the enemy" (you don't actually learn anything, it's just the excuse). As I said, this game is designed to play fast, and exploring the levels for laptops is just the perfect way to break the gameplay and the immersion. And it's absolutely not designed to play twice, that's why there is a multiplayer.

Now, what about a little conspiranoia? Is Call of Duty 4 created by the government of the US to promote a war against Iran? or maybe by the oil companies? Not probable, but CoD4 certainly helps to the "war on terror" agenda. How? Repeating a lie. OK, OK, I'm not going too deep with all this, you came looking for a review, not an explanation on how big media producers tune their messages with given political ideas of their interest in order to make societies believe that these ideas are true and go against their own good to help the interest of the people that hold the power (bankers, mostly). But let's see what this game is about.

The game starts presenting us with the situation both in Russia and in the Middle East. It seems that there is a civil war in the first one between loyalist and ultranationalist rebels. In the Middle East we learn about a guy called Al-Kashan who is super-powerful in the region (for some unknown reason). The "Prologue", consisting on three missions, shows us how these two situations evolves threatening the civilized world, that is (hand on heart full of proud), the US and the UK, and maybe other less important ones. The first (sort of) mission is played ("play" as in "the movie is playing") through the eyes of a president victim of a coupe d'Etat. It serves as an introduction in which we see a city in chaos, an unnamed city in an unnamed country that looks a lot like what we see on the news about Iraq. After this level, and the always-too-long tutorial, we start the real thing in a mission to board a Russian cargo that carries a nuclear bomb.

If we play a bit with the prejudices of lousy-minded citizens (considering a "citizen" that who lives in a "civilization", as opposed to "barbarians", those who live to the East of Poland and to the South of the Mediterranean), what we read here is:

• Arabs, that I have learned on TV is another way to say Muslim, are unable to maintain political instability, they are like children in comparison to our mature democracies. Therefore, and because they hate (hands on heart again) America (which is a country, not a continent), Arab-land is a dangerous source of terrorist.

• Even if they are capitalists now, we have never liked the Russians. After years of Cold War we have learned that conspiracy is part of their culture, and that having all that military resources, who knows how many of them are selling to who knows what people, probably even to terrorists. And who knows what they are saying with that strange language of them.

Now, let's see what is the real political and military situation in which this game has been developed.

Since 11-S, that may have been performed by the oil companies and Zionist ultra secret groups, DUN, DUN, DUN! Oh!, sorry, no more conspiracies. As I was saying, since 11-S, the US with the help of other countries (mostly the UK), has invaded both Afghanistan and Irak and has threatened with invading Iran too during the last two years (but seem to have forget about it in the last months). The results are (not) surprisingly very different to what the invaders claimed would be: they still fight the talibans in Afghanistan and Irak is the hell on Earth right now. This can be explained by comparing the reasons given to invade these countries and the final outcome they have gotten from it:

• Afghanistan: The reason was to bring Al-Qaeda to justice, the outcomes are plenty of US military bases in the region and control over the Trans-Afghanistan Pipeline. Al-Qaeda has not been brought to justice at all.

• Irak: The reasons were many, hypothetical relationship between Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaeda, hypothetical possession of weapons of mass destruction by Hussein's dictatorship, bringing democracy and happiness to the people of Irak. The outcome is, well, death and destruction, but control over Irak's oil and plenty of US military bases are still feasible too. Of course, all the given reasons have turned false.

• Iran: Mostly the same reasons and the same outcome of Irak, but with much worse consequences for everybody. The UN and even the US intelligence has already thrown away the idea that Iran is a short-term nuclear threat, while North-Korea, possible the closest dictatorship in the world, did proclaim to the whole world their intention to be a nuclear threat and the US did nothing.

Where is Russia in all this? Basically, they are a gas and armaments power in the region. They didn't take well the invasion of Afghanistan and they are always ready to sell modern weaponry to many countries in Asia, specially those opposed to the US interests.

In summary, CoD4, probably not on purpose, does a lot of good to promote prejudices against the artificial enemies of the US empire. "Hey!, and the UK too". Sorry guys, and the UK too. This game is a wrong cultural reference. If you don't believe that a videogame (or a movie or a book or whatever) can harm you, or that the science of propaganda is mature enough to make you believe whatever they want, let's play a game: Name the three errors I commited in the explanation of the "Prologue", and don't look... Here they are:

• Al-Kashan is false, it's Al-Asad.
  
• Nobody says it's a Russian cargo, it's under Slovenian flag.
  
• The coup d'Etat mission is the third one, not the first one.

If you hadn't caught these error before, your brain would take them as the truth from now on. And it's easy not to remember these facts because the human brain is inaccurate, that's why we write important things down, and the experts in propaganda know this. What?, still not convinced? Well, and if I say you that the cargo's flag is not Slovenian, but Estonian? And if I say you that now you are confused and that the only way to know where the fucking cargo's flag is from is to actually play the game and watch it for yourself?

In addition, Call of Duty 4 is another game where war looks like a funny thing to do. Through most of the game, the player is tricked into thinking that wars missions are prepared as a surgeon prepares for an operation and the only thing they see is dozen upon dozen of bad guys falling, as if that were their job. It must be the higher anglo-saxon intellect, you know. In the S.A.S. missions there are not even friendly casualties. And, of course, there are absolutely no civilians in the battlefield, Infinity Ward could have written a note at the end of the game saying "no civilian has been harmed during this game". This reinforced the pleasant idea that in modern warfare (that is, this game), the technology allow fors clean wars where nobody dies (at least, no more than ~140000 per year), as if civilians where told the day before that there is going to be war in the neighborhood, that they have to, please, go to the designated hotel rooms, and that they don't have to worry about their belongings that are going to be treated with maximum care.

OK, I was lying, there is a one civilian, which is, OBVIOUSLY, killed by the bad guys. Yeah!, they are bad you know. Man!, how pissed I am with them bad guys, they kill innocent people, I'm so proud to be in the good side of the world!

Last, but not least: women count!!! How many girls are in the whole game? One fucking girl!! (yes, both screenshots are mine, ;) ) I thought that in a "modern warfare" game we could see some more female soldiers, but no, the average of number of women in a shooter is still 1. Seriously, I challenge you to find some hyped FPS where there is more than one woman. Why women don't play that many games? WHO KNOWS!!??

The Bottom Line
Still, Call of Duty 4 is a great game and I'm going to give it a high score. Even if I can talk as double as time on the bad part than on the good one, every bad aspect of the game is an example of the "who-cares" list of the FPS world. And, if you are an intelligent person, there is still hope that you wont get too influenced by it, but don't forget to play it with critical thinking, wars are not fun, :( At least, the phrases you can read when you die are fairly crude.

The Good
Call of Duty is back! After an awesome introduction with CoD 1, a nice addition with CoD 2, and a rather forgettable third installment that missed the PC platform altogether (makes ya think, doesn't it?), CoD is back with the fourth installment subtitled, "Modern Warfare".

Instead of the tried and true (some at this point calling it cliche) WW2 environment, we're treated to, you guessed it, modern warfare with a rather plausible story. For example, in the single player campaign, you play as a Brit Special Air Service commando and as a US marine involved in foiling a terrorist organization's plans to be terrorists. Hmm, do you think this could take place in real life? Truth be told, I appreciate themes that coincide or at least resemble real life events, especially events that are currently underway. This adds a nice level of immersion.

About that single player campaign; it is VERY well thought out. You get only a little bit of story for a lot of action, but those little bits are well executed. The environments are completely awesome, and blow any other CoD installment out of the water. Graphics on the PC are very nice, and run at light speed. I appreciate that the level of detail can be very high, without much sacrifice in speed, even with a moderate system. The action is just beautiful, environments engaging, and story just so good I want to cry with excitement. People, this is good stuff!

Now having completed the single player (haha, and without giving you spoilers as well), let's talk about the multiplayer action; it's fast, low latency, and best of all you get to build a character (or as they call it, "class").

You see, fighting online gives you experience that goes towards leveling up. There are various things you can do to earn this experience such as killing your enemy, but also by winning matches you can add to your character's progression. Furthermore, there are challenges such as killing X number of people while crouching, or shooting down a helicopter that will allow for class progression. This experience goes towards unlocking more features in the game such as certain weapons and better still; perks!

Perks allow your character special abilities. For example, you may choose "extreme conditioning" as a perk which allows you to run further. Or perhaps you might choose, "martyrdom" which will drop a live grenade when you are killed, so if your attacker is close he will likely be taken out with you. If you've ever played a game in the Fallout series, then you'll know what I'm talking about.

Other unlockable features include special additions to certain weapons such as scopes and silencers. Completing various challenges and leveling up will open doors that allow you to design a fighter based on your playstyles and preferences. The result is that there is real incentive to play the game here. There are a plethora of full servers with players "grinding" to level themselves up. Even if you reach the maximum rank of level 55, there is still plenty to unlock in the way of weapon customizations. Never before has a first person shooter allowed for this MMORPG style character build up. One of the cool perks gives you added power for shootin through thin walls made of sheet metal and wooden fences.

The good thing is, even if you're just starting off, it will not be extraordinarily impossible to compete with the established players. Suffice it to say, the perks and customizations complement existing playstyles and add just a tiny advantage. They do not, as you might suspect, equate to a ridiculously unbalanced advantage that would occur when say, a level 55 warrior crushes a level 2 caster in an MMO. In other words, if you can aim straight and fire some bullets into your target, they're going to die regardless of their level.

Acquiring things like radar and airstrikes is based upon kill streaks i.e. number of enemies one can kill without dying. All in all, the multiplayer aspect is not only good mechanically speaking, but these are new concepts being implemented here, and with great success!

The Bad
Now comes the rants. There really isn't a big crippling flaw in the game, but there are a lot of little things that really piss me off. As good as it is, this game could have been better, and I personally believe that some of these "mistakes" were entirely intentional so that there is room for an expansion pack. Again, the practice of intentionally leaving out features to get to my wallet is happening, and this is seriously irritating.

For example, no vehicles and no CTF. WHY!? Why not allow server administrators or player votes decide if there were to be vehicles or not, and why not include CTF? I mean come on, other than deathmatch, CTF is the standard among FPS multiplayer options. The failure to include this could not simply have been oversight. This was on purpose!

Sound... ok the sound is decent, except for weapons sounds. The weapons all sound like little cap guns, it's disgusting. The heavier machine guns make decent noise but the rest are pathetic. The AK-47 sounds like a cork gun, and the M-16 sounds like those little snap pops that you get from the firework stand that "pop" when you throw them on a hard surface. Take an amazing story, throw in remarkable graphics, have the rumbling bass blow your windows out as bombs explode, and then put into the hand of our hero... a toy gun that makes cute little sounds. ARGH!!!!

No exclusive weapons. Any side can use any of the weapons, so it's hard to differentiate between unseen friend or foe based on weapon sounds (which seasoned players could do in the original CoD). Oh hey, that doesn't matter because now you can just use your radar to see where your team AND where your enemies are at (if they're firing)! This also means that all sides are identical and have no special traits! I mean, yeah we get to build our own class, but how about offer special strengths and weaknesses to the various teams? That isn't done here, so it doesn't matter if you play good guys or bad. Bummer.

Multiplayer environments are way too small and mostly look the same and not only that but extreme camping is rewarded and even REQUISITE for winning matches. The result is that you have these tiny maps with a million places to hide in them. Just as you've searched every nook and cranny for the enemy, you get gunned down from a position that looks impossible to hide in. Oh yeah, forgot to mention; the players blend in so well with the background that often times you can be looking square at an enemy and if they aren't moving, you can't see them. Because of this, it's just better to camp and look for movement.

In the cities, there is movement, sometimes in the form of a piece of paper, a newspaper, or some kind of trash that is blowing in the wind. I don't know exactly what it is, because it is a super low res. graphic imposed on a 3-d background. It's hard to explain, but imagine a Duke Nukem 3d sprite showing up in the middle of your high res, texture rich environment. WTF!?

There are a couple of technical issues as well. They haven't gotten the sound settings right (at least not for my rig, 7.1 might be ok, I don't know). For example, I have quadraphonic speakers. If I put the option to 4 speakers, sound only comes from the front two. If I set it to 5.1, I get sound on all speakers. One problem though; my speakers are not 5.1, and the voices echo and I'm missing sound on that setting. The answer? Set it to plain old "stereo", yep now I have sound on all four speakers, but it's not positional. Furthermore, the sounds are front heavy (loud in front, quiet in back). Boo.

I wasn't able to bind keys to the number pad. Sure, I can set certain functions to the number pad keys and I can get acknowledgment for doing so, but when hitting the bound keys in game, they are dead... regardless of the number lock position. Oh well.

Individual player skill comes down to who can hide/camp better. Often the result of a firefight favors who saw the other person first. In other words, luck is a major (perhaps the biggest) factor in multiplayer gaming.

Another think that irks me is that servers will randomly crash. First you think you're lagging or disconnecting, then a minute or so later you find out that the server went down. Happens everywhere. Do a /reconnect and you find that the server is empty. No, it's not you. Yes, it went down. Not to mention, sometimes servers that you regularly play on will simply not allow you to connect. Try 20 times in a row and watch it time out, then on try #21 you get in after 8 or 10 seconds of waiting, the whole while the server population being well below maximum. I believe this has something to do with punkbuster (and to date, PB has been such a pain in the ass for so many people that I think I speak for the majority when I say that us gamers would rather deal with the occasional cheater than deal with punkbuster).

Finally, the single player campaign is inexcusably short. It is, I'm sure, the shortest EVER for any FPS. Irritating to say the least.

The Bottom Line
Yes, CoD 4 is worth every penny, but it's not without flaw. Why can't I have cake AND ice cream? Removing good features to replace them with good features doesn't make sense, especially when the features in question can and should co-exist, but this is what happens when commercialism has its ugly hands in game design. Nevertheless, groundbreaking concepts being executed successfully are the shining points of this installment. It would behoove any FPS'er to show up for this one.

The Good
The Good: Almost everything. Call of Duty 4 delivers a thrilling war shooter experience, and its new setting and tone distance it enough from its predecessors to make it feel really fresh. The single player story line is better than it sounds. You’ll control two different men, one in the service of the British army, the other working for the US. The narrative hops back and forth between these two men, following them as they track down a few select (and dastardly) terrorists, mowing down armies of faceless Russians and Middle Easterners (the half of the game is set in a purposefully unnamed yet obviously Iraq-based Middle Eastern country) troopers.

Now normally this doesn’t do it for me, but the portrayal of the consequences of your actions (basically, fucking up when you shouldn’t, in various countries) is portrayed unflinchingly. Likewise, the storytelling and characterization of various comrades is detailed and adroit. This marks a big departure from most war shooters, as does the serious and tasteful depiction of extreme disasters (in one case, you experience the aftermath of an atomic explosion). The shooting mechanics are good, and while there’s no cover feature, the prone, sprinting, knife, grenade and scope options all combine to keep you interested throughout the campaign.

The multiplayer, simply put, blows the single-player away. Most of the multiplayer levels are condensed or modified versions of single-player ones, and almost all of them are great (and all of them are well-balanced). As you fight through ruined Russian and Middle Eastern locales, the options available to you are astounding. You can outfit yourself with multiple different weapons and explosives, but that’s only half of it. As you get kills, you level up, gaining experience.

Aside from kills, there are different achievements to be had. You get XP for using certain guns in certain ways, for shooting down helicopters, for doing almost anything, really. Along the way you’ll unlock “perks,” which are special abilities. You might unlock a perk that lets you sprint for longer, or one that steadies your aim. This makes it so that most character load-outs are unique. Some people might favor carrying two SMGs, and a full compliment of grenades, while others might want to silence all of their guns and make themselves invisible to radar. The options are endless, and since there are 50 levels of experience, which you can repeat once over to get a special medal, you can see just how much depth there is to the experience.

The Bad
Not much, except the aforementioned creepy neo-Imperialist feel. Sometimes, in multiplayer, grenade spamming can get crazy, but that’s about it. As is always the case with Call of Duty, every 100 feet your boys will halt, and wait for you to move up, just enough to trip an invisible wire and cause them to advance. If you don’t advance yourself, your comrades will hunker down and stay put, weathering the onslaught of an unending stream of bad guys. This can get annoying, to say the least.

The Bottom Line
COD4 is the best multiplayer game I have ever played. It is well-balanced, fast, entertaining, and constantly surprising. Every new perk unlocks a new strategy. When you get the Martyrdom perk (it drops a live grenade when you die), every battle will end with you rushing toward the opposition, hoping for that extra kill. Infinity Ward has announced that they’ll be releasing new maps soon. Call of Duty 4 is about to get a lot more exciting. For once in my life, I can recommend a war shooter to somebody. Go try it; you won’t want to stop, once you’ve gained that first level.