Call of Duty 4 Review

I was honored to be recruited by Activision to participate in an early closed beta of Call of Duty 4 to the press and the public beta in late August and throughout September. Now that I have returned from battlefield, I am prepared to write an after-action report describing what I saw while on duty. World War II was yesterday’s war. This is modern warfare, fought against terrorists in the 21st century. Many men and women died in the process. I was lucky enough to survive.

I returned from three points of interest. A small abandoned town with damaged buildings, a Middle Eastern town square and a warehouse with blown out offices, known respectively as Overgrown, Crash and Vacant. Working with my teammates, the objective is to kill as many terrorists as possible. This bit of team deathmatch may be frequent to most shooters, but it is just as satisfying in Call of Duty 4. It feels at times as if you are playing in an arcade version of Rainbow Six. Do not mistake this though for a simple run-and-gun. It takes plenty of skill and strategy.

Call of Duty 4 differs from other shooters in the way it rewards players. An experience system is in place that will assign you with a certain military rank depending on how you play. You do this by earning points. For killing someone you get 10 points, or for an assist, where you shoot an enemy but don’t get the kill, you get 3 points. Now, most games would just leave it at that. Halo 2, for example, has a ranking system but is nothing but a number.

Boosting your rank has its benefits in Call of Duty 4. This is how you unlock an array of different weapons which you select before the game starts. You may choose to go with a submachine gun, a shotgun or a sniper. Every player comes with grenades and a secondary weapon (a pistol). Interestingly enough, there are several sort of power-ups that you can apply to your character which you can select three at any one time. You can gain health (although it is barely noticeable), your weapon can increase in damage, you can avoid enemy radar and then there’s Last Stand, which allows you to get a pistol shot off after you die in battle.

One of the things that makes the game different from others, and yet strikes me as making the game unbalanced, are radar, airstrikes and an attack helicopter. If you manage to get three kills in a row, you will unlock the radar. A five kill streak will give you an airstrike, where you can target any point on the map for a bombing. Finally, if you manage a seven kill streak, your enemies will have to deal with not just your wrath but a helicopter. To me it seems all that this accomplishes is distancing the lead even further. Sure, you can say that it rewards people for good performance, but I would argue that all it does is make a comeback even more impossible by stacking the odds against the losing team.

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare looks to be the best Call of Duty we have seen yet. Not only does the game look spectacular, it plays just as good. While I can not comment on the single-player, the multi-player is extremely promising. All I have to say is that Halo 3 needs to watch out. Activision has their answer to Master Chief, and it is called Modern Warfare.