I started playing Call of Duty 4 a little apprehensively as I was worried that it would just be a cosmetically different Call of Duty 3, which had been set in the WWII era. Little did I know that Activision and Infinity Ward had put a little bit more into this than I expected.

 

[Minor Spoilers]

    The First mission puts you through a training section somewhat like the one required for Americas army, this part can just be skimmed through as not all the exercises were required I found it a lot more interesting to actually do the ‘fun box’ (one of the real fire exercises). Upon completing this, you are briefed and sent to a helicopter where you fly to the cargo ship. Your task; kill everything that moves. You will most likely notice the games dismal water effects, and unfortunately the superb AI soldiers opposite you aren’t enough to compensate.

    After playing through for awhile and completing the myriad objectives you go through a well done in game “cut scene” I use this term loosely as you still have to follow your soldiers and will lose if you’re not fast enough. I really enjoyed this as your head is held sideways disorientating you and adding to the games realism. One thing I disliked was the total lack of controls you had over your squad mates being unable to tell them to do so much as tie their shoes, they slightly make up for this by being able to think for themselves, a recent phenomena in modern shooters.

After this you get a CoD 4 screen and come to an impressive satellite screen that zooms into the Middle East… and then goes into one of the most horribly long and drawn out intros ever. It goes on and on introducing the people who made it somewhat like they do in movies, but much worse. After this you watch the president of some Middle Eastern country. He is assassinated and you find out that whole scene was for nothing. Finally you get into some more action, where you have to rescue an informant; you can find the rest out by playing the game for yourself.

 

            This game adds a great new feature called ‘Kill cam’.       If you are killed by an opposing soldier, you will either have a chance to respawn immediately or watch the last five (approx.) seconds of what your opponent saw before he killed you, which is great for finding snipers.

    Each class has a special ability along with his specialized weapons. A good example is the grenadier class, who pull the pin on one of their grenades every time they die, meaning for a lot of kills when the player who killed you walks over your freshly dead body. The game offers lots of unlockables for your multiplayer character, like scopes or radar shielding.

 

    This game is a welcome break from the tired World War Two setting, and the base game is better than ever, especially with some of the new multiplayer content.

All together Activision has come up with a successful shooter and good continuation of their series, the only problems being some rather long winded cut scenes, and sub-par water effects. The graphics are very good, though there are games with even better visuals available.