Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare

Buy this game. There's your review. If you require more, well, I can do that too. But after you've read the review, head out and buy this game. If you haven't grabbed The Orange Box, do that as well - because two of the best first person shooters ...ever ...are now available and life is too short to deny yourself either. And if you head down you’ll see how it fares on the Xbox 360 as well.

Call of Duty 4 is not a candidate. It's not a dark horse. It's not "our tip", the people's choice, the favourite, none of that. It is game of the year, 2007. Not only does it reward the long standing Call of Duty fanbase, it's got what it takes to attract a whole new bunch of punters.

First things first, Single player is a work of art. For real. I want to nitpick and find holes but the bottom line is it's just too well made. Infinity Ward "gets it". They didn't try and make War & Peace, they went for Black Hawk Down meets Commando or something. In each of the individual sub-scenarios which play out, you play an utterly believable action character surrounded by testosterone-laden but utterly believable supporting cast. Yes, it's stereotypical on one level, but so what? Approach it on the same level as an action movie -get sucked in by the clever staging, the dramatic angles, and the stirring music - only you're actually part of the action.

As shallow as you may think it is to say, the visuals propel this game into the elite echelon. Player models are amazingly detailed, the urban landscape unparalleled, with the organic environment only a step or two behind. The swaying trees, the debris that occasionally gets blown around - it all conspires against your efforts to try and shoot everything that moves because just like in real life your fellow humans aren't the only things in motion.

Hell, I even ploughed several times through the training mission. Not because I was being professional, no, because I actually enjoyed it. What the hell is going on here? The same attention to detail you see elsewhere throughout the game shows here. Your commanding officer sets the scene as you make your way to an obstacle course, telling you who holds the course record. Several laps later, and while you're nowhere near that record you'll be gratified to know that your time is recorded, gruff feedback from the boss man ensues, and a recommendation of difficulty level follows. Simple and classy - keeping you in the game as much as possible.

Throughout single player there's none of the toiling in festering weapon obscurity jazz - you're given the right weapons for the job. You can pick up gear from corpses along the way, but usually you'll have all the tools you need for a successful mission.

At some point some plonker mate of yours will probably assume a smug air of arrogance and tell you the game is too short. Slap them upside the head and tell them to jolt the difficulty up to Hardened and see if they're still popping off. And besides, with Blu-Ray and HD-DVD movies coming out for 50 a pop currently, I'm more than happy with the prospect of paying double for a single player experience triple the time.

Then of course, there's the main feature - the multiplayer.

Map design is intelligent and commonsense, which in turn makes you respect your environment more. You'll be covering your entry points, checking blind spots and darting your vision all over the joint. It promotes a feeling of healthy competitive paranoia. Rare are the moments you will feel you have to travel any major distance - this is not a vehicle game, this is foot slogger's heaven. True, you still have the "rigid hedge of impenetrability" bordering maps and preventing egress any further, but that's unavoidable. Destructibility of certain map objects is not overdone, but is in there as well.

The game's superior presentation, audio and design all mesh together to give you a pulse-poundingly real feeling of high intensity combat on foot. There's no ducking into a tank and mowing people down with impunity. No respite from the heat of ground battle via chopper - you're there, in the thick of things more often than not. And more than any game before it - and this includes the excellent Team Fortress 2 - in the game's many team modes you always know what to do, courtesy of vibrant, obvious arrows pointing where to attack, where to defend, where the bomb is - you are never without direction. It's so user friendly if it wasn't for the army of highly skilled players tearing up servers already, you'd have to recommend it to your friends as the ideal introduction to online FPS.

Weapons... Oh man. If you've been suffering with CounterStrike Source or Battlefield games, you're in for a rude awakening. Weapons on COD4 hit where you aim. Even the traditional spray and pray light machine guns are capable of decent accuracy if you stick to short bursts. And it rarely takes more than a quick burst to take someone down. If you're capable of aiming straight, you're going to love this game.

There is a comprehensive array of reasons to keep playing this game beyond the mere gut-level fun of ploughing bullets into some dopey guy in another city. There's the ranking level, where your cumulative scores go towards your progression. That's the mere tip of the iceberg. Unlocking weapons here - as well as custom sights, firing rates and other extras is determined by kill count and type of kills. Take Battlefield, substitute powerups for badges and ribbons and you get the picture.

Well, half the picture. The other half is how you can custom create classes to suit your needs. Throw in all the kitted out gear you like, and stack out the Perks you have unlocked. What are Perks? Well, they're just one of the hot edges that COD4 brings to the table. Want to have less recoil as you fire on the run? Unlock the steady aim and go nuts. Want more health, longer sprint time, bullets that penetrate harder or any other number of upgrades? Perks are where it is at. Once again - it's all tied to progression.

Make no mistake, there are some occasions in Call of Duty 4 where you will get intensely frustrated. One serious issue cropped up on the night of release, with the master server going down. Isn't this what testing is for? And while we're willing to give the benefit of the doubt to that one and assume it's not going to be a regular occurrence, there's other idiosyncrasies as well. Or to be more blunt, things that will grate.

Take the imbalance in how your scores affect rankings. One thing that could be said for Battlefield 2 and Battlefield 2142 was there was a reasonably sane approach to calculating the persistent scoring that determined your place in the game world. Rank affected the unlockable weapons, items and skills you could use, just like here. The sad, pathetic losers busted rigging the ranking system were dealt with harshly, a good thing given Counterstrike's gift to first person shooter gaming - exploiting muppets - now proliferates every corner of online gaming.

The problem is currently in Call of Duty 4, there's definitely faster ways to rank up and get your special goodies than others. Hence for every server using some of the excellent team modes available, you'll find free-for-all servers loaded with chums inflating their scores and e-pe...rsonas. It's not at all an unthinkable scenario to imagine clusters of said sad individuals hitting a low population server en-masse and spending the hours pumping bullets into each others heads and steadily attaining the gear genetics, good breeding and a sense of fair play would otherwise deny them. And as we have already established - the stuff you unlock in COD4 definitely makes a difference.

The only other issue about COD4 is an unavoidable one when you get online gamers in camouflage fatigues running around like heavily armed chooks with their heads cut off. On some maps your average survival time is often measured in (single digit) seconds. On the game's smallest map - which essentially resembles your back yard with a couple of shipping containers tossed into it - if you can live more than five seconds with more than eight people on it you're ready to go pro. Or you're one of those clowns constantly hosing spawn points with fire. There's also the stack of punters you'll find embedding themselves behind every dumpster, brick wall and car wreck in the hope of scoring a cheap kill if they wait there long enough. And boy, can some people wait. In industry parlance, these people are known as "free frags", and half the pain factor in getting killed by one of them is the knowledge you may be the only person who will be.

Some of these flaws will be fixed, others we'll get used to, and undoubtedly new ones will appear. We only bring them up because we love Call of Duty 4, however. It finally brings sexy back to smaller scale combat. The map design is exquisite, the visuals are unmatched, the weapons are brilliant, and the gameplay destroys all comers.

If you were to visit a store with me and contemplate picking this or Team Fortress 2 up, I would probably tell you to stop being a knob and buy both. Don't insult either one of these brilliant games by thinking you have to choose, as many people will find their subjective taste determines which is best for them. From my perspective, COD4 shades out TF2. The best FPS since Battlefield 2, and easily the best looking game you will play this year. If you're not already playing this on PC, take a long lunch, pick it up, and prepare for gaming nirvana.


You know what we think of the game, read on to see how it translated to the consoles.


Just what is next generation, anyway? As we hit the two year mark for Xbox, and the one year mark for Sony the definitions keep flying around, but the games supposedly embodying them are pretty rare on the ground.

According to Microsoft, a next gen game supposedly is one which makes you the star of the show. So thoroughly immersive you feel like you’re in the game, not playing it. As for Sony, they’re a little more vague. The next generation starts when they say it does, apparently… and we’re still waiting.

I don’t know if Call of Duty 4: Modern Combat on Xbox 360 is next generation or not. I don’t care, and neither should you. All I do know is this is a game I would buy a console for. Yep. If I had the cash burning a hole in my pocket, and I ran past a store with this playing – I’d be all over it faster than Ben Cousins’ looking for his next hit.

Now here is where we’d normally make some qualifying statement about how the console version is best …as long as you don’t have a powerful PC to play this on. However it’s our pleasure to report COD4 on Xbox 360 does not take one backward step when compared to the PC version. The control is terrific – or maybe we’re being slowly bludgeoned into accepting it – and the visuals are every bit as lush on a suitable TV as you running this on your games computer. In fact, one of our crew of part time elite soldiers that’s been tearing up the lower half of scoreboards in PC FPSs for months – a PC man through and through - has gone so far as to defect to the Xbox 360 version…truly a concerning development for our teamwork prospects, but an affirmation of the power of the console flavour.

The visuals are once again the star of the show, and multiplayer is every bit as smooth and sweet… except you’re usually playing this on a widescreen TV twice the size of a large monitor with outstanding framerate and detail. The precision sighting and aim system everyone is raving about makes it here too, and yes – the single player is every bit as gung-ho, jingoistic and sensational as you would expect from the team who drew such great feedback when they pulled out COD3 for the launch of Xbox 360.

The main quibbles are a lobby system that sometimes drags its feet finding you a game and the fact if you own a PC and Xbox 360, you will be hard pressed to figure out which one of these you should buy. Both versions already have extremely good players cleaning up online – annoyingly good in many cases. Excellence permeates throughout both – we’d probably suggest to owners of both platforms at this stage the increased flexibility of the PC version’s server selection system gives it the edge in multiplayer, and the Xbox 360’s rock solid framerate and likely lounge room setting shades the PC in single player. But really – whichever format you spend more time on – its version will more than suffice.