(9159 Views)

Before we start, lets get this one thing out of the way – Call of Duty 4 (COD4) is woefully short as far as the single player campaign is concerned. Agreed, there’s tons of fun to be had with the superbly well done multiplayer aspect of the game, but still, once you see the end credits roll, you have this feeling that the game could have gone for a little more.

Now that we have that out of the way, we come down to what we have on hand, which is nothing short of amazing. This is a game that will grab you by your throat and never let you go till the very end, such is the quality of it. Right when you thought that war games were passé, Infinity Ward came out with COD4, completely revamping the series, taking it light years beyond Treyarch’s Call of Duty 3. While it is still essentially Call of Duty as far as the gameplay is concerned, the wise choice of shifting the setting from the much used World War II theater to a grittier, modern day setting comes as a breath of much needed fresh air, even as announcements start to go out that Treyarch will be taking the series back to boring World War II with the next game in the series.

COD4 has you playing as a US Marine as well as a British SAS Operative in a fictional Middle Eastern location (We could have said Iraq, but then we’d have to get political and start talking about global warming and the melting polar ice caps and all that as well) , faced with radical extremists toppling the government, executing the President and taking control of the nuclear assets, brilliantly and chillingly depicting (predicting?) what a modern day nuclear nightmare will be like. Like all the other previous games in the series, COD4 suffers from the same level of linearity and relies heavily upon scripted events, which is not really a bad thing for a game like Call of Duty, as you will eventually find out, if you haven’t already. Right from the very first level that has you rappelling down to a ship, catching the enemy unaware, securing much-needed intel and beating a hasty retreat before it goes under the waterline, to one absolutely amazing flashback mission where you are inserted behind enemy lines, dressed in the ghillie suit and crawling on your belly through long grass to take out their leader, CoD4 has moments that you will never ever forget. You will literally have your heart in your mouth as you try to blend into the background while enemy boots thud inches away from you, where one wrong move makes all the difference between staying alive and becoming Swiss cheese. And if being Sam Fisher and fighting off killer dogs doesn’t catch your fancy, one particularly spectacular level even has you manning the guns on a C130 as you peer down through your heat-detection cameras and systematically take out tangos with an assortment of gattling guns and 40mm cannons. Mmm, satisfying. All said and done, the game is full of so many breathtaking moments when you just drop your controller and stare around in disbelief at what you just saw. Like, for example, in a jaw-dropping moment where you see your chopper spin out of control as a nuclear blast wave hits you and takes you down. When you come back to your senses, everything is red and hazy, all-out destruction all around you while you can just crawl out of the mangled mess that your high-tech heli has been reduced to. Then you look up and see this huge mushroom cloud blooming in the horizon just as the searing heat wave engulfs your world as you probably go “Oh SH**!” The Call of Duty series has always been known to portray what a real war is like – brutal and de-glamorized and this particular sequence drives across the message like never before. Nothing would be unnerving enough than pulling down your night-vision goggles to see enemy as well as your allies’ laser-sights criss-cross the battlefield in a deadly, but a disturbingly beautiful web. Infinity Ward has managed to yet again push the envelope further with the game engine that drives COD4. Battles play out across varied locales at different times of day, walls end up getting pockmarked as enemy fire tears through them. Debris flies all around you as bullets hit the ground and go up in a shower of dirt. Flashbangs will burn into your vision, freezing what you had been looking at, leaving you temporarily blind and extremely vulnerable to enemy fire. RPG’s will zoom past you with a trail of smoke as you hastily side step the incoming projectile. Bullets will tear through thin wood and wall with a sickening sound leaving you desperately looking for cover. And lumbering tanks will serve as mobile car crushers, putting those ghostly shells out of their misery by turning them into flat ribbons of mangled metal. Voice acting has been done extremely well, with your superiors barking orders on the battlefield, (which, strangely seem to be some sort of weird homage on IW’s part to the Alien movies) as your squad mates rush to help you out of tight situations. Background music comes and goes on-cue and in-sync with the action on screen, but without distracting you in the least bit from the mayhem you are causing. The battlefield sounds are extremely well mimicked here - you can hear the grenades land close to your feet and bounce before exploding into millions of pieces and making a human sieve out of you, even as the weapon bucks in your virtual hands as you fire, faithfully reproducing what we assume a highly powerful military ordinance will sound like. And to prove how deeply sarcastic they are, and how pissed off they were at Treyarch getting to load up with CoD3, a nice rap song in the end credits takes a more-than-apparent dig at Treyarch and their console-only offering. Apparently, Infinity Ward considers this to be the third in the series of Call of Duty, effectively damning what Treyarch churned out. in case you missed the in-your-face way they named the PC’s EXE file “iw3sp”. The game holds its ground on both the Xbox 360 as well as the PlayStation 3 without any noticeable difference, which comes as a good boost for the PlayStation 3, especially when it has been on the receiving end of all the negative vibes about how difficult it is to code for the shiny black console with the Spiderman font. Understandably, the PC version looks the best if you have a rig powerful enough to drive this baby, but the Xbox 360 version has the addictive Achievement Points, so.. But what’s worth mentioning is that all the Achievement Points can be earned in the single player campaign only. Gamers will have to turn up the difficulty to Veteran if they are to earn all the achievement points and boost their GamerScore to pimp themselves as leaders somewhere on some forgotten corner of the Internet. Rest assured, the game will make you sweat your blood out for those points. We didn’t really like how the difficulty ramps up in Veteran mode, with two shots being enough to kill you and the enemy literally spamming your hiding place with grenades. It kind of kills the fun after a while, especially if you’ve been shot to pieces 10 seconds into the Epilogue mission for two days straight. While we would have loved to review the multiplayer part of the game, this reviewer faced a lot of trouble going online on Xbox LIVE and getting a match to jump into. After having waited for weeks to have the game show up on the shelves here at Bangalore, this came as a major disappointment to someone who’s been online on CoD3 as much as humanly possible. Even after having waited for hours, no games show up on the playlist, whereas the same connection will immediately get you into the thick of action in Call of Duty 3. Apparently, this situation is all too common and will be taken care of by the soon-to-be-released patch. Until then, we will have to be content with playing through the campaign again and raining “Death from Above” as we debate whether CoD5 will go the Company of Heroes: Opposing Fronts way and have us pumping hot lead into Allied soliders from a German perspective.[TABLE=8]

9.5 / 10

Distributor: World Wide CDROMS
Platforms: PC, Xbox 360, PlayStation 3
Price: INR 1299 / INR 2510 / INR 2799

Screenshot Gallery:

TRANSLATE

Translate this post into your favorite language. Click on any of the flags below to view the translated version. NOTE: Translations use the AltaVista Babel Fish Translation Service and may not be 100% accurate.

• UnR3aL Says:
  December 22nd, 2007 at 1:09 am

  n1 Cody…

  Really good game tho a bit Short but wrapped up pretty nicely . A must try for every1 !

• x3nophon Says:
  December 22nd, 2007 at 4:21 am

  n1 cody. i loved the ghillie in the mist mission. its scary how pripyat looks exactly like the real city in stalker and cod 4 (esp. the place near the ferris wheel).

• Dev Kanchen Says:
  December 22nd, 2007 at 3:11 pm

  Awhyuck! Sweet review. When I read yesterday you were actually trying the thing on Veteran, had a wtf moment. I generally like to take point and flush out the whole place before anybody else fires a round, and more often than not (unless the camera is practically taken from my hands, like in Crysis) I don’t have the patience for the AI to make the first move (like in the Prologue when you’re inside the ship, and Price’s supposed to throw a flashbang before you troop in). That, and I have generally assumed that in CoD, the AI waits for the player to raise a finger; things are of course a little different this time (as it is with most recent games) with practically everything happening in real-time, and you having to keep up with or slow down to sync with the events in the game. ANYHOW, getting to the point. I kept dying on Hardcore in that part on the ship till I realised you actually had to hang back, and wait for Price to create a tactical advantage. Besides I haven’t really been able to stay out of cover for more than 5 seconds (I was going to say 10, but that would probably have been an exaggeration of my survival skills :P) in most of the missions, things even getting frustrating sometimes. Can imagine what it would be like on Veteran.

• Roshan D'Silva Says:
  December 23rd, 2007 at 11:15 am

  Yes,COD4 is absolutely BRILLIANT!!!,best FPS i’ve played in a long time.GOTY for me man!!

• Meggsa Says:
  March 11th, 2008 at 12:12 am

  the game was a little bit shorter, but it is a must buy game. absolutely brilliant. many don’t know that after the credits roll you can still do one last mission for the epilogue. I’m almost half way through veteran and it’s been semi-difficult. you just have to keep the anger to a min. I can’t wait for COD5.

Name (required)

Mail (will not be published) (required)

Website