Sorry for the delay… been a busy weekend…

Put away your Halo 3, a new FPS is in town. I suppose I could have written this review about 2 months ago when I was beta testing it, but I figured I’d wait until retail just in case anything had changed - which it didn’t.

Lets jump right in to the multiplayer aspect of things. Call of Duty borrows from the Battlefield style of rankings and upgrades for your character online. You start out with a very ordinary and standard assault rifle kit and are forced to play team deathmatch. As you shoot off people’s faces, the game rewards you accordingly with bigger and badder guns, fancy attachments, and upgrades to generally not make the game suck. The game feels quite solid, and has more of a defense over offense orientation to it - pretty much the reverse of Halo.

Halo rewards you for running amok, jumping, strafing, and pretty much shooting uncontrollably (don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining). In Call of Duty, if you try the maniac approach you will likely be cut down faster than a forest in the suburbs. Crouch, look down the sights of your gun, and keep your eyes peeled for any motion because doing so will usually end in one quick burst from your gun as well as a bloody spatter on the wall (and points towards your bigger and better gun!).

Assault rifles are so insanely accurate at long range there seems to be little reason to actually use a sniper rifle. That being said, I do enjoy using a sniper kit. I think mainly because CoD4 is the first game in a long time that hasn’t handicapped the stopping power of a sniper rifle down to something between a pea shooter and this mans potato gun. In fact, CoD4 is the first game I seem to have played in a while where I can consistently one-shot someone in the chest with these bad boys. On the negative side of things, there seems to quite often be a lag delay in firing the sniper rifles, making it very hard to hit people on the run - or sometimes even when they are stationary. I have no idea what is up with this, but it seems to be hit or miss on the connection to the server.

Again though, usually 2 quick bursts to someones chest will drop them with the standard assault rifle - just don’t forget your red dot sight or else you will struggle with vision problems.

What keeps the multiplayer fresh is the endless amounts of challenges to complete. Kill 100 people with this gun, 100 people with that gun, do it while crouching, prone, etc. If have trouble motivating yourself to play a game unless there are cool achievements (you know who you are), then you might find the challenges system to be quite stimulating - despite their lack of artificially inflating the number that represents your dignity, aka your Gamerscore.

Game modes include your standard FPS modes, including the Counterstrike Bomb-Plant rip off. More interestingly might be the Hardcore mode unlocked later in the game. In this mode, your entire HUD is gone (including cross hair and radar) and friendly fire is turned on - not to mention increased bullet damage. Basically you get absolutely zero help that you would expect in a video game shooter. I guess this really should be called Real Life mode. The downside to this cool idea? Well it’s a massive camp-fest which turns out to be quite lame in the few times I have tried it. If you are in to the camp-fest aspect of things, then maybe this mode is for you. I prefer to see players more than once a minute.

Finally, the much hyped up Single Player mode turned out to be slightly above mediocrity for me. I had heard that the first mission was something to go down in history, how it blew away the first mission in Call of Duty 3 (which was very over the top), and how it was just something out of an amazing action movie. I must say, after the hype, what a let down. The mission is simply the Ship infiltration mission that was plastered all over the Call of Duty preview movie websites. You run through a ship, quite calmly, catching most guards, uh… off-guard (or shooting them in their sleep), and finish up with a shootout between your team and about 10 enemies. The “cool” aspect of it? Well the ship is rocking while you are playing, and there is a hectic escape at the end while the ship is going down. The escape could have been much more fascinating if you weren’t being given step by step directions as you are running out. “GO LEFT, CONTINUE DOWN THE HALL, UP THE STAIRS” makes things quite a bit easy to get our of the twisty-turny corridors.

Personally I found the 5 minute video between mission one and mission two to be much more interesting. You are in a car driving through a Middle-Eastern city as rebels are apparently “cleansing” the streets of civilians.

Either way, Call of Duty 4 is quite a solid First-Person Shooter. The multiplayer aspect has quite a good amount of replay value with the challenges and unlock and should keep you interested for a while - even if you find yourself sneaking back for a little Halo 3 now and then.