Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare Reader Review

A game for the future US Marine Corps. Advertising glory and heroism for your future patriotic efforts, guaranteeing you a place in history.

A good linear shooter?

The game is surprisingly good, Infinity Ward has taken to perfecting first person story telling by creating elaborate first person sequences where the player is still in control. Within limitations of course. There are several points in the game where you will seriously question the merits of playing the game and it's almost like the developers knew it themselves. It's in most of everything they do, from the death sequence quotes to the comments from your squad mates to the missions of the game.

Speaking of the missions they are all really simplistic go from A to B and kill all the resistance type of missions, sometimes Infinity Ward throw in a timer to stress you out. Intermixed with the action they've put cut scenes to enhance the immersion. It's mostly a one sided experience, you'll be playing a good guy and when your side is torturing people there is no mention of the Geneva convention but when you hear the enemy soldiers torturing an American (or British) soldier you'll immediately hear the terrorist/ultranationalist (the enemies are either ultra nationalists Russians or fundamentalist Arabs... while your merry band of soldiers are either a bunch of patriotic us marines or a specialist SAS troop) mentioning it.

Story, in a Shooter?

The story borrows heavily from popular media and even features a section with one of the worst most brutal things I've seen of the war, a sequence with you playing the gunner of a AC-130 gunship where you're using IR targeting and firing heavy rounds down at combatants. I've never felt quite the same feeling of disgust over the actions that I do in a game and I salute Infinity Ward for implementing it.

Of course, the things I appreciate about the game might have been included just for that excitement and self affirming back patting that Americans will do when talking about 'the war' because this game is all about Iraq, they'll not mention it but that's what it is. It's a game 100% inspired by CNN (and Youtube) footage from Iraq.

The game play is the same as it has ever been, move from A to B and shoot the opposition and then when you've temporarily stopped the respawning of enemies you need to move quickly towards the next point.

Rinse and repeat.

As mentioned earlier Infinity Ward does split the gameplay up a bit and you'll play various roles in the game and see different sides. It's all baked together in the story this time and works much better than the 'select' mission you could do in earlier Call of Duty games.

Conclusion

Far better than Medal of Honor even though it suffers from a likewise idiotic difficulty level in one specific level where I had a really hard time getting by even though the game up until that point has been a relative breeze. I had to drop the difficulty level and when I did the game became a run n gun affair and suffered greatly. If Infinity Ward had balanced that section a bit more the game would have benefited. (Sniper mission, ferris wheel section)