matt’s

I couldn’t resist buying Call of Duty 4 - Modern Warfare when I was en route for Christmas presents on Saturday. If you’d like to read my experiences with it, read on.

The first thing I recognized was the relatively short intro. Instead, I went through a tutorial and then straight into a mission on a ship which unfortunately got hit by an air strike and started sinking so I had to leave quickly. This was the first place where I recognized the new physics engine: the ship really developed a heavy list and I was nearly falling off a gutter. Literally in the last second I managed to jump into the transport helicopter. And then I recognized that this was just the prologue and the actual intro was about to follow. Nice job, so far, and one that went smoothly on my not-so-new hardware (I played on an Athlon 64 X2 4200+, GeForce 7600 GT with 1280×1024 and average effect settings) - bravo!

Besides the fact that CoD4 runs surprisingly well on my box, I really enjoyed the excellent staging and diversion. For example, I played the gunner on a helicopter and a bomber and I was helping my injured sniper squad mate out by backpacking him through an abandoned Tchernobyl town. Whenever I dropped him, he gave me backup and told me where enemies were. I also saw intercontinental missiles launching from an enemy launch site and later roped down the shaft. I took part in a wild car chase and blew up tanks and helicopters and poles.

On the other hand, I was missing a certain degree of freedom mainly in the first missions: I just followed my team mates and was getting involved every now and then but could not really affect the progress myself. This was quite a contrary experience to Rainbox Six: Vegas which was quite staged, too, but where I could command my squad at any time. Most confusing, though, was the fact that I played different characters in different missions. It took some time until I recognized that. The sniper I was playing in the shot above is actually one of the main characters, but 15 years ago. I’m not yet sure whether I like that.

Concerning graphics CoD4 features great looking indoor- and outdoor-scenarios, but I liked the character models even better. Although they reportedly have reduced the polygon count of the characters, they look really great, especially the faces. The speech and sound effects in CoD4 are just excellent, and the music fits perfectly into the gameplay - one advantage of the quite linear staging. Enemy AI seemed to be quite challenging, but due to the fact that I had many squad mates with me most times I could retreat each time I got into serious trouble. The new physics engine features some nice ragdoll physics and is nicely incorporated into some events like the sinking ship I mentioned in the beginning; it’s even possible to wound enemies by shooting through soft material like wooden crates.

I had some issues with CoD4, though. First, it didn’t like my Daemon Tools, but when I deactivated the virtual drive I got it started. Then, at one point, the mission loading failed and I was presented the following message in the CoD console:

Fastfile for zone ‘airlift’ appears corrupt or unreadable (code 107.)

I installed patch 1.2 but this did not seem to fix the problem. Next, I simply re-copied the file zone/german/airlift.ff from CD and this fortunately worked.

When I started writing this review on Saturday, I also wrote that I feared that extremely staged games like CoD4 often are quite short (I worried about that in RB6:Vegas, too). I had no idea how right I was! As I wrote, I bought the game on Saturday for 44 EUR at the local Saturn in Cologne and played 3-4 hours in the evening. I played again on Sunday, another 3-4 hours maximum. And I finished it. This really pissed me off - I spent 44 EUR for the game and needed two relatively short sessions to finish it. But at least it comes with multiplayer support and I’m looking forward to trying this soon.

Infinity Ward has implemented a nice gimmick. If you watch the credits completely, you can play a last, short mission, and after that, a number of cheats are activated (maybe they are also activated when you just finish the game without watching the credits and playing the last mission, don’t know). I did not look into the cheats yet but it seems like IW tried to give the game a little more replay value.

There’s so much more I could write, because CoD4 offers a variety of challenges, weapons and scenarios, and it’s definitely a great game. Still, I’m dissatisfied about the playing time, and those of you who cannot afford 44 EUR so easily and prefer singleplayer over multiplayer may want to wait until CoD4 is available as a low budget title.