Call of Duty® 4: Modern Warfare [FPS] Full Game Review for PC

creativity101 (57)in #gaming • 7 years ago

When you compare the first Call of Duty game to the first modern warfare trailer, you would hardly believe they're from the same series which I guess was kind of the point. At a time and most shooting games were set during World War two, Infinity Ward tried something a little bit different with modern warfare and brought the game to more contemporary premise.

However, in doing this they pretty much moved away from keeping things historical and factual and just moved into pure fiction. What we ended up with is what many consider to be the first in a long line of modern shooters that slowly killed off the FPS genre and trapped it into mediocrity. Now I don't test something like that to a single game and whilst it true that one warfare did pretty much set the tone for countless shooting games to come, modern warfare does still offer up a really intense and cinematic single-player campaign and it also has a very fun and challenging multiplayer mode.

THE GAME PLAY

In warfare again, you play a campaign through the eyes of several different characters, the main being a sergeant in the USMC and also a sergeant in the SAS. The campaign kind of switches back and forth between these guys mission to mission but this happens in somewhat real-time going back and forth across the globe as events unfold. In a really innovative sequence, you also briefly see the world through the eyes of a president of a Middle East country, moments before he is executed by the game's main antagonist.

All this stuff is handled really well and the way the narrative shifts between characters during the loading screens is seamless, even if it is just typical stuff about Russians and Middle Eastern terrorists stealing nukes and holding the world at ransom.

The main bad guy is dude named Imran Zakhaev, a Russian guy with a serious grudge against the West who goes on to instigate a series of events that led up to the eventual third world war. He's an asshole with no real redeeming features making him a great villain. You've Globetrotter location to location killing the same two or three looking enemy types over and over then the level ends and you go to the next destination. There's a few neat story twists here and there in fact there's two moments in the game that literally made my jaw drop the first time I played them, but they feel a little bit forced in the way they try so hard to make you empathize with the characters that it might come off a little bit hammy.

The opening mission takes place on a tanker that dynamically rocks back and forth with the ocean and it's still impressive in terms of design layout and just the basic technology of it. About halfway through the game puts you in the controls of a large ac-130 gunship defending the game's protagonist by destroying everything in their way. This was totally groundbreaking at the time and no one had ever done anything like it. The realism increased by the jovial radio chatter that accompanies it is successful here.

The issues I had with the gameplay doesn't stem from the visuals more the way in which the actual levels are often designed, in certain levels the sheer amount of bad guys they throw you is just ludicrous. There is dozens and dozens of bad guys firing you solely regardless of the fact that you're often accompanied by half a dozen of your allies. There is literally no pattern or strategy you can use to get through some of these larger encounters you just kind of have to run the gauntlet and then find a safe place to regenerate your health when you take too much damage.

Then as all the environmental hazards like explosive barrels and cars scattered around each level, I mean who knew that cars exploded with the force of a small missile from just a few rounds of pistol fire, and this is the kind of shit where you see the genre slipping you know this kind of lackluster half-assed approach to enemy placement and spawning.

The difficulty setting you choose doesn't really make them any more smart or aggressive or whatnot it just increases the amount of damage you take and also how often they tend to throw grenades but that's about it. On that note, this is also really Modern Warfare's biggest fault, the fact that it's just so relentless. It literally never stops from the moment level starts up you're pretty much under fire from the get-go and until the level ends you're just running around killing people over and over.

There's one mission in the entire game that takes a break from throwing explosions in your face and lo and behold it's the best mission in the entire game. This is an entirely stealth based mission where you're playing a flashback as Captain Price, moving through an irradiated area trying to complete an assassination. Arguably, one of the best missions in the game and it's also arguably one of the best missions in the entire franchise.

Overall though I would say this campaign is mostly enjoyable though it is only four or five hours long and it's at this point that most players will find themselves migrating through to the games included multiplayer mode. For me, this was cod multiplayer at its absolute finest, a stripped back version of what the multiplayer mode is now like today with only a few unlockables of red little customization for players and just some really good weapons to play around with. As you would expect for such an old community the people still playing this game know it back to front and as a result the learning curve is pretty substantial.

SOUND AND GRAPHICS

One thing that will be hard to criticize however is the game's presentation even for a nine-year-old looking game there is still an incredible amount of detail here especially when you run the game and its maximum visual settings. From the assortment of weapons that have been faithfully modeled into the game, all of the various environments with the weather and particle effects even down to the voice acting and the incredible soundtrack. I'm really impressed by all the recreations of weapons and gadgets into the game like the way night vision works for instance and all the manner of surveillance and reconnaissance gear you get your hands on.

In terms of level design, it's just flat-out laziness, you know someone's just going oh hey let's dump as many bad guys on the player as we want in any order and from any direction and it won't matter right because they'll have infinite health, well no, it does matter. Often you will just take shots from every single angle and find yourself totally bamboozled, you quite often have to let yourself take damage so the hip market will give away the direction enemy might be firing from.

It can also be a little bit hard to find a game going that doesn't suffer from atrocious lag at least for someone like me living in Nigeria. But overall this mode is still enjoyable and its really interesting seeing how refined the multiplayer works, before they just overloaded with so many different game modes and gimmicks.

MINIMUM SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS

Supported OS: Microsoft® Windows® XP/Vista (Windows 95/98/ME/2000 are unsupported)
DirectX Version: Microsoft DirectX 9.0c (included)
Processor: Intel® Pentium® 4 2.4 Ghz / AMD(R) 64 (TM) 2800+ / Intel® and AMD® 1.8 Ghz Dual Core Processor or better supported
Memory: 512MB RAM (Windows® XP), 768MB RAM (Vista®)
Graphics: NVIDIA Geforce 6600 or better or ATI Radeon® 9800Pro or better
Sound: 100% DirectX 9.0c compatible sound card
Hard Drive: 8GB of free hard drive space
Internet: Broadband connection and service required for multiplayer connectivity

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REVIEW/RATING

Graphics 7/10
Sound 8/10
Gameplay 7/10
Controls 7/10
Effect 7/10

OVERALL REVIEW/RATING

7.1\10

DEVELOPER

Infinity Ward, Aspyr

PUBLISHER

Activision, Aspyr

GENRE

First-person shooter

MODE(S)

Single-player‎, ‎multiplayer

RELEASE DATE

12 Nov, 2007

CONCLUSION

Lastly, I guess it comes back to the point where I say whether or not this game is worth playing and you know what ultimately? I would say it is. There are just so many little things in modern warfare that we now take for granted in FPS games from the cinematic storytelling devices in the campaign through to the way that multiplayer modes are now handled. It kind of pioneered itself within its own pioneering franchise if that makes sense and bringing it into a modern setting was the only logical way to keep the series alive.

You know there's that saying from The Dark Knight you know the one you either die hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain, now you could apply that phrase to the cod series on the whole but still I think modern warfare is a fantastic shooting game with an incredible campaign that should be experienced by anyone who's a fan of killing lots of bad guys and watching things explode.