Call of Duty 4
One of my Christmas gifts from my loving wife was a fresh new copy of Call of Duty 4 for the Xbox 360. While I like first person shooters, I’m famous for being terrible at them, and I usually stay away from war-based games and prefer fantasy settings such as Halo or Half Life.
So I was pleasantly surprised when I started playing Call of Duty 4. The gameplay is actually something I can understand and grasp easier than a lot of other shooters.
First off, let me say that the game itself is incredibly beautiful. The textures and details and use of technologies such as HDR make the experience pretty darn immersive. Along with the visuals you have the addition of a great physics engine that gets shown off early in the game. The first mission puts you on board a sinking ship with pipes exploding, water and gas coming at you, bullets flying, and bodies stacking up. You can shoot through walls and explode cars, so you really have to think when taking cover.
While the gameplay is very similar to previous Call of Duty titles, this time the developers have really perfected things and added neat little twists (such as shooting baddies on the ground from an AC-130 in one mission! How cool is that?)
Another thing that really impressed me with this game is the fact that the plot is actually very interesting. The opening credit sequence is stellar for a video game, and I’ve been on the edge of my seat more playing the game than I have been watching a lot of recent action movies.
My only complaint about the single-player game is the same complaint I had about Portal: It is too short. On the easier settings you can beat it in under 5 hours, although I’ve heard the hardest setting can take close to 10 hours.
I can’t comment on the multiplayer part of the game as I need to run cat 5 cable to my game room to be able to get on Xbox Live, but it looks very promising and a lot of fun. I’ll post more when I get a chance to play.