One of the greatest first person shooter campaigns of the era
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It feels like the First Person Shooter genre is almost always being redefined. From the beginning in 1992 with Wolfenstein 3D, followed by DOOM and QUAKE all shaping the perfect window of opportunity for one of the greatest FPS games of all time, Goldeneye 007.
Following Goldeneye – which was the standard and would birth dozens of copycats in years to come the next massive game changer would be, you guessed it, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. With its intense and memorable campaign, slick controls and absolute-suck-you-in multiplayer modes, gamers up to that point in time had never experienced a game like it. Which is why it’s been remade, rereleased and rebooted about four thousand times and admittedly, as much as I hate the remake process, COD4 is certainly a title that does actually deserve the extra love.
The game begins at training grounds not unlike many of the other COD games. You begin as Sgt. John “Soap” Mactavish, the “FNG (fuckin’ new guy)” for the British 22nd SAS (Special Air Service) Regiment. You are under the command of the battle tested Captain John Price. A character you grow to love as the game marches on.
Instead of past entries with plot lines that follow several different allied soldiers in different theaters of World War II, Modern Warfare takes on a much more cinematic tone following only three soldiers, the aforementioned “Soap”, his Captain John Price (in flashbacks) and United States Marine Sgt. Paul Jackson. All in a multi-national attempt to stop Saudi ultra nationalist, Khaled Al-Asad (خالد الأسد) after he staged a violent coup d’état in the Middle East.
While Asad executes the president in a stadium on State run television, the Marines and S.A.S. dispatch – the Marines to capture Asad in the Middle East and the S.A.S Head to western Russia to rescue a captured informant and do battle with a stronghold of more ultranationalists. Midway through the game you learn that Asad was only executing orders handed down to him from Imran Zakhaev, a Russian arms dealer bud ultra nationalist that has been selling nuclear capabilities to extreme nationalists and also a man that Captain Price has personal beef with from back in the early nineties.
In the PlayStation 3 version (original release, 2007) the modern COD controls are now just about there despite a little tweaking (To aim is: L1 / Fire is R1) but the game is so smooth, sound effects are incredible and the action is tense, fast and deadly. The A.I. is by far the most intelligent of the series, to date, and you never really feel like you’re fighting entire armies alone. You can get pinned down and your squad mates will lay down cover fire for you to help you get a better position.
The voice acting is well done, the presentation is dramatic but the intense geopolitical intricacies rival a Tom Clancy novel. All in all the entire game is a delight and I love playing it at least once every couple of years. It’s dirt cheap and you get a lot of bang for your buck even if all of the servers have long since been shut down.
OVERALL: 94% (GOLD)
