It has been said that the World War II genre of shooters has lasted longer than the actual war itself. Fortunately for us Infinity Ward realized this as well and decided to ditch the World War II theme in favor for a modern setting. Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare will have you going through the Mid East as well as Russia in an attempt to prevent some catastrophic events from occurring. You will assume the role of either an American or British soldier depending on the type of mission as well as the location. Throughout the campaign you will experience things like rescuing a captured informant, raiding a ship in the middle of the Bering Sea and trying to providing cover fire from a gun ship so that your ground troops can achieve their objective. Very few people develop a shooter the way that Infinity Ward does and it shows with each new game that they release. Call of Duty 2 set the benchmark for shooters when it launched with the Xbox360 two years ago and now Call of Duty 4 is set to do it again. The A.I. in this title has been improved from past experiences although it is still not perfect. There are times when one of your allies will still walk right in front of you effectively blocking the shot that you were lining up.

You start out the game as a new cadet and after a basic tutorial you are immediately thrown into the action. Infinity Ward has set it up in a way where after you go through the tutorial they will recommend a difficulty setting for you. It is completely up to you whether you pick the difficulty that they recommended or whether you pick something more difficult. If you are unsure you can run through the CQC training as much as you want to until you are more comfortable. There is even an achievement if you can complete the course in less than twenty seconds with Infinity Ward’s best time being at 15.1 seconds. As far as the other achievements in the game are concerned Infinity Ward did a smart thing and they made all of the achievements available throughout the campaign. There are no online multiplayer achievements in this game. For those gamers who don’t have time to spend countless hours online to get to the top of a leader board this is great news as getting all 1,000 gamer score points in this game is entirely possible, although you will still have to earn it. To get a bulk of the achievements you will have to beat the game on its hardest difficulty setting: Veteran. In this mode the enemy A.I. is especially vicious and it will only take one or two hits to take you out. The parts where this will become really annoying are the few parts in the game where you have a time limit. You have to be careful not to get shot and take it slow but since there is a time limit you have to rush through the area as quick as you can.

Once you beat the game some different abilities will open up to you. First of all once you go back to the main menu you will know see that you have access to “Arcade mode”. What this mode basically is is that you play it as if you were in an arcade. You go through the missions just as you normally would however you have a time limit, you only start with two lives and you see who can get the highest score in any given stage. The quicker that you complete a mission and the more lives you have at the end of that mission, the higher your score will become. In addition to that you will also be able to enable cheats for the single player campaign. They have a “COD Noir” mode “for that art house feel” as the game describes it. The other cheats you have are “Photo Negative”, “Super Contrast”, “Ragtime Warfare”, “Cluster Bombs”, “A Bad Year”, “Slow-Mo Ability”, and finally “Infinite Ammo”. It’s a lot of fun to turn on these cheats to try and experience the game in a whole new way however the catch is that you cannot earn achievements while the cheats are turned on. In this menu they will also tell you how many pieces of intel that you have found in the mission that you are in. If there are five different pieces of intel that you need to find and you have only found one, then it will tell you that you have found one of five intel pieces. It will also tell you how many you have collected total throughout the game. Finally within the main menu itself you have Infinity Ward’s “Message of the Day”. This area is usually filled with any information that Infinity Ward wants you to know about. Since acquiring this title I have seen a message advertising that Infinity Ward was hiring in Chicago and that Xbox Live was having issues but that Microsoft was hard at work on solving whatever problems there were.

Next of course is the multiplayer. For anyone who has ever played any of the previous Call of Duty titles then you pretty much know what to expect here. The multiplayer runs silky smooth without any sign of lag at all. It is a very fast paced game with a bunch of different maps and different game types. Call of Duty’s multiplayer is unique in the fact that you level up the more you play and the better you do. As you continue to level up you will acquire access to better weapons, better perks and more options for what type of match you want to play in. When you first start out you only have access to Team Deathmatch and Free-for-all. However as you gain more experience you will gain access to game types like Domination, Team Objective, Search and Destroy and Old School just to name a few. You can also invite your friends and hold either a public or a private match. Once you get to level four in your experience points you can also create your own class choosing the weapons that you want as well as the perks that you want to take advantage of. The game also features leader boards and different challenges for you to meet. It will also support clan tags and something called Prestige Mode. Prestige Mode is something that you will have access to after you attain level 55. Activating Prestige Mode will put a special symbol next to your name and signify to everyone how much of a bad ass you are. The only problem is that in doing this it drops you back down to level one and you get to level up again. You can do this up to five times meaning that you can actually level up to level 275. Once you max out your levels you will get the advantage of gold weapons which will give you even more of an advantage by being more lethal, the reload times are quicker and things like that.

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare is an incredibly deep game that you will keep you coming back for more and more, even after you have done everything. You will want to go through the single player campaign multiple times just so you can experience everything the game has to offer. There is also nothing funner than inviting a bunch of your friends into a private match and see who is the last man standing. It’s fast paced nature ensures that you will experience a game that can definitely get your adrenaline pumping. If you are a fan of the shooter genre this game is a must own. In a genre full of clichéd World War II shooters, Infinity Ward has once again changed things up and set the benchmark for other studios to follow.

Score: 9/10

Originally posted on Totally Gaming Network