REVIEW: Call of Duty 4 (Spoiler Free)
By Jacob Bond
January 8th, 2010

Please note that I do not currently have the ability to hook the XBox 360 to the Internet. Since the online portion of this game is as important as the campaign, please note that any opinions and score I give do not reflect the game as a whole. It very well could be higher or lower based on the online experience.

I am not a first person shooter fan, although I do occasionally give them a shot every now and then. There's something about not seeing my character that throws me off and I in general do not do well with them. So that should say something that Call of Duty 4 is so well made that even someone like me can get the hang of it rather quickly.

The game's story focuses on tracking down a terrorist, but I honestly doubt anyone playing really paid all that much attention to it. The story is serviceable but hardly anything special, and it isn't the reason to play the game anyway. It's everything else from graphics to game play that COD4 really shines.

The visuals are absolutely stunning. Even two years after release they hold up to today's games, and in a lot of cases surpass them. From backgrounds and buildings to vehicles and character models, Infinity Ward took a lot of time to make everything look as good as it possible can. When there's a lot going on, such as massive battles, everything holds up well. Not even some of the 360's biggest releases today can say that.

Combined with the visuals, the sound helps make it feel like you are in a real war. The music is intense and powerful, while the gunfire and explosions help to set the mood. A lot of games tends to suffer from NPCs repeatedly shouting the same lines over and over until you want to shoot them yourselves, but that isn't the case here. The NPCs react to imminent threats, such as yelling out a warning of a nearby grenade or reacting to a couple of RPG-wielding enemies, and the entire time it sounds completely natural. In most cases the NPC dialog ends up taking me out of the experience, but COD4 does it right.

As for the rest, the controls are tight and respond almost perfectly and the game play is is addictive. The only issue I had with the controls is occasionally it wouldn't maintain a sprint when I pressed in the left stick. If that's the worst issue I have with the controls, though, I can live with it. On game play, there aren't a lot of negatives. The combat is fun and there's a wide range of weapons to choose from, and the game puts your character in a variety of situations to survive. Fortunately Infinity Ward resisted adding any vehicle-based levels; maybe their version would have been terrific, but I've yet to play a game that made such levels anywhere close to fun.

If there is something to complain about the game it's length of time. The single player campaign mode is, at most, four or five hours. If you like achievements and play through the harder modes you can double that, but it doesn't excuse the fact the first play through is so incredibly short. I understand that with a game like this online play is half the package, and it's expected most people would be playing more to frag each other over the Internet rather than play the campaign level. Still, for people who don't play online for whatever reason this seems way too short for the price tag. Two years later, the game is still selling for at least $40. If you buy it with the intention of playing campaign and online, it seems like a price worth paying. If you're looking for just the campaign mode, it's overpriced, despite how good of a game it is.

This is a game I will play again and again, and once I have access to XBox Live again I'll almost certainly log a lot of time with it there, too. If you're like me and only play the occasional first person shooter, this is definitely one to take a look at. Still, the short single player mode is a big drawback for the game.

SCORE: 8 / 10 (Campaign only; does not consider online play)