Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare

The First Person Shooter genre of games has always been my favorite. Nothing can satisfy you more then running into a room filled with bad dudes, the odds stacked against you, and yet gunning them all down, and standing victorious. Well, maybe sex. The Call of Duty series has always captured that feeling of being a bad ass dude the most. Call of Duty 4 Modern Warfare is no exception, standing out as my favorite FPS of all time, and my favorite game of 2007.

Modern Warfare's single player, while short, is possibly one of the greatest I have played. You play through the perspectives of a British soldier and an American soldier in a conflict between England, USA, Russia and rebels in the Middle East. At the beginning of the game, you play as Soap McTavish, a soldier from the British SAS. You have to run a course, which determines which difficulty level is right for you. The first actual mission you do, really sets the stage for the bad-assness which is the rest of the game. You are airdropped onto a Russian ship to search for a nuclear warhead. You can only escape with the manifest, after enemy MiGs start attacking the ship. Once you make it out on the deck, the ship is sinking and is on an angle, and you jump onto the helicopter and fly back to base. Shit blows up, dudes die, and a lot of stuff happens in this short 6 hour story. Although short, this is still one of my favorite stories ever in a game.

The multiplayer is what kept me coming back to this game. I have sunk 188 hours into this game, and that number gets higher with each passing day. You have a persistent character in this game, which you can level up a total of 55 levels. As you play, you earn XP which levels you up. The higher level you are, the more guns you get. You can earn XP by killing dudes, and doing challenges. Challenges are like achievements on the Xbox 360, you do stuff weird shit and you get points. Well, not all of it is weird shit.
Each gun in the game has 2 challenges, one for kills and one for headshots. They are split into 3 portions; first you get twenty-five, then seventy-five, and lastly one hundred fifty. The kill challenges let you unlock add ons for your gun, such as a red dot scope or a silencer. The headshot challenges give your gun a camouflage pattern. If you max out all the challenges in a gun category, you will unlock the golden camouflage, which makes the select weapon golden. It looks pretty awesome.
There is lots multiplayer modes, ranging from your generic free for all and team deathmatch, to some flag-capture ones like Domination and Headquarters. In Domination, there are 3 flags placed around the map. Your team has to hold the flags to earn points. The points add up to a score total, and whichever team reaches that goal first, wins. In Headquarters, there is a laptop set up in a spot on the map. One of the teams has to capture it; when they do capture it, they have to hold it for a specific amount of time. The catch here is that the team holding the laptop cannot respawn, unless the time limit is reached, or it's taken over by the opposing team. Search & Destroy is the equivalent of the de_ maps in the Counter-Strike series. There is a bomb, and bomb sites. You have to plant the bomb, or kill all of the opposing team. Once you're dead, you can't respawn. Sabotage is like Search & Destroy, instead of the bomb being limited to just one team, the bomb is neutral, and you're working back and forth trying to plant the bomb on each others bomb sites.

The game definitely looks very good. It uses a proprietary game engine, developed by Infinity Ward themselves. The game engine has some really awesome stuff to it, like true world-dynamic lighting and really cool looking depth of field effects. All of the character models look really high detail and are animated very well. The houses look really awesome; never looks like 2 houses are the same, almost never at least. The foliage, while low detail, is all bunched up together, which makes it look really dense and realistic. Backgrounds are a bit more sketchy looking; if the side areas of the level are not surrounded by trees or building so you don't see the actual background image, it looks quite nice. The image itself, however, does not. It's low quality and grainy.
The level designs are probably my favorite in any game. You can enter most of the buildings, and they are placed so that you can over see the rest of the battle.

Sound is also of really high quality. The voice acting provided sounds great, and suits all of the characters. The soundtrack is composed by British composer Stephen Barton, who works a lot with Harry Gregson-Williams. Harry also helped on the soundtrack; he produced the main theme. All the guns sound like the gun you're shooting. Sound also plays a big part in gameplay; it really helps in multiplayer, if you're hiding and hear footsteps coming, you can get ready to gun them down.

The game plays like any first person shooter. You got a gun, you point your gun at dudes, gun shoots bullets, dudes drop, you move to the next area, more dudes to shoot. You will be in lots of different locales through the game, but they're just filled with dudes to shoot in the face. The game doesn't use the health bar system, lots of games don't these days, don't know why. Instead, if you get shot, the screen gets redder and redder. You got to hide, and the red on the screen goes away, and you're back in the fight. The AI in the singleplayer is good for the most part. They will help you out and actually kill dudes, unlike the AI in the Medal of Honor series. Sometimes there are times where the dude just doesn't follow you for some reason, and you have to restart the mission. It can be a bit of a drag, but most of the missions are so fun you would want to do them over and over.

In conclusion, Call of Duty 4 is an amazing game that shouldn't be missed by anyone who has their systems up to date for this generation. I will quote X-Play on this,"while it may not have revolutionized the genre, it comes damn close to perfecting it."