XBOX 360 Review: Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (2007)

Without a doubt, Modern Warfare is one of the most cinematic games I've ever played. The drama of some of the cut scenes and situations the player finds himself in are breath-taking and beg to be shown to others who haven't yet experienced them. This includes crawling in a ghillie suit through a field full of enemy soldiers and armor, experiencing a nuclear explosion, and manning the guns on an AC-130 gunship (eerily reminiscent of a predator drone). In the story mode, you switch between controlling a fresh out of selection Special Air Service operator and recon force marine. Though the differences are often subtle, I like the contrast this provides between special forces and conventional infantry. It's also pretty cool how inter-connected the plot is: these two forces are fighting in the same conflict but in different roles. The graphics are still quite impressive even years after its release.

Being a next-gen release, it utilizes the current standard of regenerating health rather than a life bar. This is interesting in how it can affect the overall experience of the game. Let me explain this. Whatever difficulty you choose to play on, you will be shot and have to hide and recover quite often. On the harder difficulties, the same amount of damage will instead have you dying and retrying. This makes me wonder how accurate of a modern warfare experience this game is. Obviously one isn't going to be able to get shot and just stay under cover for a few moments and be all better. But, on the other hand, it is not possible to make it through this game without doing just that. It appears that the hardest difficulty, Veteran mode, would most accurately reflect the amount of damage a human body can withstand. In my own experience playing in this mode, I die countless times and only manage to advance to the next checkpoint when luck decides that I should. Playing this way for any length of time can give one quite a morbid feeling about warfare; how does anyone survive it? Surely, the CoD trailers make those special forces guys look cool, but the gameplay makes it seem that they only survive because of blind chance rather than their elite abilities.

I don't find the gameplay itself to be that fun, especially on the harder difficulties. It often entails repeatedly popping up, trying to shoot someone while getting hit, and then crawling around trying not to die. The occasions where tactics come into play are limited. There are very few alternative pathways included in the game. As well, you are just a grunt and have no ability to command your allies to do anything. It is really too bad that for how imaginative the cinematic elements are, the gameplay doesn't match it. The repetitive nature of the game made it pretty weak in terms of replay-ability. I played through the game on the Regular and Hardened difficulties and then put the game on the shelf for a long time. Hardened was frustrating enough. Only recently did I try it on Veteran. I don't recommend it.

In addition to the story mode, the game features a somewhat cool arcade mode which can be used as a form of competition for those poor souls who lack multiple controllers. You play through the game with a set number of lives and a time limit, seeing how far you can get and how many points you can rack up. Unfortunately, that's all it is: playing the story mode with a time and life limit where points pop up for shooting people.

One last thing I'd like to comment on is how dark the Modern Warfare and Black Ops series have been. This includes (besides the obvious examples of seeing men next to you get shot and killing hundreds of enemies) the start of Modern Warfare, where the player takes the point-of-view of a head of state in the Middle East riding to his public execution, watching a man get sucked out of a helicopter, crawling around after a crash only to see the aftermath of a nuclear bomb and die, and in Black Ops where the player experiences the simulated horrors of being sent to a Russian gulag. I suppose this seems only right; war is the most horrible invention of mankind. But one thing I'd really like to see out of this series are tragedies of war that hit closer to home. In Modern Warfare, special forces actually abort nuclear missiles in flight targeting the eastern seaboard of the US. What if you play and then find at the end of the game there actually were no weapons of mass destruction and you've been fighting for a lie? What if when you are controlling a heavily armed aircraft your allies aren't so clearly marked and you end up killing hundreds of civilians (as has happened with predator drones in Pakistan)? What if you are called upon to assassinate an American citizen (or anyone else) because simply because he upset someone in power? What if you capture and torture someone only to find out they were innocent? Though the Call of Duty games have touched upon the horrors of war, they have only scratched the surface.

If not for its online play, Modern Warfare would not be nearly as popular. The goosebumps one gets from the presentation in the campaign mode, however, ought to be experienced. Offline, it is a game worth at least one play through, so it comes recommended as a rental, not a purchase.