It’s fair to say that there are high hopes for this fourth instalment. Having passed the baton to Treyarch for the third in the series, Infinity Ward has – since before, during and beyond the entire development cycle of number three – been working on this fourth generation, and, being back with the series’ original developers, the air is thick with expectation for the company to deliver. BIG.

This is the first in the series that’s moved away from its World War II origins. Reasoning, no doubt, that there’s probably a statistic out there regarding the number of WWII games in existence reaching from here to the moon when laid end to end – and that’s just the ones with the word ‘Of’ in the middle of the title. But Infinity Ward’s previous Call Of Duty titles have somehow stood out from the gazillion other WWII experiences that were, essentially, attempting to do exactly the same thing. Why?

The very essence of a Call Of Duty title is variety. Shooters, WWII or otherwise, often suffer from what we like to call ‘corridor fatigue’. It basically describes games that pretty much nail everything right from the get-go, but then, maybe even conscious of their own brilliance, force the player to repeat whatever they’re doing right for the next ten hours or so. In short, corridor fatigue is categorised by the growing sensation that a shooter you were enjoying at one point is now hinting that your initial confidence may have been misplaced and, in actual fact, might be a bit shit. Many are the greats that have succumbed to this maxim, but Call Of Duty (except for number three – sorry three, you just weren’t up to scratch, no hard feelings and all that, old boy) has always managed to avoid it. Call Of Duty 4, like its Infinity Ward predecessors, very rarely has you doing the same thing twice in succession. Basic corridor levels are never followed by more basic corridor levels, sniping never follows sniping and tank-busting… well… you get the point. It seems so desperately simple; make every level an experience (an episode, if you will), one that is unrecognisable from any of the others while maintaining the ethos of flow. It staggers us just how many shooters cock it up where COD4 makes it all look oh-so easy.

Apart from mixing things up nicely, COD4 also has a very distinctive ‘feel’ to it. Things seem solid. It’s an illusion that’s surprisingly difficult to carry off, requiring lighting, physics, animation and sound design to all come together to complement and enhance one another. And how right it all is. The moment in which that first round leaves your M4A1 assault rifle, you just know that you’re in for a good time. The steadiness of the weapons during volleys of fire is also very welcome. Unlike many others, the game credits the player with having arms that are made of actual man-muscle and not of the rubbery cheese we often see in other games that causes even short burst recoil to send your bullets helterskeltering off into the bumpiece of a nearby comrade.

Solidity is a word that was rolling around in our heads stoically throughout our playthrough. Environments, vehicles, enemies and even vegetation each have their own characteristics both visually and physically. And there’s just so god-damned much of it. It blew our minds just how much these environmental elements interact with you – with the devastation you’re causing, with the enemy AI and even with the wind. What’s more, they’re so well executed that they go almost entirely unnoticed as separate elements unto themselves coalesce to create the greater whole. Unnoticed, that is, until the game decides it’s time for you to use one or more of these elements during a mission and another weaves itself seamlessly into the gameplay.

As has become standard practice for a Call Of Duty title, the game begins with training. As usual, this is pulled off spectacularly by not only introducing you to who you are but also to the other main characters, the setting, the beginnings of the story and to your various weapons and how they’re operated. All of this in a ten-minute shooting range and assault-course sequence. Impressive. The assault course, even if you partition it as a standalone game, is bags of fun: drop down the zipline, take up position one, shoot targets, move to position two, throw flashbang, breach, clear. Feeling especially pleased with ourselves – specifically with how we managed to cook the back of our retinas with our own flashbang – we made it to the finish in just under a minute, which, our CO had pre-warned us, was within acceptable limits for a pass. The smiles quickly drained from our faces, however, when we were told that Corporal Bastard (which we’ve decided to call him) holds the record, at a quite ludicrously quick 19 seconds. We could have continued to the start of the first mission at this point, but X360 never shies away from a challenge – especially not from Corporal Bastard – so instead we spent the next 30 minutes shaving seconds from our best time. In the absence of a giant ‘S’ on our shirt, though, we never did get close to 19 seconds. However, we did manage to flashbang ourselves in the face enough times to come away from the experience with a glowing perma-tan. Think David Dickinson in a flak jacket. Actually, don’t think that.

Previous Call Of Duty titles have split the player between several different factions throughout their campaigns. This one is only different in that you’ll be taking part in the military actions of a mere two – The United States Marine Corps (USMC) and, at last, the Special Air Service (SAS). Maybe it’s because we’re Brits ourselves that we had a distinct preference as to which force we preferred playing as. Either that or it’s that the SAS seem to use actual tactical voice comms, which are a big help in overcoming overwhelming odds. The USMC, on the other hand, prefer to spend a majority of its time saying ‘oorah’ in a variety of shouts, whispers and intonations; the difference, at times, is quite comical. The SAS and the USMC, being a Special Forces unit and a bog-standard mobile infantry division respectively, have very different ways of tackling a situation; moreover, the situations that they’ll find themselves in are wholly different. For example, the SAS will usually undertake stealthy, snipe-type missions, whereas the members of the USMC (oorah) will more often than not find themselves in loud, brash assaults – the two disparate styles of battle assisting even further in staving off the dreaded corridor fatigue. Oo. Rah.

The game’s plot revolves around a coup d’état somewhere in the Middle East. As is usual in these situations, the radical new government’s first port of call is to acquire WMDs. After all, what self-respecting military regime wouldn’t want the world’s superpowers coming down on them like a ton of exploding bricks within minutes of taking power? Meanwhile, somewhere in Russia, shady Mafia-type characters are making shady deals with even shadier buyers of ‘shadioactive’ materials, which, without intervention, are going to come together in one, very large, ‘mushroomic’ display. The SAS will be spending a vast majority of their time in Russia, while the Americans (oorah) prefer to duke it out in the Middle East. We don’t want to give too much away here, as the course of the plot defines the types of missions you’ll be undertaking and vice versa, but suffice to say that there are some beautifully orchestrated surprises awaiting you, such as when you find yourself pinned… No. Must. Resist.

There are a wealth of differences in evidence as a result of the series’ shift from WWII to present day. From little differences, such as the language used by the cast (oorah), through to a far more significant change: the move to bleeding-edge military hardware. You’ve probably already seen all the new subs, assault rifles, side arms and rocketpropelled varieties of collateral murder in other games, but there are a few notable exceptions and a caveat. The caveat is that while you’ve most likely handled some of these weapons before in the likes of GRAW and Rainbow Six Vegas, you’ve never felt them in quite the same way. We’ve already alluded to this earlier on in the review, but the bottom line is you haven’t fired a gun until you’ve fired it in COD4. A bold statement, but we challenge you to pick up a pad, pick up a gun, whack the volume up and tell us we’re wrong. We won’t be receiving any letters. As for the exceptions, well…

Available to you on a couple of different missions was our personal favourite, the Javelin. Far and away from its track-and-field namesake, the Javelin could most accurately be described as an over-the-shoulder cruise missile launcher. Ever seen footage in which a Tomahawk is being launched from a battleship? If you have, you may remember that the projectile itself launches out and then up, performing an almost comical rightangle turn some way away from its launcher; the Javelin does the same. It’s been designed specifically to take out tanks and other impregnable vehicles. Tanks, as you may or may not know, are heavily armoured from all sides to prevent attempts to separate them into their component parts with said armour angled so that any side-on, rocketpropelled attacks will simply glance off into a nearby cow (moorah). With this in mind, the Javelin launches itself to a height of approximately ‘very high’ (this is right on the cusp of the Earth’s alongwayup-o-sphere), before pulling a complete 180 and nose-diving at seven times the speed of ‘very fast’ directly into the soft topside shell of an awaiting enemy tank. COD4 gives you all kinds of stats about the weapons you’re using, some even having a dollar price per round. This being the case, even more satisfaction is to be gained from knowing that each of these tank-busting projectiles costs a massive ‘$very dear’.

So, by now, you’ll be on the same page as the score and probably wondering what it’s all about. After all, haven’t we just espoused the game’s perfection? So where’s the 10?! Well, quite apart from the fact that no game is perfect, COD4 does have one nagging flaw that grates just enough throughout to knock it off its potential ‘Legendary’ spot. It’s the enemies, you see; they’re all very clever and the AI is good and everything works and all that, but they’re infinite. As in previous Call Of Duty games, if you stay in one place an infinite amount of soldiers will just keep pouring forth from unseen spawn-mist, the game instead relying on what boils down to a leap of faith to take up the next cover position and gain some ground. There’s nothing actually wrong with the system, but there’s nothing right with it either. Often your progress will be held up, not because you haven’t single-handedly dished out a headshot to every single member of the Russian separatist army five times over, but because you haven’t stood on an arbitrary and invisible marker that tells the game to stop the onslaught for a minute and move the enemy back a bit. Don’t get us wrong, this game is bloody marvellous, but we’d rather have a finite number of enemies if it’s all the same to you. Look out for our online review next issue but, in the meantime, two words… buy it!

Dan Howdle