Title: Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare

Platform: PC

Distributor: Activision

Genre: First-Person Shooter

The Call of Duty series for the PC is one of my favorites. Each release has been not only strong, but in many ways ground-breaking. The first version, still sitting within arms reach of my PC, remains a Must-Play on my own little “All Time Greatest Games” list. That’s a lot to live up to for a single sequel, let alone a series of sequels. It’s a little amazing that they were successful for as long as they were.

As can be expected with any release in this series, the graphics and gameplay are absolutely top-notch. Because they moved the time frame ahead 50 years, there are new weapons (which is, I think, probably one of the primary reasons they abandoned the WW2 era games… not enough cool stuff that goes BOOM! Pity, that…), but overall there are very few new things to learn. That itself isn’t a bad thing, but it also means that there wasn’t much done to live up to the reputation the series had earned over the years.

One of the primary components that made the first games in the COD series so successful, however, was the way in which they implemented their story line. They focused on very specific battles of WW2 that had been romanticized already in film. The opening scene in Saving Private Ryan is beautifully re-done in the opening level of COD for example. They took a moment in time that already had a specific emotional investment for most of their audience and built on it, exploiting what was already there and upping the stakes of that investment by making it interactive. They did this amazingly well, guiding the user through levels that were recognizable not just through other media outlets, but through the history books. This is a fairly standard technique used in Strategy games, especially turn-based, but in a First-Person shooter it was a brilliant implementation that immersed the gamer in ways that had previously been ignored.

All that is gone with COD4. Rather than draw from the history of American warfare as they had been doing, the developers decided to create their own story. And it isn’t a really a bad story, by any means. But the emotional investment, so heightened by the familiarity of the environments, is gone. It’s just a typical, standard, average story line that allows the user to shoot bad guys and blow stuff up. Worse, it’s really, really short.

And that is my main complaint with COD4. There just simply isn’t enough of it. I understand the old addage is “Always leave them wanting more,” but they left me feeling cheated. They didn’t earn my $50.00, and that is not something I say lightly. It’s as if the game itself was created primarily to showcase their engine, a common enough tactic, but not one I would have expected within such a highly respected series.

In the end, the latest installment of the COD series takes a tremendous step backwards. It is still a good game, one of the top 5 or so from last year, but the changes to the basic, underlying, fundamental premise of the series reflect on the game’s overall level of enjoyment. Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare is, in the end, average.