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Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare

Rank and File

COD4 could be a veritable rabbit magnet (sadly it actually is but more on this in a moment), because it has more carrots than your typical farmer's market. As you gain kills in deathmatch games and objective points from team games, your experience increases and at steady intervals you gain a new rank. Ranks unlock new weapons - the most obvious carrots - but some other delicious veggies as well. Perks and custom player classes are two of COD4's new multiplayer features, and both work wonders for keeping you interested in the game.

The Last Stand perk: you go down but keep fighting

New perks come available as you amass experience points and rank

Perks are mostly weapon-independent abilities that make your COD4 alter ego more durable, fitter for extended sprints, more lethal with guns, more proficient with explosives, and so on. The game's five default classes have appropriate perks pre-selected, but you can freely choose up to four perks at a time for your custom classes. Some of the perks are completely transparent, like Steady Aim which gives you an accuracy bonus when firing from the hip. Others, like Last Stand, feature new animation and pretty original ideas: if you have the Last Stand perk, you don't die immediately when you receive too much damage. Instead, your character lies wounded on the ground and pulls out his pistol to give you a last few shots at the enemy.

It'll take a bit of experimenting and experience before you find out which perks and which weapons work for your playing style. Many of the perks work as effective antidotes for certain weapons and tactics. If you keep getting stabbed in the back by some sneaky player, or lose a lot of close encounters, consider picking the Martyrdom perk. It'll make you drop a live grenade every time you die, and you'll probably take one or more enemies down with you. Of course, a cheeky sneak will just grab your grenade and toss it at your mates anyway.

The red dot sight is one of the most useful upgrades to any weapon, but you have to earn it first for each one

You can play to your strengths by creating a custom class

Some of the most useful toys like red dot sights and silencers are locked behind Marksman Challenges. These involve getting a certain number of kills with each particular weapon before you get your hands on the upgrade. There are other challenges as well, in categories such as Boot Camp, Killer and Humiliation, that earn you experience (for faster advancement in rank) and the respect of your peers (or then perhaps not). Challenges have one thing in common - doing a specific activity in a multiplayer game, often several times. Equipment earned from challenges is also a way to tell between players who earned their ranks by actual playing, and the miscreants who did a little memory modifying trick to give themselves free experience. That's right, COD4 saves multiplayer data such as rank and various achievements locally, not on a centralized server - so if you see a four-star general at the bottom of the score board, you know what's up.

Call of Duty 4: Raving Rabbids

If you're playing on a server with friendly fire enabled, you're almost certainly going to be the victim and perpetrator of multiple teamkills. Splash damage from air strikes and explosions is the chief cause of these unfortunate incidents. Although it's a great deal of fun, picking up grenades and trying to throw them back is a risky gamble in COD4 multiplayer. You can easily blow yourself up, and rack up some teamkills at the same time. Most of the time it's better to run away instead - grenades make a distinctive clinking noise as they bounce about, and suddenly you have to shake a leg or lose one.

Explosions are very deadly in single player (I think I got killed more times by exploding cars than from enemy fire), and the same goes for default multiplayer settings. Unless you're safely behind hard cover, one frag going off nearby takes you out immediately. Conversely, you can take a bullet in the chest from most of the game's weapons and still survive. I suspect the under-barrel grenade launcher will get a slight downgrade somewhere down the line: the "noob tube" is very effective against targets behind light cover, and you can even shoot a charging enemy with it point-blank, and get a one-shot kill without the grenade detonating. Currently, there's only one way to make explosive weapons less formidable, and that's playing on a server with "hardcore" modded gameplay settings.

With the official hardcore mod, COD4 caters to the realistic shooter crowd, and does a pretty good job of it. Weapons do realistic damage, the revealing kill cam is gone, and you have no HUD to help you find the enemy or your objectives. Thanks to the the various multiplayer modes, the hardcore mod can be fast-paced and fun, unlike many other realistic shooters that lack a respawn option. Unfortunately, the mod doesn't get rid of the rampant bunny hopping in COD4: you can still shoot pretty accurately and reload your weapon in mid-air. These bouncing battlers look just as silly as in Counter-Strike, but COD4 suffers even more than CS from allowing mid-air marksmanship. It's infinitely better to negotiate obstacles by jumping, wherever possible, than using the game's excellent climbing system that denies the use of weapons while going over the obstacle. As a result, you'll see less of the game's beautiful character animation and more of 110 meter hurdles in multiplayer games.

Bunny hopping didn't stop Counter-Strike from becoming the world's most popular online FPS, and it's not going to slow COD4 down either. There's a healthy number of servers and thousands of players online, and the game's popularity probably hasn't peaked yet. The server browser still needs some work, as there's no queueing option, and trying to join a full server annoyingly bumps you back to main menu. With a promise of continued support and an upcoming mod toolkit from Infinity Ward, COD4 looks like it could be a major player in the online FPS scene - but how does the engine hold out?

Page 1: IntroductionPage 2: Single Player CampaignPage 3: MultiplayerPage 4: Challenges and PerksPage 5: Graphics and PerformancePage 6: Conclusion and ScoresPage 7: Screenshot Gallery

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