Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare
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ESRB:
Blood and Gore,Intense Violence,Strong Language
Publisher: Activision Genre(s): Shooting Home Page: http://www.callofduty.com/
A little polish goes a long wayCall of Duty 4 runs on Infinity Ward's proprietary 3D engine, and it's by far the best looking game in the COD series to date. New graphics features include dynamic lighting, bloom and depth of field, the last of which is done with particular flair. When you aim through your weapon's sights, the screen focuses on where the sights are pointed, blurring everything that's much closer or further than the target. Similarly, things passing through your peripheral vision are out of focus, making peripheral movement seem much more realistic.
Dynamic lighting and shadows are pretty standard fare in recent 3D engines, and COD4's implementation looks very nice. Muzzle flashes light up the room, and point lights like lamps and candles make characters cast shadows. This is not just eye candy, either; both features are very important for COD4's gameplay. On a low-end system where shadow rendering is too demanding for the hardware, some campaign missions change quite significantly because of the lack of shadows.
COD4's highly polished graphics and smart level design hide the fact that the engine doesn't support quite a few features that the competition has introduced. The ground looks fairly primitive - there's no moving grass, players and other characters don't leave footprints, and puddles of water aren't disturbed when you walk in them. In fact, the water effects in COD4 are particularly crude: there are no water reflections (the reflection you see is just a bitmap), and a very simple wave effect is all that separates "Low" and "Normal" quality water. However, water isn't prominently featured in the level design, and if you're in the thick of a firefight or keep scanning the horizon for enemies, you might completely miss the fact that the water doesn't look at all real.
The same goes for some other graphical effects. Empty cluster bomb casings tumbling to the ground during an air strike is a nice touch, but the bomb explosions themselves are a bit underwhelming - just a big yellow explosion and sparks flying everywhere, but no dirt is kicked up, nor is there a shockwave effect. The game world isn't destructible, apart from vehicles and some token breakable items like watermelons and bottles. There's one area where the COD4 engine really shines, though: particle effects like the smoke billowing out of rocket launch silos looks beautiful, conceals players the way you'd expect it to, and runs surprisingly well even on the minimum specified graphics cards.
YouGamers recommendationsThe publisher specifies a fairly modest system for playing Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, and notes some Windows Vista-specific requirements as well. We tested the minimum requirement system using Windows XP, and found out that even with all graphics options turned to minimum, the game would only run at 15-20 fps at 1024x768 resolution. The game's automatic settings suggested a resolution of 640x480, at which the game was playable with the publisher's minimum system.
Although it's not listed as an official recommendation, we tested the publisher's recommended system from the open multiplayer beta. Again, the game suggested a very low resolution of 800x600, but we found that the game was playable with the common LCD resolution of 1280x1024, with average frame rates hovering between 30 and 40. Model detail and water detail were set at Low, and bullet impacts, ragdoll physics and soft smoke edges off by default. Call of Duty 4 monitors your hardware setup, and notices if you've upgraded (or downgraded) your computer between game sessions. The game then suggests that you load automatically detected optimal settings for your system. Unfortunately, these settings rarely hit the mark. If you have an LCD screen, the game makes no attempt to match the settings to your monitor's native resolution. Also, some of the settings are disabled seemingly without reason, in particular ragdoll physics and bullet decals, which have little effect on typical gameplay performance but make a major difference in terms of gameplay experience.
The game's death animations are a novel combination of animation and ragdoll physics. When a character gets fatally hit by a bullet, the hit location triggers a death animation, which then transitions into a limp ragdoll fall to the ground. This makes each death scene much more unique and believable, as the bodies don't always fall down in the same animated pattern, and on the ground they rarely clip through walls or objects. Because these new effects are a large part of what makes COD4 stand out, we decided that the YouGamers minimum system should be able to render them on screen. The only major difference between the YouGamers minimum and recommended systems is therefore the resolution at which you can play the game, and slightly higher texture detail. With our minimum system, the game runs at 1280x1024 resolution with steady frame rates, while the YouGamers recommended system can handle 1920x1200.
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