I’ve been avoiding this title for a couple of reasons:

1) I don’t need another FPS game
2) I tend to avoid real-war based FPS games recently due to them being done to death
3) I didnt want to spend the $85 on a new title

However, I had read a lot of really impressive stuff about the new game, and the fact that it wasn’t WWII based, but set in a Modern Theatre of War interested me.

So I downloaded it from Steam the other night and fired it up. This was at about 9pm, so I fugured I’d just do the intro mission and pick up from there on the weekend.

(time passes.. dinner is missed.. Wife went to bed.. Is that the Sun coming up?)

At 4am I blinked slowly as the game ended in one of the most cinematically pleasing and emotion filled scenes (for a war game) that I have ever played. It was even better than the ending to Half Life 2.

CoD4 is a seriously great game. My only quibble is that the single player campaign is very short (5-8 hours). But the sheer quality of the campaign makes up for this. I will always appreciate quality of quantity, and the fact that the campaign is the most intrguing, immersive and fun one that I have ever played makes up for the really quick Single player component.

I wont give away any spoilers, but basically you take on several roles during the game. At one point you are the President of some middle eastern country which has just undergone a revolt. You are dragged into a car, and driven through the burning city as the games opening credits roll in like a James Bond movie. You are then taken to the rebel leaders building and executed on Live TV. It’s at this point that you start really playing the game, in the avatars of a SAS Soldier and a Marine. You flip from one to the other during the storlines.

You get to play with a wide variety of realistic weapons, from knives, Pistols, Rifles, Machine Guns and one very cool Javelin personal missile system.

The plot is intense, and doesnt bog you down with too much detail or poitics. You get given enough that you have a good understanding of the mission you are on, and the backing music is just fantastic.

The game plays like a movie - and some of the scenes are interactive that you feel like your in a Raiders of the Lost arc movie.

All in all, this is by far the best FPS single player game i have ever played - beating my previousd Half Life 2. I havnt even tried the Multiplayer aspect yet, but am told there are oodles of unlockable skills, weapons and classes.

All in all, Im giving the game a 9 out of 10. Had it been a longer Single Player campaign, it would have gotten the extra point. But all in all, I think this game was made for online play.

9/10

Gamespot posted a “first look” at CoD4. Personally, I don’t see this game offering anything new - this genre has been done to death and there are already very fine examples of a FPS across the platforms (Halflife2, Resistance, etc).

Call of Duty 4 is currently topping the wish lists of PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, and PC gamers everywhere, but Activision’s massively popular shooter franchise is coming to the small screen too–or the dual small screens, to be precise. We got a look at Call of Duty 4 for the DS recently to see how it will relate to its cousin on the consoles and to find out how the controls work on Nintendo’s handheld. COD4 on the DS won’t follow the storyline of the console game explicitly. Instead, it will happen in parallel, so you’ll be visiting the same or similar locations as in the console game, sometimes even encountering the same events that you’ll remember if you’re also playing the bigger version of the game. For instance, the DS version will open with a ship level just like it does in the main game, but you’ll be investigating a different ship from the one on the consoles.

In practice, the game plays much like other recent shooters on the DS. You use the stylus to look around, the D pad to move, and the left shoulder button to fire your weapon. You can access your collected weapons and grenades by tapping icons on the touch screen. You can also bring your weapon up and look down its sights for more precise aim by double-tapping the touch screen. In addition to the run-and-gun core action, you’ll get some occasional on-rails action sequences, like manning a mounted machine gun as you buzz enemy positions. The single-player game will include 12 missions. There will also be a four-player, local-only multiplayer mode with such game types as team deathmatch, capture the flag, and hunter/prey, which is sort of a kill-the-man-with-the-ball game. This multiplayer mode will offer nine maps, two of which you can play with a single cartridge through download play.

In the campaign, the game will also have a couple of interesting and surprisingly hectic minigames. One of them is a hacking minigame where you have to rotate a number of tiles around to create connected pathways between a number of nodes on the edges of the grid. The other minigame we saw involved defusing a bomb. We had a limited number of seconds to trace colored wires with the stylus between various connectors on the bomb, and naturally, we had to be pretty spot-on with our tracing to make sure we could disarm the bomb before it blew us to smithereens.

Call of Duty 4 looks like it’s shaping up to be a fairly solid shooting experience in DS terms. The developer seems to have crammed quite a bit of action and explosions into Nintendo’s scrappy little handheld. The DS game is due out in early November, right alongside the console versions.