Answer the Call
Call of Duty 4 delivers on single-player, it delivers on multiplayer. Basically it just plain delivers.
Published: November 18, 2007
Ah, but the single-player campaign is really just there to whet your whistle. It's incredible, no doubt, but it also serves as something of a light tutorial into the world of jumping online and gunning down other folks. If you just jump into the multiplayer part of the game without first getting a chance to goof off with the myriad weapons found in the single-player campaign, it can be a little daunting; multiple shotguns, assault rifes, light machine guns, machine pistols, semi-auto pistols and sniper rifles are all available right from the start, though as you play and level up your online persona (more on that in a second), you'll unlock more variants with more stopping power or range. If you happen to find happiness with your warm gun, you can save up to five loadouts, effectively creating a default type of player for a given game type and one of 16 maps.
More importantly, though, you can store your perks. Unlocked early on in the game, perks are special abilities that occupy three different levels of abilities. You might, say, give yourself more health or opt for a faster reload time or make your bullets travel more easily through thinner bits of cover. Later perks open up post- or near-death abilities like pulling the pin on a grenade as you go down to catch someone running over your body in close quarters or being able to whip out a pistol and take someone down with your last few breaths -- which gets you more experience in the process.
Yes, I said experience. Like a role-playing game. Offing enemies nets you a base set of experience points, and you quite literally gain levels. It's an absolutely brilliant idea, and when compounded with the progressive unlocks to weapons and perks, it becomes not unlike digital crack, where you're always chasing the next big milestone which will give you access to new weapons or a new perk. Factor in killing sprees that give you the ability to ping the entire level and see all your enemies on you and your team's radar, call in an airstrike or call in a helicopter if you can rack up three, five and seven kills in a row without dying, respectively, and you have a recipe for addiction that is without peer.
As if that weren't enough, there's also a set of basic challenges that have you doing everything from blowing up cars to knifing people to getting headshots to just simply racking up a bunch of kills with a particular weapon. These challenges in turn unlock more customization features for that weapon, allowing you to mount a different sight or bolt on a grenade launcher or even the vanity aspect of just throwing some custom camo on your rifle. It's more or less useless in a firefight, but at least you'll look pretty with it laying on top of your bloodied, still-warm corpse, right?
It's the combination of all these little factors -- the leveling up, the progressive unlocks, the variety to weapons, the perks and the game types (which are mixed and matched in special modes that let you, say lump games where you race to capture and hold a constantly-moving headquarters with ones where you're trying to grab and plant a bomb with another where you simply capture and hold a base) all come together with that absolutely silky framerate and almost nonexistent lag to create hands-down, the best online multiplayer experience on the PlayStation 3 (sorry Warhawk, sorry Resistance).
It's not just on the PS3, though. Given the complete package, both single- and multiplayer bits, Call of Duty 4 is one of the best games ever made for any system. It marries technology with control and keeps giving for weeks if not months after you first pick up the controller. It delivers a powerful single-player experience and an almost impossibly tense, utterly addictive online component and when the two are brought together... well, you're looking at your Game of the Year right here.
