With the release of Call of Duty 5, and the impending release of Modern Warfare 2 within the year, I'd thought I'd like to look back for a bit at the single-player experience of COD 4.
When it was first announced that Infinity Ward would move into the niche traditionally inhabited by the likes of the first three "Rainbow Six"s and "Operation Flashpoint" (games I fondly remember from my childhood), it was thought that the age of World War II shooters was over, as IW in a way was the benchmark for the WWII genre of games.
In Call of Duty's 1 and 2, players would experience the moments played out by heroes from all of those old flicks like "The Dirty Dozen," "The Guns of Navarone," "The Great Escape," and the like. The IW formula was to intermingle these scripted moments with massive gunfights created through the optical illusion developed by game developers colloqially called "infinitely respawning enemies."
Of course, the principles behind the IW's game design would have to be revamped in order to match the nature of modern warfare, which we have seen in movies like "Black Hawk Down" and "Three Kings." So IW, being the clever developers they were, decided to take the exciting cinematic moments from these films and intermingle them with massive... hey, wait, hold on a second...
So illustrates COD4's most egregious flaw. IW hasn't gotten past the principles of COD's previous incarnations to match the tone of COD4. Mind you, the problem wasn't that it was an old mechanic; they could have made a game based on the Spanish Civil War or something with the engine and I'd think it would have been pretty damned good game. But COD4 finds itself in a quandary: is it "Rainbow Six" or is it "Half-Life?" Is it "Operation Flashpoint" or is it "Halo?" Games like "Half-Life", despite having a cerebral plot told through in game scripted scenes, superb AI, and excellent level design, is a relatively meat and potatoes shooter experience, which is fine, since Valve has refined that formula to the point that it serves as a model for all "run'n gun" shooters. This served the first 2 CODs quite well, considering that the old movies based on World War II in a way had larger-than-life protagonists gunning down Himmler's SS like Chow Yun Fat in a John Woo movie. While I'll give it to you that a military game would do well with scripted in game cinematic sequences, but it seems as if to me that COD4 is overly dependant on them in order to seem exciting. The high point for me was the AC-130 Spectre Gunship mission, which I found compelling with the eerily creepy, disconnected dialogue, but the mission is so ludicrously easy it practically plays itself.
In all honesty, the actual gameplay of COD4 is completely broken. The modern military shooters IW desperately tried to imitate typically feature a multiple approache to objectives mechanic; this is what makes games like "Ghost Recon" fun. Do you take along snipers and take out "tangos" from afar, or send one time to the far side of the encampment and sandwich the rebels from both sides, or use your entire squad as one big cudgel and charge through the front door. In COD4, there is a very obvious sense that the nature of the level is "leading" you to where you have to go, and that typically means there is only one route to go, only one solution to an encounter (again, its suffering from Half-Life-itis). A finite number of enemies in a single encounter would have helped tremendously with game flow and level progression, sadly, IW decided that this was "300 (if you know me, I hated the comic book and didn't bother watching the movie)" instead of "Black Hawk Down." This isn't helped by the sub-par AI. Enemies are relatively bare-boned in terms of tools and tactics availible to take out the player. They shoot at you and duck behind whatever they were next to and thats basically it. The linear level design also means they hardly do a whole lot in the way of flanking and the AI seems as if it isn't even reacting to the player's actions. Sure, the droves of Islamic militants and ultra-nationalist hardliners you slaughter toss grenades at you, but I think IW hasn't gotten the memo that this technique in AI development is virtually pedestrian in terms of FPS design. In fact, the AI is wholly dependent on grenades in order to seem remotely exciting to fight against, almost to the point that its frustrating (Sandy Koufax and Randy Johnson eat your heart out). Your squad-mates are also equally unresponsive to the player's presence. While its nice that they aren't a burden, on the contrary, if one dies, another quickly spawns to take his place on the battlefield, which means I'm free to do the morally questionable thing and leave them behind. However, its immediately apparent that they are utterly incapable of so much as doing what a well-trained, modern infantry man is trained to do, for example, maybe its too much to ask considering where we are in terms of AI coding, but if I'm trying to flank fortified position, shouldn't my fire-team be able to surpress them and make my life a little easier, couldn't they at the least bit show a little initiative? Okay, so IW's direction was to show that the player was a relatively lowly soldier that was part of a much larger conflict, but the AI should have been designed so that your buddies were almost, if not more so, as competent as you were and the fact that they were working with you as a team was apparent. As the final design stands, they seem almost indifferent to my plight. The weapons at your disposal don't seem as exciting to use than if you were to use them in a game like "SOCOM." There is also little distinction between the weapons, for example, when I play the original Rainbow Six games, I know how an M-4A1 handles and shoots as opposed to an FAL rifle or an MP5-A2.
As for story, missed potential pretty much sums it up for me. Carrying over the tradition of WWII games, sides are clearly divided into good and evil, black and white. You should expect from most military-themed games that your side occupies a morally ambiguous grey area. Take for example "EndWar." Which ever side you decide to play for, you're definitely sure that you're not fighting for them for a greater good, but instead, for the profit of your own nation, consequently, you'll be doing some morally questionable things, something "Splinter Cell" got right as well. In COD4, the motives of the antaganonists appears solely to be "kill lots of a Americans," which may be fine if they had explained better that they were doing it for the reason of, say, stopping western Imperialist aggression, or reviving the rule of the Proletariat. It also seems cheap that the antagonists are portrayed as corrupt by any nation's standards and the side you're fighting on is the undisputed conscience of the world. I'm also rather chagrined that I was fighting alongside extremely gung-ho allies (I would imagine they would be a far cry from the soldiers fighting in Iraq today), including one character that is almost token in any game set in modern times, the gangsta rap listening black dude (maybe it has something to do with me being a Satanic, death and black metal listening bastard). If I had it my way, fighting alongside shell-shocked, disillusioned circa-Vietnam soldiers who listened to Henrdix and Iggy Pop would have been a much more compelling experience.
All in all, this is probably a game that is meant to be "experienced" for its cinematic quality than actually played. This review comes from a long-time veteran of realistic military simulator games. I fondly remember the days of "Jane's" flight simulators like "F/A-18" and "Longbow" as well as the first three "Rainbow Six" games (Rainbow Six: Vegas and its sequel are a good squad based shooter in my book, its just that I don't really consider them to be actual "Rainbow Six" games based on the original formula).
When it was first announced that Infinity Ward would move into the niche traditionally inhabited by the likes of the first three "Rainbow Six"s and "Operation Flashpoint" (games I fondly remember from my childhood), it was thought that the age of World War II shooters was over, as IW in a way was the benchmark for the WWII genre of games.
In Call of Duty's 1 and 2, players would experience the moments played out by heroes from all of those old flicks like "The Dirty Dozen," "The Guns of Navarone," "The Great Escape," and the like. The IW formula was to intermingle these scripted moments with massive gunfights created through the optical illusion developed by game developers colloqially called "infinitely respawning enemies."
Of course, the principles behind the IW's game design would have to be revamped in order to match the nature of modern warfare, which we have seen in movies like "Black Hawk Down" and "Three Kings." So IW, being the clever developers they were, decided to take the exciting cinematic moments from these films and intermingle them with massive... hey, wait, hold on a second...
So illustrates COD4's most egregious flaw. IW hasn't gotten past the principles of COD's previous incarnations to match the tone of COD4. Mind you, the problem wasn't that it was an old mechanic; they could have made a game based on the Spanish Civil War or something with the engine and I'd think it would have been pretty damned good game. But COD4 finds itself in a quandary: is it "Rainbow Six" or is it "Half-Life?" Is it "Operation Flashpoint" or is it "Halo?" Games like "Half-Life", despite having a cerebral plot told through in game scripted scenes, superb AI, and excellent level design, is a relatively meat and potatoes shooter experience, which is fine, since Valve has refined that formula to the point that it serves as a model for all "run'n gun" shooters. This served the first 2 CODs quite well, considering that the old movies based on World War II in a way had larger-than-life protagonists gunning down Himmler's SS like Chow Yun Fat in a John Woo movie. While I'll give it to you that a military game would do well with scripted in game cinematic sequences, but it seems as if to me that COD4 is overly dependant on them in order to seem exciting. The high point for me was the AC-130 Spectre Gunship mission, which I found compelling with the eerily creepy, disconnected dialogue, but the mission is so ludicrously easy it practically plays itself.
In all honesty, the actual gameplay of COD4 is completely broken. The modern military shooters IW desperately tried to imitate typically feature a multiple approache to objectives mechanic; this is what makes games like "Ghost Recon" fun. Do you take along snipers and take out "tangos" from afar, or send one time to the far side of the encampment and sandwich the rebels from both sides, or use your entire squad as one big cudgel and charge through the front door. In COD4, there is a very obvious sense that the nature of the level is "leading" you to where you have to go, and that typically means there is only one route to go, only one solution to an encounter (again, its suffering from Half-Life-itis). A finite number of enemies in a single encounter would have helped tremendously with game flow and level progression, sadly, IW decided that this was "300 (if you know me, I hated the comic book and didn't bother watching the movie)" instead of "Black Hawk Down." This isn't helped by the sub-par AI. Enemies are relatively bare-boned in terms of tools and tactics availible to take out the player. They shoot at you and duck behind whatever they were next to and thats basically it. The linear level design also means they hardly do a whole lot in the way of flanking and the AI seems as if it isn't even reacting to the player's actions. Sure, the droves of Islamic militants and ultra-nationalist hardliners you slaughter toss grenades at you, but I think IW hasn't gotten the memo that this technique in AI development is virtually pedestrian in terms of FPS design. In fact, the AI is wholly dependent on grenades in order to seem remotely exciting to fight against, almost to the point that its frustrating (Sandy Koufax and Randy Johnson eat your heart out). Your squad-mates are also equally unresponsive to the player's presence. While its nice that they aren't a burden, on the contrary, if one dies, another quickly spawns to take his place on the battlefield, which means I'm free to do the morally questionable thing and leave them behind. However, its immediately apparent that they are utterly incapable of so much as doing what a well-trained, modern infantry man is trained to do, for example, maybe its too much to ask considering where we are in terms of AI coding, but if I'm trying to flank fortified position, shouldn't my fire-team be able to surpress them and make my life a little easier, couldn't they at the least bit show a little initiative? Okay, so IW's direction was to show that the player was a relatively lowly soldier that was part of a much larger conflict, but the AI should have been designed so that your buddies were almost, if not more so, as competent as you were and the fact that they were working with you as a team was apparent. As the final design stands, they seem almost indifferent to my plight. The weapons at your disposal don't seem as exciting to use than if you were to use them in a game like "SOCOM." There is also little distinction between the weapons, for example, when I play the original Rainbow Six games, I know how an M-4A1 handles and shoots as opposed to an FAL rifle or an MP5-A2.
As for story, missed potential pretty much sums it up for me. Carrying over the tradition of WWII games, sides are clearly divided into good and evil, black and white. You should expect from most military-themed games that your side occupies a morally ambiguous grey area. Take for example "EndWar." Which ever side you decide to play for, you're definitely sure that you're not fighting for them for a greater good, but instead, for the profit of your own nation, consequently, you'll be doing some morally questionable things, something "Splinter Cell" got right as well. In COD4, the motives of the antaganonists appears solely to be "kill lots of a Americans," which may be fine if they had explained better that they were doing it for the reason of, say, stopping western Imperialist aggression, or reviving the rule of the Proletariat. It also seems cheap that the antagonists are portrayed as corrupt by any nation's standards and the side you're fighting on is the undisputed conscience of the world. I'm also rather chagrined that I was fighting alongside extremely gung-ho allies (I would imagine they would be a far cry from the soldiers fighting in Iraq today), including one character that is almost token in any game set in modern times, the gangsta rap listening black dude (maybe it has something to do with me being a Satanic, death and black metal listening bastard). If I had it my way, fighting alongside shell-shocked, disillusioned circa-Vietnam soldiers who listened to Henrdix and Iggy Pop would have been a much more compelling experience.
All in all, this is probably a game that is meant to be "experienced" for its cinematic quality than actually played. This review comes from a long-time veteran of realistic military simulator games. I fondly remember the days of "Jane's" flight simulators like "F/A-18" and "Longbow" as well as the first three "Rainbow Six" games (Rainbow Six: Vegas and its sequel are a good squad based shooter in my book, its just that I don't really consider them to be actual "Rainbow Six" games based on the original formula).
