There?s a reason I?ll only be reviewing the single-player portion of Call of Duty 4, and it?s not plain inveterate laziness. While my house is now the proud owner of such innovations as the wheel and the written word, and we have Christianity and crop rotation slated for a Q3 2009 arrival, a decent broadband connection remains a luxury out of my grasp for the foreseeable future. If the multiplayer?s anything like the single player, it will involve me being shot in the back of the head over and over again. Online gaming presumably offers the bonus of a twelve year old (who is admittedly much better at this sort of thing than me) deriding my manhood as he riddles me with P90 fire, only for him to riddle me with accusations of faggotry as I smite him from beyond the grave with Martyrdom.
Look at me, talking as if I know a damned thing about it.
The reason for this riddling, and my downfall overall, was a pleasantly ironic one: I was too prepared for the game. I'd seen bunches of videos of people doing the ?F[ucking].N[ew].G[uy].? shooting range in 3.7 seconds. I was unaware what the fuss was about, but intrigued anyway. Down the rope; switch to pistol; shoot, shoot, reload, shoot; cook flashbang; throw; shoot more; flashbang; reload; run to end while shooting through walls; earn grudging respect of mustachioed octogenarian captain and dreadful Mary Poppins cockney chimney-sweep; high fives all round; home in time for Countdown. I worked my way down to seventeen seconds, and the game duly suggested the ?Veteran? difficulty setting. I decided to select regular instead.
At this point a message flashed up: ?Are you sure you want to select regular? We think you'd be better off with veteran. You're not... a pussy, are you? Oh, of course you are- my mistake. I see it now. You're a pussy. That's fine.? Mildly emasculated, I proceeded with a difficulty setting I wasn?t altogether happy with. Sulking.
Cod4?s campaign is not difficult, as such. But several moments- spikes of difficulty- will have you cursing. On a difficulty setting where an angry look from a bullet seems enough to make the protagonist fling himself from the mortal coil, being pelted by thousands of bullets from all directions can lead to a lot of reloading, of games and guns. I?m not sure it?s coincidental that the words ?checkpoint? and ?chokepoint? are nearly homophonic.
The most notorious chokepoint, the end of ?One Shot, One Kill?, is a particularly galling one because, upon restarting the fiftieth time, you realize you?re actually trapped in a flashback. Captain Price is standing there in a barn, reminiscing about his youth (heck, when he went to Pripyat he couldn?t have been more than?what, a fresh-faced seventy-three year old?); enemy troops are
You?re just lucky you?re pretty, Price?
The player rarely feels like a cog in the war machine. This may sound like a compliment, but it?s not implausible that a soldier should feel like a cog. For one soldier to win the war, single-handed, is patently absurd. I don?t need to set the first foot on the beaches of Normandy, plant the flag on the Reichstag and kick the door of Hitler's bunker down just before he can commit suicide so I can cap the fucker himself. It's too much. The CoD series has adopted an ensemble cast approach, putting us in the shoes of various cogs while taking the player for the most thrilling ride possible. Maybe this is low self-esteem talking, but I'm down with being a tiny part of a bigger picture- one more dead pixel on the LCD screen of life.
Thereabouts lies CoD4's paradox. The player feels small when he sees hundreds of tanks and helicopters riding into battle alongside him. There?s bias in that thar syntax: they are alongside him, and not the other way round. However the game chooses to disguise it, everyone is escorting you, and waiting for you to make a move.
A COG, at least, does something (even if it's swaggering about, acting like a macho cock: see above image). It turns in reaction to other pieces, and causes other parts of the mechanism to turn. The player in CoD4 does nothing. A well-documented bugbear is the game?s macabre cum slapstick enemy respawning. Go prone; point your machine gun at a doorway; squeeze trigger. Enemies pour out like a clown car somebody?s thrown a rabid Doberman into, and you can just sit there, mowing them down. The war just goes on, nightmarishly and perpetually repeating itself, the player stuck in a loop of gunfire blaring and ragdolls collapsing.
Once the player moves forward and reaches that checkpoint, the enemies stop spawning; the next group of enemies pop their heads over the wall; and you repeat. In this sense, the player is utterly vital to the war effort- hell, you are the war effort, because without you nothing would ever get done. At the same time the player feels entirely superfluous, deprived of agency. Maybe that's what wars are really like. I don't know, I've never been to one. It makes the player feel insignificant, however, and it?s hard to see that as a good thing in a game. If you know that shooting an enemy will just instigate someone popping up from ground to replace him, it begs the question of why you should waste ammo shooting him in the first place. Political allegory or dubious game design? I?ll say the latter.
Curse you, respawning Stratocumulus! You killed my father!
One could get the impression that CoD4 is a brainless piece of work- that?s the appeal of the Arcade mode, certainly. It offers a naked and primal purity of purpose, with no strings attached. The respawning enemies become an opportunity to rack up some bonus points. But the gun fetishising element of CoD4 is only part of a greater picture. By the time it?s become a CND promotional tool and launches into a heartfelt diatribe on imperialist foreign policies, CoD4 will have surprised you with its brains.
The old CoD games sacrificed some of that capacity for deeper commentary by virtue of their historical setting. That a World War 2 game would feature ?bad things happening? is tautology to the point of triteness. Nobody playing a prior CoD game jumped up from their seats in surprise and yelled,
?Good lord, what the devil are those chaps doing? Executing PoWs? Concentration camps? Genocide? Why, these ?Nazis? look like quite the cads. I shall be my keeping a monocled eye on them henceforth!?
A plague on humanity. A gift for game devs who need a villain.
As far as clear-cut villains go, the Nazis are a boon to game designers. Nasty Nazis act nasty- it is their way, after all.
?Motivation? They?re Nazis!
Character development? I just told you, they?re Nazis!?
It would be easy to assume that the faceless ?terrorists? of CoD 4 are just as much of a polarised projection of evil- we never hear the story from their side; we never play a terrorist. Heavens, but imagine what the Daily Mail would say if we did play as terrorists. Any sympathy we may develop toward their motives is counteracted somewhat by their zealous shooting of unarmed civilians and their laissez-faire attitude to abstaining from nuking cities. Even so, deciding which guys are the bad guys isn?t always simple.
A lot of people think that guns are cool; that the SAS are pure badass; that nuclear weapons will, should push come to shove and saber rattling come to no avail, show those foreigners who is boss. Any popular piece of entertainment asking its audience to consider that these beliefs may not be altogether devoid of fallacies is doing something right.
Will a person who has experienced a ?first-person fallout sickness and agonising death? simulator still be so enamoured with nuclear weaponry?
Will people reconsider that guns might not be that much fun after all, when they are tied to a stake and see an execution from the eyes of the person being shot?
Will the player consider that the pure badassness of the SAS comes hand in hand with their readily shooting the unarmed, sleeping crew of a cargo ship, simply because they had been deemed ?expendable? by the SAS commander?
Calling war a messy business is a transferred epithet. People: they?re the messy ones.
The AC-130 mission is a highlight. Operating a thermal imaging camera on a gunship, the player protects a squad of friendly troops by emptying a few hundred thousand metric tonnes of depleted uranium into some unsuspecting unfriendly troops. The overwhelming sensation is a sense of seedy voyeurism and profoundly unsporting conduct: it?s not a fair fight, and the player knows this. It shows how effective overwhelming firepower can be in the right circumstances, and also how quickly it becomes useless. Your guns can wipe out villages, raining Howitzer fire down from the stratosphere with impunity. But when the radio operator pipes up, telling you to keep an eye out for an ?enemy roadblock along the curved road? the player?s character is confused:
'Uuuuh...which one is the curved road?'
'It's...the...do you see the water tower?'
'The...water tower...the one by the crossroads?'
'Yeah, follow that along: see how the road curves?'
?Maybe?I think so. Next to the orphanage??
?That?s the one.?
?Should I shoot the orphanage? While I?m here??
?Umm?how about we focus on the roadblock for the moment??
All that firepower and you still need to stop and ask for directions.
The eerie photorealism of it creates a vivid, dehumanising perspective on war. Dehumanising, because they all look like ants from up here. The only ways to tell the bad ants (the ones you bomb the shit out of) from the good ants (the ones you refrain from bombing) are the flashing transponders on the good ants. You can see how easy a friendly fire incident could occur in real-life: 20,000 feet in the air, it?s not easy telling a good heat signature from an evil heat signature.
Sometimes, you shoot your own people. You do so because you?re human. Human fallibility permeates CoD4. The game lambasts the military arrogance of the Americans, in believing invading a country will really solve any problems. That nuke wouldn?t have gone off if the Americans hadn?t invaded. It?s not just crude (but sadly fashionable) anti-American propaganda, though. The game denounces the equally supercilious presumptions of Western capitalism as a whole, England included, condemning the assumption that we can ruin other cultures and countries for our own gain and never expect to feel any repercussions.
CoD4?s single player campaign offers a brief but striking commentary on war. Come the endgame, every side pays a high price for their hubris.
...bang.
