Pros: "Yo Andy, let's get some of that geniunely fun multiplayer in us for a while!"
Cons: "Andy, bro, this single-player campaign is kind of... ehh, not so great."
The bottom line: CoD4 does online right--it's fun, long-lasting, and innovative. Single-player's okay, but not as special. Overall, CoD4 is a solid release. Not the best, but good enough to keep you entertained.
Call me what you will -- a hater, overly critical or even donkey poo -- but I assure you that I am not these things. I bought the original Call of Duty for the PC back in 2004. I did so based on the recommendation of some people who I knew to be hardcore PC gamers. From what I heard of the game, from officially receiving the 2003 Game of the Year award, to its emotionally engaging "wow" moments, I thought that I would be impressed by the game on the same level as those who recommended the game to me; but instead, I wasn't. Those supposedly exciting plot moments where explosions and gunfire are ricocheting all around the player hadn’t driven me to enduringly admire the game. And for that, I was once more called a biased hatemonger. What I happen to think, though, is that anyone who thinks that I'm biased or hypocritical and only sticks to one platform... must be biased themselves. I didn't hate Call of Duty; I thought it was an okay game. It was, however, just a standard first-person shooter set in World War II. How many times in first-person shooters have we visited World War II? I think the count was lost somewhere around 23.7 billion. Innovation is what I crave. Story-telling with an appealing amount of depth is what I love. Call of Duty had neither one. It wasn't a spectacular thrill ride, but it did eventually go through a metamorphosis from the World War II schlock so many first-person shooters are pegged as today. Activision along with the loyal franchise development studio, Infinity Ward, takes you to a time that has not yet been set; a time where peace still does not seem near: a place set in the near future. The following briefs my thoughts on Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare.

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away... World War II took place. It was something gamers saw the upside, the left side, the right side, and especially the downside of in mass-produced storied forms. Now, take part in a new tale in a completely different setting, where ultimately a more modern story thrusts players through the futuristic war-torn ranks of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare into another kind of element all together. Playing as both an American soldier in the Middle East, Sergeant Paul Jackson, and as a British soldier, Sergeant "Soap" McTavish, you'll aspire to clean up the world's terrorism one filthy job at a time. A nuclear threat is present, and you'll either get the job done, or you'll be laid to waste as you're to bunk up with higher ranked officers who know exactly how to debunk the villainy that's afoot, from a leader of the Russian Ultranationalists who goes by the name of Imran Zakhaev.

Setting apart Call of Duty 4 from its predecessors isn't easy, and apparently can't be done by very much. Everything Infinity Ward has done is take the same basic premise of the earlier model and parks you into an unknown time frame closer to us now than around half a century earlier. You'll play as a couple of different soldiers, even though that matters not. They each play the same way, and essentially they'll tackle missions that are already familiar to players of the first-person shooter genus. Some objectives entail that you're to locate and find a certain bad guy, which this assignment will then spread out over the course of various sets of levels where you'll actually do a few new and interesting things in this franchise, such as one mission that has you in control of a helicopter's bombing patterns. On the black and white map you can zoom in and out of ranges where you’re enabled to drop a load of fiery death upon sighted targets scurrying about. In another mission orientation, you're to sneak around a camp capping guards quietly along the way, make it to the top of a building to snipe a certain individual, and make it out of the building alive. There, you'll be required to carry your disabled commanding officer and set him down along the way as you'll make it to a specific point to hold off an incoming angered brigade until your rescue aircraft arrives. Of course, most of the time you're driven to just shoot your way to victory, following orders about given directives -- whether you need to make it to the yellow marker on your pointing compass to carry a guy off, set off some C4, or just make it to some spot in order to be taken out of the level while condensing the volume on noisy enemies with their machineguns flailing at you around many a corner.

While the single-player campaign mode is decent like it was in the first game, what does push Call of Duty 4 ahead of the pack is its online outline. Here in Call of Duty 4, the multiplayer is a much different breed from its earlier counterparts. Call of Duty 4 has an RPG-like leveling system that rises your status up through its ranks more and more the better you perform at a long list of given challenges. Defeating a set number of enemies with any weapon is one way to go. Defeating a set number of enemies by taking them down with headshots is a more experienced path that will better serve you toward gaining that golden weapon that your gun will transform into if you're complete all of the given challenges with a particular dead meat-maker. This gold paint scheme is mainly used for showing off to others to tell them, "I got the golden gun, suckers!" But of course, it's not the only thing in your arsenal that there is to unlock. There is more than one type of gun to access in each category, which is not all available at first. Opening multitudes of paint schemes, a plethora of challenge types (from dispatching enemies by blowing up cars, to being able to fire upon more than one enemy while free falling in the air), and of course the perks adds a lot of juice to this long-lasting chewy piece of networking gum space. What are perks, you ask? Perks are customizable possibilities that you can arrange and rearrange around for any kind of gun in your possession. There are quite a few perks in all; however, you're only allowed to select a specific perk for up to three types. Meaning, you can't pick the same three perks in a row. Perks add things such as strengthening your health during combat or deepening your bullet penetration. It will allow you to hear what the enemy team is saying over the microphone if you're in range, or you can even carry up to two primary guns at a time (well, you can switch between the two instead of using a pistol as a secondary weapon when the first one runs out of ammo). The perks benefit the gameplay greatly, and make you and enemies both more challenging while at the same time more irritating. Damn you, martyrdom! It's only too bad that there weren't more perks invented for the game (there's only 21 of them in all).

Heading online with Call of Duty 4 isn't all fireworks and waterslides, though. The game has its share of problems that may come up on many an occasion while you're playing through it. For one thing, you'll sometimes come across a level where the server's frames will be locked into a stuttering rate. In other words, you'll see slowdown as enemies hop from one point to the next, disappearing and reappearing... just as you'll act the same way. The only thing is that you'll also be dying a lot and will be unable to play as you normally would on a smoother server. You'll also find the host shutting down a game just once its loading is complete, whoever the unspecified host may be. Then there's the connection disrupted error, which basically prevents every single player from continuing on with a game you may have already worked hard at to win. It's a bummer, I know. But aside from such dilemma, the game won't bother you with much else, as you do have quite a bountiful selection of game modes to access and then play through for many hours and days as you'll most likely become glued to wanting to rank up and master your skill at various game types. The game modes consist of everything from the expected (Free-for-all, Team Deathmatch) to the unexpected (Search and Destroy, Hardcore Team Deathmatch, Domination). Whereas in something like Free-for-all where it's you up against everybody or Team Deathmatch where two teams take sides in the spilling of blood, games like Search and Destroy has your teammates and yourself defending destination points on the map in order to protect them from the other team's objective, which is to plant a bomb and blow up that distinctive target. Or, in reverse, it's up to all of you and your allies to complete the same goal. Once you die in this mode, you're barred from its remaining duration until the next match slot opens up... which does make such games as this more tactically intriguing. Creative rules like these also apply to other modes like Hardcore Team Deathmatch, where you're given limited mini-map radar (usually if enemies are firing their weapon they will appear as red dots on the map, but not here) as well as having the kill cam stricken from the record, which would otherwise lend you the view of the enemy that vanquished your life from the exact location they came upon striking your death blow.

One other nice thing about Call of Duty 4 is its vast arsenal of weaponry. Sure, a lot of the guns are structured around limited sets of classes, but when say you have to reach both 150 kills and 150 headshots with each and every one of the eight different kinds of assault rifle, then you'll certainly find yourself wanting to play for quite a while just to reach that golden paint scheme for this particular weapon. Being more specific though, of the gun classes available includes the ones you've come to expect from just about every other first-person shooter in the world, of shotguns, sniper rifles, Uzis, handguns, and yes the assault rifles are in there too. There are even certain perks or special in-game advantages that give you more pluck for your mayhem muck, as you'll find yourself planting claymores down (left d-pad) somewhere around corners, at the top of ladders, or somewhere that enemies normally aren't going to detect these automatic destruction-inducing devices from a safe distance. Tossing grenades (R2) will help at times when an enemy's near and you want to dispose of them safely rather than fire at them (R1). Running around (L3) grants players a limited sprint, but is also annoying in that same sense. You want to run around as much as you can, rather than running, stopping, running, and stopping again. Bending down into duck mode (circle) and lying down on your chest (the same, pressed twice) in a prone position helps to reduce the noise you would otherwise create as you'll find yourself jolting over metallic, stony, and grassy surfaces. Eliminating a kill streak of three enemies also gives you the God-like power of a UAV, or a widespread map for all of those on your team to track every red dot or enemy for a short amount of time. Get a five kill streak though, and you'll be able to call in an airstrike that uses a jet to fly over a specified area on the map of your choice (hopefully one where red dots are all gathering around) using a bombing and aftershock pattern to knock them out cold. Seven kills in a row, on the other hand, will call in a chopper that automatically flies itself around the map gunning down any enemy it sets its sights on. All three are called with the right button on the d-pad. What can be said control-wise is that the game is fairly average to become accustomed to, like most first-person shooters games. You probably won't master the game right away; however, you will get a handle on the controls in oh say... about 15-30 minutes.

There are PlayStation 3 games that try to look nice, and then there are those that completely melt your face off with their illustrious awesomeness. Call of Duty 4 is the former, being that it's from Activision who has to spread the love around between the higher-end spectrum (a.k.a. the PlayStation 3) and the lower-end one (a.k.a. the Xbox 360). But, that doesn't matter much because nice is nice, and Call of Duty 4 is structured well enough in the glamour department that there's technically nothing serious to complain about. Basic junky car models will set ablaze when tossing a grenade through the window, setting off a black billowing smoke that simmers up to the entire car busting upward in an explosive force of fiery light and charred clouds sending anyone in its immediate vicinity to their grave. From decimated terrains where the walls have busted out openings in the bottom to slither on through, construction vehicles plotted about, some grassy hillsides with every blade given its own model to use as cover, a darkened container-topped rainy ship to stomp about, and more, the environments themselves have both scale and detail enough not to be bitter about its makeup. Sure, the game may not be the most authentically pleasing to the eye when compared to the deeply serene eye candy of other biggies, but soldiers and enemies are outfitted as they should be (diversifying between brown-clad getups fitted with an arsenal hanging off the belt, to tight black diving gear, to grass-covered chameleon suits), they hop over ledges or move their arms in a hurtling motion when projecting grenades, and the guns fire as you'd imagine, from tiny pellets out of a smaller gun to bursting blasts of fire from out of a grenade launcher.

Hear that? No? Well, you shouldn't, because there's nothing there to hear. But you know what? There is something to listen to throughout Call of Duty 4. The spoken dialogue, for starters, varies between two groups of soldiers: one's an enemy terrorist organization and the other is of a British-tongued "good guy" platoon. Where there are some moments in the single-player campaign that has the terrorists who do sound Arabic, Afghan, Iraqi... wait, just what background are these guys from anyway? Well, whatever: they sound like they should and through the online multiplayer component the one actor will speak memorable lines such as, "Aformdalay!" and "We have won the battle, but not the war!" British gents, as you know, come from merry old England. With their sly chirpy tones, you'll get a dose of their charming quips throughout the single-player and but a dose on the online portion, as well, as the single actor similarly belts out, "Our UAV is online!" and "Grenade!" Standing out in some part in its other aspects, Call of Duty 4 doesn't stray from bringing gamers a schematic of stirring orchestrated moments to get you riveted into the action, or a far range of distinctive audio to tune your ears for the preparedness you'll need to overcome this challenge. You've slid under a metallic staircase and footsteps are crunching over the hard panels up above, now are clinking their way over every step. What do you do? WHAT DO YOU DO?! Well, you can take out your automatic weapon popping off machine-gunny noises at the enemy, or just get up on your feet and toss a flash grenade that clinks and clanks as physics enable it to realistically bounce off walls, cars, and even roll around in the dirt before it sets off in your enemy's face and then your rickety machine gun finishes the job. From destructive blankets of booming after an airstrike assault to the rumbling aftereffects that follow, there are sounds to hear in this game all around, and they are of decent quality, luckily for your ears to squeeze the life out of.

Not every game is perfect. Many a times there are games that don't even come close to perfect. Even Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare is one such game that is far from perfect. How can I say this? I've played it. I've owned the game and have enthusiastically enjoyed Call of Duty 4's greatest feat, its online functionality. Then how come I'm ragging on the supposed "Game of 2007"? Well, because of the single-player option of course. In order to meet my standards for a triumphant title that's divine in each and every aspect that it performs, the game must not falter greatly in any one area. Unlike the phone messages Infinity Ward and even Treyarch once billed to player's homes across the nation, never has before a step up into the online field been this enriched for Activision's Call of Duty franchise. Sure, it was fun before, but it's really all been done before. Now Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare has reshaped and reevaluated that space, making for the greatest leap the series has ever taken. While the offline portion doesn't follow and doesn't try too hard to stand out, like always it lends you that spot to practice for what's to come ahead: where foes will not only be programmed bots lining up in their predetermined arrangements, but where actual people who can trash talk you, flank you like you weren't expecting, and can get up to 50 points off of your dying carcass. Play Call of Duty 4 today for its online portfolio, and give the call of single-player doodie to your grandma who's going to blab her mouth off about that time in the 1920s to someone awful who will actually listen for once.