Pros: Graphics, gameplay, strong multiplayer, sound, pretty much everything...
Cons: Except for the horribly short single-player campaign. And you can't lean.
The bottom line: The best game I've played this year by far, Call of Duty 4 has it all.
One of my favorite games last year was Call of Duty 3, a World War II first-person shooter. However, there have been so many World War II games in the last few years that it’s beginning to feel like we’ve fought the entire war twenty times over. So when Infinity Ward came up with Call of Duty 4, they decided to change all that. Sub-titled “Modern Warfare,” the latest installment of this classic franchise has been given a face-lift, brought into the present with an interesting storyline and some intense action.

Call of Duty 4 has you play one of two roles in various missions to complete the storyline. You play both an SAS soldier (British Special Forces) as well as a US marine, in missions that will take you from a ship on a storm-tossed ocean to a Middle Eastern city in a fictionalized country where a coup has just taken place, ultimately to a Russian missile silo where your mission is to stop the bad guys before nuclear devastation on a massive scale is unleashed. The storyline, while interesting, is unfortunately incredibly short, with only 5-10 hours of gameplay required (unless you get stuck on a mission like I did, which will then drag it out to 15 hours or so) to finish. It’s a good thing the multi-player is so addicting, as otherwise this wonderful game would have a major strike against it.

The story has some amazing moments, and you will grow to respect some of your companions (which will make some of the later scenes even harder on the emotions). In fact, for the first time I can think of, something actually happens to one of the characters you play, which will really make you choke up. Especially given the way Infinity Ward actually has you play it out. For instance, one of the early scenes has you taking the role of the deposed president of the Middle Eastern country. You’re hauled off by the bad guys, and you can look around but you can’t do anything about what’s happening. The sequence comes to its inevitable conclusion, but the fact that you’re seeing it firsthand adds pathos to the whole thing.

Gameplay
The gameplay, while updated for the various modern weapons included in the game, is pretty much standard Call of Duty. The buttons are pretty much the same, with “A” being your action button, “B” being your stance control. “Y” allows you to change to your secondary weapon and “X” reloads. Clicking the right stick enables a melee attack (though this time you pull out a knife and slash rather than using the butt-end of your gun). Thankfully, Infinity Ward has made clicking the left stick the way to sprint rather than using binoculars. I hated the fact that you couldn’t run in Call of Duty 3. And believe me, you’ll be sprinting a lot in this game. Your bumpers toss your grenades. Right trigger fires your weapon (or activates your special ability, such as laying Claymore mines, if you’ve activated them) and left trigger pulls up your aiming reticule (or scope, if your gun is equipped with one). All fairly standard, and a blessing to those familiar with the previous games who don’t want to re-learn a control system.

I loved every moment of gameplay in Call of Duty 4. The firefights get quite intense on the default difficulty level (I’ve heard that the Veteran level is incredibly hard), the enemy soldiers mostly use cover to good effect, and you seldom have people charging you for no reason. They’ll toss grenades with wild abandon (you can throw them back, of course) and try to keep you pinned down as their companions try to flank you. It’s a good thing that your soldiers are pretty intelligent too. While you certainly can’t let them do all the work, they will support you and will take care of their fair share of enemies.

Bullets will be screaming by you, almost making you hunker down in your Lay-z-boy as you pilot your way through the game. And you’re not even safe behind cover, as a lot of it can be shot through. Unlike most games, where kneeling behind a fence will keep you safe as if there were an invisible barrier in front of you, this time bullets can go through stuff like that. They’ll lose some punch, but you can still take a lot of damage that way. The good thing is that this works both ways, and if you see a bad guy behind cover you can still ventilate them.

The criminal omission from this game (though it’s missing from a *lot* of them, so Call of Duty 4 is not alone) is the “lean” function. If you’re standing next to a doorway, you should be able to lean your head (or even your gun) out without exposing your entire body. It would also be nice if you could drop grenades rather than throwing them all the time, but that’s a complaint for another time.

The cool thing about this game is the variety of things you’re given to do. One mission has you wearing a brushlike “ghillie suit” that allows you to blend in with the tall grasses of the Russian plain. You have to sneak by what feels like a whole army of Russians without them seeing you, just so you can take a sniper shot at somebody. Once that happens, everything hits the fan and the mission gets even more intense. Another extreme situation has you as a Marine making your way room by room through a television station. The explosions that take place in this sequence make this one of the most breathtaking sequences in the game.

Graphics
The graphics in Call of Duty 4 are some of the most beautiful and realistic I’ve seen in a shooter. You truly feel like you’re deep in a Russian forest or making your way through a Middle Eastern city. The colors are extremely realistic, with drab brown and tan in the desert and deep green in the grass. During one mission, it’s pouring down rain and everything is grey. Your companions and your enemies all move fairly realistically and, and what’s most impressive is that the cut-scenes are done within the game engine, allowing you to move and look around while they are going on. It’s just incredible.

Another great thing (though this could possibly go under “gameplay”) is that the terrain is destructible, and it *stays* destroyed. Put a bunch of bullet holes in that wall in front of you? Those holes will still be there if you go back (as long as you don’t re-start the mission, of course). That car you blew up will still be blown up if you go find it again. Of course, this doesn’t go as far as blowing up buildings or anything (you can’t collapse anything like that), but it’s still quite impressive to see actual battle damage in the terrain.

Sound
The sound adds to the immersive quality of the game. The bullets zing by your ear and make you want to duck, the guns are suitable for what they are (the muffled “whumpf” of the sniper rifle versus the normal sound of a sub-machine gun, for example). The soundtrack isn’t the most impressive, but it’s typical of the genre. Lots of military orchestral music and stuff like that. The voice work is pretty good too, with not a lot of overacting from the speaking parts. Soldiers will shout at each other about what they’re doing and what to look out for. You just feel like you’re in the middle of a battle.

Multiplayer
Given the criminal shortness of the campaign, multiplayer is where this game earns a lot of its stripes. It adds so many things to the typical multiplayer experience (or at least mine, which admittedly is rather limited) that I could be playing this game for years. First, you earn experience points for every battle you’re in, which allows you to advance your skills, opening up new options for you. When you first start, for example, you only have a couple of classes you can play and a couple of games (Team Deathmatch and just plain Deathmatch) that you can play. As you gain experience, your rank will go up, your game options will open up, and the number of weapons you can use also does.

Once you reach a certain level, you can build your own class, mixing and matching weapons and “perks” (or special abilities) to make your own class. Perks can be anything from increased stamina to the popular “martyrdom” perk, where your death results in you dropping a live grenade, hopefully taking out whoever killed you. I don’t like that one very much as it resulted in too many team-kills of teammates who happened to be standing next to me when I died. My favorite perk is “Last Stand,” where your “death” results in you lying on the ground and pulling out your pistol. You get the opportunity to take out the guy who killed you (and anybody else who gets in the way too) before you finally expire.

As you advance, you can play games like “Hardcore” variations of the common games, where you don’t have a HUD, you can’t see how much ammo you have, and you have no radar unless your team manages to launch a UAV vehicle. One thing about the hardcore games, though: team-killing is turned off in the basic games, but can happen in these games. So watch out.

There are also other cool possibilities. Kill three guys without dying and you can launch your UAV for 30 seconds, which will result in a radar showing where all of your enemies are. Kill five in a row and you can call in an airstrike. Kill seven and you can call in a helicopter that sticks around for a while and will shoot at any enemies that expose themselves. This helicopter can be shot down, of course, but that’s difficult to do.

There are just so many possibilities in the multiplayer that it’s a lot more addicting than just basic “who gets the higher score?” That’s still there, of course, but there’s much more than that. The multiplayer in this game is incredible.

Achievements
Finally, I have to mention these. In a welcome change from any game I’ve played so far, there are no online achievements in Call of Duty 4. The ability to build your character takes the place of this, but it’s thrilling that all of the achievements can be done in the main game. When I didn’t have access to multiplayer, I was seriously annoyed every time I saw a game with multiple online achievements.

Overall
Call of Duty 4 is the best first-person shooter I’ve played (though granted, my experience is a bit limited). It’s intense, it’s fairly realistic (within the limitations of a virtual experience, of course) and it’s a lot of fun. The single-player campaign is way too short, but the multiplayer more than makes up for it. Infinity Ward should be proud, and if you’re online, look me up for a game. I’m not that good, which means you’ll be able to get some easy experience.