Halo Killer

-Kyle McGuffy

When the final credits rolled, I couldn’t believe what I had just experienced. I had just sunk a ship, fought in the Middle East and stopped a crisis that spread worldwide. Call of Duty 4’s single player experience blew me away, and the multiplayer was even better.

The single player campaign shined from the training mission to the final sequence. The campaign provided everything that you would expect from a next generation game: terrific graphics, a very smart artificial intelligence (AI) and great playability. Call of Duty 4’s great playability is credited to the control scheme, which almost seems natural. But most importantly, the story was actually something you could get absorbed in and not something you just wanted to get through to find how it ends, like in Halo 3.

Call of Duty has the most life-like graphics I’ve ever seen. The best example of this is with a sniper’s gilla suit. The suit is a bunch of grass on normal sniper armor that works as camouflage. The result is near invisible snipers that will shoot you down before you even have an idea as to their whereabouts. To go along with that, the weapons and environment look almost too real, and the shooting effects are top-notch. During my play through (roughly five hours) I was continuously and mercilessly throttled by the AI. The only other time this has happened to me was when I played Halo 3 on its legendary setting, and I wasn’t even on Call of Duty’s hardest difficulty.

In between single player games, I met up with a friend on the internet multiplayer. If you thought Halo 3’s multiplayer had a lot of depth, you haven’t yet played Call of Duty. Not only is there a wide variety of game types, but you can also make your own classes, customize your weapons, achieve different military rankings, check out your world-wide statistic rankings in four categories and do various in-game actions like call in air strikes and helicopters.

Also there is a reward system called “perks.” You can upgrade your custom class with different perks that you have unlocked to make you more powerful. A few examples include: drop a grenade when you die, additional health, extra ammo, listen in on the other team and much more. The combination of the perks and weapons just adds to the great fun that I experienced from Call of Duty 4’s multiplayer.

Like any other game, Call of Duty 4 isn’t perfect. Occasionally your shots miss even if your crosshairs are aligned with an enemy, and there were a few problems with the AI. Sometimes your enemies will occasionally run out of their cover and you can easily pick them off. But these problems are minor and don’t take away from the great experience.