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Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare | 
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| From: Activision Inc.
Category: Video Games
List Price: $59.99
Buy Used: $38.00
You Save: $21.99 (37%)
New (2) Used (20) from $38.00
Avg. Customer Rating:  281 reviews
Sales Rank: 241
Format: Blu-ray
Platform: Playstation 3
ESRB: Mature
Media: Video Game
Autographed: No
Memorabilia: No
Batteries Included: No
Age: 17 - 20 years
Operating System: Playstation 3
Shipping Weight (lbs): 2
Dimensions (in): 6.7 x 5.3 x 0.6
MPN: 83081
Model: 83081
UPC: 047875830813
EAN: 0047875830813
ASIN: B000TG72TM
Release Date: November 5, 2007
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Features:
| • | Intense action thriller with stunning next-generation graphics and amazing special effects | | • | Play as both a U.S. Marine and British S.A.S. soldier fighting through an unfolding story full of twists and turns | | • | Enter treacherous hotspots around the globe to take on a rogue enemy group threatening the world | | • | Use sophisticated technology, superior firepower, and coordinated land and air strikes on a battlefield where speed, accuracy, and communication are essential to victory | | • | Depth of multiplayer action providing online fans an all-new community of persistence, addictive, and customizable gameplay |
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Product Description
Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, the new action-thriller from the award-winning team at Infinity Ward, the creators of the Call of Duty series, delivers the most intense and cinematic action experience ever. Armed with an arsenal of advanced and powerful modern day firepower, players are transported to treacherous hotspots around the globe to take on a rogue enemy group threatening the world. As both a U.S Marine and British S.A.S. soldier fighting through an unfolding story full of twists and turns, players use sophisticated technology, superior firepower and coordinated land and air strikes on a battlefield where speed, accuracy and communication are essential to victory. The epic title also delivers an added depth of multiplayer action providing online fans an all-new community of persistence, addictive and customizable gameplay. ESRB Rated M for Mature
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| Customer Reviews: Read 276 more reviews...
 Very Impressive July 22, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
While I have only played through one mission on the single player campaign, I am rating this one 5 stars based on the outstanding online mode. The single player mode was impressive in my short experience, and the opening section allows you to practice and get a pretty good handle on the controls if you're new to the series. I can only imagine how intense the following chapters will be based on my near heart attack trying to jump onto the helicopter during a violent thunder storm (stage 1).
The online mode is simply incredible. By far and away the best I've seen to date, it's seamless, lag-less, and very intense. It feels as if you're not online at all, there are absolutely no lags in shooting and graphics. There are few things more satisfying then onlocking the sniper rifle then hiding in the bushes, holding your breath, and nailing some unsuspecting guy in the back from fifty yards away. The sound effects are insanely realistic, you will hear another soldier's footsteps as he approaches you especially on the metal stairs.
The producers really evened the score online too in this installment. I'm still on the receiving end of stabbings far more often then I'd like, but you're put into games based on your skill level and the unlocking of new weapons motivates you to keep going. I have never played the online version of a game so much more frequently then the single player mode, that's how intense this game is. I can't wait to see what the PS3 does with SOCOM........
 Relatively short single player game but good online longevity. July 18, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
COD4 - the latest and arguably best installment of the Call Of Duty series, is a proper game of two halves.
Controls
COD4 is a first-person run-and-gun game. You can sneak (and on some maps you have to) but for the most part it's shoot or be shot at. The controls are pretty good for this. Left stick moves you, right stick adjusts where you're looking. Various buttons crouch, jump, reload and fire. It's fairly intuitive to pick up and if you've played something like Drake's Fortune, the controls are sufficiently similar that it becomes a zero-learning-curve game. (Note - Drake's Fortune uses third-person camera - yuk. COD4 is first-person - ie. you look through your own eyes).
Graphics
The graphics in COD4 are good. Very good. Not brilliant, but a massive step up from the previous titles. The environments are detailed but the maps are relatively small. There is good texture mapping and use of colour and the global shadowing system is adequate. There are some problems though. There is a lot of aliasing on thin lines - power lines, cables - stuff like that. Aliasing is the stair-step effect (jaggies) that you get when a graphics system is unable to smooth out the differences in extreme contrast. For a console as power as a PS3, this shouldn't be a problem but it is. COD4 also suffers a lot of popup - where items pop in to view very late or change level of detail very late. This is particularly noticable on the Ambush map in multiplayer mode. The bricks and debris on the ground pops in in front of you almost in a wave as you run. Sandbags pop to their highest right in front of you and the burned out tanks in the middle of the map pop into high detail as you approach them. To start with you won't notice it, but once it catches your eye, you'll see it everywhere. Again - a PS3 shouldn't have this problem but COD4 is a multi-platform game so maybe they just coded to the lowest common denominator and didn't bother to tweak it for the PS3.
Smoke and particle effects are nice, but very processor-intensive. If someone pops a smoke grenade and you run through the smoke cloud, be prepared for very low framerates - it really bogs down. You'll see the same three or four textures used on smoke billowing through the smoke effects too so if you're waiting it out for the smoke to clear, you'll think "hey - deja vu - I just saw that exact same smoke."
There are specular highlights and bump maps used where you'd expect them to be used to pretty good effect. One of the neatest effects is the visual distortion you get around the muzzle of a gun during gunfire, or around an exploding grenade. Nice touch.
Occasionally you'll find faults in the graphics engine that make you wonder if the game didn't QA properly. On the Pipeline map for example, you can hop on to one of the oil tank rail cars and see through the oil tank. Sometimes when you die you'll fall out of the map or be able to see the inside of your character's head. The game runs at 60Hz for the most part, and in 720p it looks pretty good (but it's not full HD). There are places where it'll bring the PS3 to its knees though with the number of characters and effects all being drawn at once. Multiplayer mode on the Shipment and WetWork maps are good examples. You'll be lucky to ever see 60 frames per second on those maps.
Motion capture is good but not brilliant. All the requisite moves are there for all the characters but there are some noticable pops and bangs in between their set pieces. If you're in the thick of the action, you don't notice it so much but if you're spectating a multiplayer game, or observing enemies through a scope in the single player game, you'll often see a glitch in the motion capture between crouching and standing up. There's a definite pop as the characters go from slow, hunched-down crawl to normal walking when standing up. There are other issues here and there but the crouch-to-stand-up problem is the one that immediately springs to mind.
Sound
The audio on COD4 is also pretty good. There's good stereo separation at the front and excellent use of the rear channels. Often you'll be able to hear someone behind you giving you more reaction time to do something about it. It's so seamless in COD4 that I've come to rely on it. The weapons effects are OK and they use the subwoofer to good effect. There's noticable differences in weapons types, with and without silencers, but I suppose only a gun nut would be able to tell you if they're right. There's a couple of mis-steps here too though - the Mini Uzi sounds like a child's toy for example. The voice talent is varied but too many of the English characters sound like Dick Van Dyke doing cockney. Come on - this is the 21st century - couldn't they get English people to do the English accents?
Single player
Single player mode is a good intro to COD4. The maps are varied and the missions are split between US and UK troops. Each mission is a mission-on-rails in that you really can't deviate much from what the developers want you to do. Go from A to B. Kill everything. Collect item. It's a tired formula but I guess it still works.
Enemy AI is so-so in COD4. There are some neat new tricks compared to other run-and-gun games but ultimately you'll be able to out-think the AI pretty quickly. You need to; there are no health packs in this game. You have overall health and that's it. If you get badly shot up, you can hide and recover, but in a full on smackdown with enemy troops, there's no time to hide so it becomes a question of speed, skill and luck to stay alive.
As I said above, the maps are quite small and confined This is good because it means at no point during gameplay do you ever come across a loading screen unless you change maps or missions. It's bad because you can run from one side of the map to the other in about 30 seconds on the largest map which means there's not a lot of free-roaming capability. The game itself is mercifully short on cut-scenes so there isn't a lot of interruption. The cut scenes that do exist are a split between pre-rendered and game-engine scenes.
The weapons choice is wide and varied and there's an option to throw grenades back if one lands close to you and you have quick reactions. Invariably when I try this though, it goes off in my face and that's the end of that. Each weapon has iron sights or laser / scope / dot sights. Some of the aiming positions are counterintuitive though. The MP44 and M14 assualt rifles have the distinct look of shooting diagonally instead of straight. I've never quite got used to this and if I end up with one of these things, the enemy automatically has an advantage over me.
Without a doubt, the best single player mission is where you find yourself at the weapons controls of a C130 gunship. This entire level is played through an infrared sensor channel. You're orbiting a village and your task is to keep your troops on the ground safe from enemy attack. Your troops are marked with infrared beacons, so they all pulse or flash in the sensor view. You have three different guns at your disposal from rapid-fire machine gun to what-the-hell-was-that cannon. I think if you play COD4 through to the end, you'll eventually only ever re-play this level in single player mode.
Online
Online gameplay is where COD4 really shines in terms of fun factor. Unlike days of old where inexperienced players would drop into maps with 8 year old Korean kids who could snipe them through glitches in the map, COD4 has a load balancing system. As a newbie, you have zero experience points so you get put in games with other people way down the scale. This means you get a chance to learn the maps and figure out how best to play without the frustration of instantly dying because you re-spawned near someone who has a zillion hours of game time under their belt.
The more kills you get, the more matches you play, the more experience points you get. These unlock challenges and the ability to make your own weapons load (instead of choosing one of the predetermined ones) as well as perks. Perks are things like the ability to carry three grenades instead of one. As your experience increases, you get put in maps with other players with similar levels of experience. In this way it leads you into the all-guns-blazing experts-only matches quite gently.
There are a bunch of different online modes ranging from the usual capture the flags (Domination, straight from Halo), to headquarters, search-and-destroy and outright free-for-all and deathmatch. Team Tactical is a neat mode where each time only has three players, so the games become a lot more tactical. That mode also relies on headset chat otherwise you'll be running around completely uncoordinated. COD4 does support headsets chat, but until the first patch came out, there was no way to mute other players, which meant you were treated to levels of swearing that you probably had no idea existed in civilised society. Fortunately, now you can mute the players with Tourette's which makes it a lot more enjoyable. The problem is that a lot of people assume that because they've got an open mic and a captive audience, it gives them the right to behave like a total goon.
There are issues with the online play though. You'll often come across a situation where you are clearly shooting someone else but your hits aren't having any effect. When you die, the replay cam will show you the same gunfight from your opponents point of view and there will appear to be an obvious disconnect between when you thought you were shooting, and when the game considered you to be shooting from the other player's perspective. I call it bullet lag. More often than not it clears itself, but occasionally the online match will just become impossible to play because of it and you have no choice but to exit and join another game.
The biggest drawback of the online play is that the code isn't distributed. This means that one person's machine is hosting the game. If they get annoyed at losing a battle, or being shot too many times, they can cancel the entire match, resulting in a "host ended session" message for everyone else. This is really nasty. A lot of games use distributed online mode, meaning all the machines track the progress of the host in case it goes down. If it does, another player's machine becomes the host, seamlessly, and gameplay continues. GTA4 and Racedriver Grid both use this technique to great effect. For it to be missing from COD4 is criminal.
One thing that I'm still not quite used to in COD4 is bullet penetration. Get a sufficiently powerful weapon and a suitably thin wall and you can shoot other players through the wall. A lot of the time it's guesswork, but there are enough graphical glitches that you'll often be able to see another player's knees, elbows or backside poking through the back of a building when they think they're hiding. This is good if you're the attacker, but bad if you're the victim - you can often think you're suitably out-of-sight only to have someone fill your back with lead from the other side of the wall.
Three stars or four?
Very few games deserve 5-star rating at this point. The PS3 is still a relatively new platform and the developers are still learning how best to get everything they can out of it. Giving a game 5 stars implies the developers have nowhere left to turn for future improvements. This happens rarely.
COD4 is a three-star or four-star game but it's hard to choose which. In the end I went with four stars because of the fun factor. It's quick to pick up and the online play, despite the graphical and server glitches, has a high X-factor. It's hard to say what makes the game so much fun but it has that certain something that will probably keep you coming back. In the end, that's what it's all about. You can have all the hype and fanfare you like (are you listening Konami?), but if your game has spectacular graphics, a long and twisting storyline but no fun factor, people won't play it. COD4 has good graphics, good sound, mercifully little storyline and it's fun to play.
5 stars for fun. 4 overall.
COD4 PS3 July 16, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
One of the best games I've ever played. Addictive is putting it lightly. I used to think of the game all day long at work. Best online gaming, I don't even touch Halo anymore. I've had the game for at lest 5 months and I'm still playing online and missions. I only wish the game was longer! I've been ruined form the other games to follow. Best Graphic's and game play. Worth ever penny. Only thing that could have made it perfect... a con-op option in the actually mission levels. You can find me online iceman_jm.
Again, you should buy the game, it's worth every penny!
Amazing Game but Amazingly Short June 22, 2008
This is one of the best FPS I have ever played but I couldn't believe it when the credits started rolling after a couple of hours in a single player game.
I know there is more to the game playing online but i just was left wanting more.
Visually breathtaking, but short - 4 stars.
Genre defining June 22, 2008
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
First off, let me tell you some of my gaming character flaws. I have so-so hand-eye coordination, I'm constantly being distracted by my girlfriend, and I'm a very sore loser. I played Halo for all of two minutes before my eyes became bloodshot with anger and I threatened to chuck the controller out the window. I hate first person shooters or anything from that perspective to tell you the truth. So I didn't have very high expectations of this game, especially online. I expected to see a bunch of bunny hops and impossible sprint-run-headshot type of kills that you don't even see in action films.
Not to my surprise, I suck at this game. When playing online, if my kill to be-killed ratio is 50/50, that's a victory in my book. But despite my inherent video game character flaws, none of them ever manifest while playing this game. Everything is just so well done that the controller works with you instead of against you. The perks system and the balancing of the game mechanics works in such a way that even if you are getting your booty handed to you, you can feel that you have a chance to get the person that got you in the next encounter.
Ok, just a few negatives. Well, they aren't really negatives more like wishes for the next installment. I was actually kind of disappointed there is no online co-op for the storyline. I was also kind of disappointed that I could not customize my online character at all, just receiving randomn foot soldiers depending on what side of the conflict you end up on.
So what does all this mean? Basically what I am saying is I still hate FPSers and I'm still a sore loser, except when I'm playing Call of Duty 4. The game is so well done and so much fun, nothing else really matters. Isn't that why we play games in the first place?
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