Call of Duty 4 :Modern warfare sniper mission Review

Modern Warfare

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare is a first-person shooter video game, developed by Infinity Ward and published by Activision for Mac OS X, PlayStation 3, Windows, and Xbox 360. The game was released in North America, Australia, and Europe in November 2007 for video game consoles and Windows, and it was released for the Mac in September 2008. It is the fourth installment in the Call of Duty video game series, excluding expansion packs. The game breaks away from the World War II setting of previous games in the series and is instead set in modern times. Call of Duty 4 was in development for two years, and it uses a proprietary game engine. A sequel to Call of Duty 4 titled Modern Warfare 2 is due for release on November 10, 2009.

Call of Duty 4 as a whole, beside the gameplay and the story, has some of the best graphics I have seen in a next-gen game so far. My gripes and complaints from last year are finally being satiated. The experience is very cinematic, and it really pulls you into the game.

What, on the other hand, pulls you RIGHT out of the game is the AI. There are two circumstances in particular which drove me bat-shit crazy in the game. And these did just enough crazy-causing on my part to make me think that this isn’t worth a full 5/5“ now bare with me.

The biggest complaint about the AI is the fact that its constantly respawnable. If you want to take your time down that alley, taking that house, or rooftop the game will damn well let you take your time forever. Thats right. You can sit back and snipe all you want, but unless you charge superhero style headlong into that next room your guys arent going to do it, and the enemy isn’t just going to dry up. I cant tell you how many times I was stuck being shot at from all directions and thinking I’ll just take a few guys out then move up a little bit, only to have more take their place immediately. One of the biggest offenders (as far as situations go) is taking the TV studio.

The game was given considerable praise, receiving an aggregated score of 94% from both Game Rankings and Metacritic. The gameplay, multiplayer, and story received particular praise, while criticism targeted what was perceived as an inability to revolutionize the first-person shooter genre. The game won numerous awards from gaming websites, including IGN’s Best Xbox 360 Game. It was the top-selling game worldwide for 2007, reaching over seven million copies by January 2008, and over 13 million by May 2009.

Weapons :

The game’s move to modern warfare introduces new weapons and technology to the Call of Duty franchise, including the M4A1 carbine, the M203 grenade launcher, the AN/PEQ-2 Target Pointer for use in conjunction with night vision goggles, the MP5SD submachine gun, and the FGM-148 Javelin portable anti-tank guided missile.Players also have additional abilities, including a grenade launcher attachment, claymores with tripwire-like detonation (appears as a V-shaped motion sensor laser in-game), C-4, night-vision goggles, and the ability to call in airstrikes.A character can be positioned in one of three stances: standing, kneeling, or prone; each affecting the character’s rate of movement, accuracy, and stealth. Using cover helps the player avoid enemy fire or recover health after taking significant damage, as there are no armor or health powerups. When the character has taken damage, the edges of the screen glow red and the character’s heartbeat increases.

Plot:

The story unfolds with the televised execution of President Al-Fulani somewhere in the Middle East (no specific location is mentioned). You play the roles of John “Soap” MacTavish of the 22nd SAS Regiment and Paul Jackson of the USMC 1st Force Recon in attempts to quell an ultranationalist revolution aiming to restore the former Soviet Union. Imran Zakhaev, his son Victor, Kahled Al-Asad, and an unnamed second-in-command to the latter, together known as “The Four Horsemen,” must be eliminated. Espionage, airstrikes, nuclear detonations, and millions of empty shell casings ensue.

There are so many moments in this game that I have found to elicit school-boy glee. In one of the first USMC scenes, you make use of the Javelin anti-tank weapon. I’m sure fellow fans of “Future Weapons” got a kick out of that. Early showings of the game at E3 depicted ghillie-suited snipers in the Chernobyl disaster zone, infiltrating enemy lines. Stealth is rewarded immensely in that sequence and you eventually man a .50-caliber sniper rifle at a range of nearly a kilometer. However, the best part, by far, is when you are put into the gunner seat of an AC-130 “Spooky” Gunship. Through a thermal imaging camera, you are tasked with protecting the SAS squad on the ground using a 25mm gatling gun, a 40mm Bofors cannon, and a 105mm howitzer.Something foul is afoot in Russia and Britain’s Special Air Service knows it. Confirmation comes in the form of a nuclear warhead discovered during a nighttime tanker raid in stormy waters, the first true combat mission in the game.

Engaging the Enemy in Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare

Modern Warfare’s well-crafted narrative would be nothing without the action-packed missions that back it up. This is a game after all. Compared with Infinity Ward’s previous World War II-era Call of Duty games (the first and second, but not the third), Modern Warfare offers more open environments, more intelligent opposition and, best of all, some much-needed variety to break up the territorial battles of the previous games.

Mission goals are incredibly varied. You’ll rescue a variety of endangered friendlies, fight your way from house to house in search of a specific target, cut through heavy concentrations of enemy forces to reach an extraction point and even sneak through a crumbling city in a flashback sniper mission to Soviet Russia. And that’s just a relatively spoiler-free sampling of events from the first half of the game.

In addition, you put your character’s military training to use in a variety of ways within each mission. Forget the ‘cineractive’ button-pressing sequences of the last game, developed by Treyarch; Infinity Ward takes things in a completely different direction here. It’s telling that one of your first tasks in the game following the tanker raid is providing sniper support as friendly forces storm a heavily defended area. You’re not always the one to be leading the charge this time around. In addition, an impressive array of feats can be performed via D-pad button assignments; we saw air support requests, claymore mines, night vision goggles, secondary fire grenade launchers and more mapped to it during various missions.

There are also several on-rails shooting sequences which show up in just the right places to break up the run-and-gun. The most technically impressive of these is the oft-mentioned AC-130 mission, with three different turrets to choose from and convincing black and white visuals of the action on the ground. What’s more, these sections are just as challenging as the rest of the game. Rather than letting you catch your breath from the relative safety of your helicopter turret, Infinity Ward instead presents you with a differently flavored type of challenge during these on-rails sequences, a refreshing change for a mechanic which is too often used in other games as filler material.

Even Modern Warfare’s more “standard” run-and-gun missions impress, with multiple routes to a single objective or multiple objectives in an open space. The most important thing you’ll learn early on is that sticking with your fellow troops is tremendously valuable. They won’t always follow when you want to, but there’s nothing worse than storming an enemy-held building only to discover that friendly forces are not behind you to provide backup. Cue the re-spawn.

Whenever you do find that your allies are nowhere to be seen, it’s usually because they’re engaged elsewhere. The A.I. on both sides of the conflict is sharp and aggressive, particularly on the game’s Hardened difficulty setting or higher. In fact, it’s fair to say that Normal is too easy for most hardcore gamers. Any complaints which crop up about Call of Duty 4’s short length will likely come from those who set the difficulty too low. On average, Modern Warfare’s single player campaign should take most seasoned gamers between eight and 10 hours to complete. Finishing the game makes cheats available (which are individually unlocked by finding up to 30 hidden ‘enemy intel’ items scattered throughout the game) as well as a scored Arcade Mode in which the number of re-spawns is limited and every mission is timed.

Game engine

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare runs on a proprietary engine with features that include true world-dynamic lighting, HDR lighting effects, dynamic shadows and depth of field. “Bullet Penetration” is calculated by the engine, taking into account factors such as surface type and entity thickness. The game runs in a native resolution of 600p for its console versions.

Certain objects, such as cars and some buildings, are destructible. This makes distinguishing cover from concealment important, as the protection provided by objects such as wooden fences and thin walls do not completely protect players from harm. Bullet speed and stopping power are decreased after penetrating an object, and the decrease is dependent on the thickness and surface type of the object. The game makes use of a dynamic physics engine, not implemented in previous Call of Duty titles. Death animations are a combination of pre-set animations and ragdoll physics. Console versions of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare run at a consistent 60 frames per second. Code was included to determine spawning points based on the nearby weapons, and enemy positions and line of sight. The various criteria are meant to minimize players dying immediately after rejoining a match, or being “spawn-killed” due to players simply waiting for players to “respawn”.

The game engine has also been used for the development of two other Activision games. An enhanced version of the original engine was used in Call of Duty: World at War, the fifth installment in the Call of Duty series after Call of Duty 4, while a slightly altered version has been used for the James Bond video game Quantum of Solace.