50 Years of Video Games: Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (PS3)
Prior to 2007’s Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, there were plenty of successful first-person shooters that left their mark on the video game industry. Halo, Doom, Goldeneye, all of them had their imitators, but Call of Duty 4 changed the market, many other developers rushing to make their own gritty shooters to try and ride the same gravy train. Up until then though the Call of Duty franchise was just another name in the military shooter game, it certainly having some advantages over the competition but it was the fourth installment’s decision to place the gun fights in the present, build a multiplayer system that rewarded constant online play, and the embrace of console-based shooters that really propelled it to the point that it could pull off a franchise where they could release yearly entries that sell exceptionally well.
Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare actually takes place a few years in the future at the time of release, being set in 2011 instead of 2007 and skirting around real conflicts of the time by introducing a new threat that mirrored the tensions in the Middle East and lingering worries about Russia at the time but didn’t directly reference any group. Over in Russia a group of Ultranationalists are aiming to take over the country and using an unspecified country in the Middle East as part of their destabilization efforts, a radical revolutionary named Khaled Al-Asad dethroning the president and galvanizing the citizens to fight back against the influence of Western powers. While any game alluding to a controversial war can risk making it hard to actually turn your gun against the enemy, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare makes sure to show these radicals in particular are too dangerous to leave alone, one effective early portion of the game not having you play as a marine with an assault rifle but the president Al-Asad is preparing to execute as he’s driven to his doom. As you are ferried through the war-torn city you see the lengths this group is willing to go to in order to seize power and enforce their ideology upon the nation, innocents gunned down in the street with little justification or provocation. It’s a surprisingly dark idea to be a helpless man only able to watch as you’re taxied to your imminent demise, just one of a few moments the game isn’t afraid to take a look at some of the worse aspects of war without any attempt to gussy things up behind a veil of patriotic fervor.
The game doesn’t truly dip into emphasizing the horrors of war, but it doesn’t shy away from some of the rougher realities, the game not even guaranteeing that good men can make it to the end of this conflict alive. For most of the story you will be playing as one of two characters, one being a British SAS sergeant known by the nickname Soap and the other being U.S. Marine Sergeant Jackson, Soap primarily fighting in secret ops over in Russia to take down the Ultranationalists while Jackson is deployed in the Middle East to directly challenge Al-Asad’s forces. The mission structure is quite different between the two even with gunfights as the baseline gameplay and even within their parts of the story they can shift quite drastically, but one thing that does remain rather consistent is the game’s emphasis on working together as a team. Your soldier is almost never alone, always moving with at least another soldier by your side to face the enemies ahead. Most missions have a small squad by your side providing cover fire and actually doing fairly well at taking down some troops on their own, although you will be doing the bulk of the work when it comes to thinning enemy ranks. However, your companions are constantly reminding you of their presence as they work together with the player to make progress, and while it can be a bit easy to accidentally shoot them in a firefight which can cause a restart from a recent checkpoint, it does truly feel like you’re working with a team on the operation, especially when they bring in backup like helicopter coverage or even a tank. In fact, while some missions have you slinking around in the dark with a small set of allies, others can be structured as full on invasions where the city is filled with troops on both sides, the work put in to make it look more like a war rather than some roguish hero heading into battle alone.
The campaign’s mission structure provides plenty of surprisingly memorable moments, some of course sticking in your mind like the bombastic push by the U.S. military when they try to take down Al-Asad once and for all but others thriving more on interesting set pieces or breaks from the normal play style. There are definitely plenty of small gun fights in the arid streets of a Middle Eastern city and Soap spends a fair bit of time in the grassy Russian countryside, but these will be broken up by a siege on a television station or a visit to a small village where the buildings are packed with enemy gunmen. While the path forward is almost always clear thanks to objective markers, the game makes it about more than moving from Point A to Point B by having little open areas where you can find plenty of cover or alternate routes to attack the enemy from. Flanking, entering nearby buildings, sticking with the squad or trying to break off to avoid the focus of the gunfire, these approaches are catered to and if you do die attempting one you’re not just stuck trying to repeat the same tactic until your aim is good enough to clear away every enemy. Some don’t even play in the same manner as others, one having you man a gunship that views the night time action with a filter and needs to aim its pinpoint strikes to try and hit tiny human targets.
Perhaps the most famous level of the game, All Ghillied Up, emphasizes this more than other stages. Captain Price of the SAS is already an interesting character with his tough love approach to caring for the group of troops Soap is a part of, but for All Ghillied Up you get to play as him in a flashback that begins first with a segment that can be approached in many different ways. It’s a mission where, if you so chose, you can avoid most every soldier so long as you sneak well, you can engage with small skirmishes if you think you can clear them quickly, or if you’re feeling lucky you can try to blast your way despite it being much harder if you give up your cover. While the freedom of choice is captivating and plays well into the game’s idea of having small segments that provide many potential approaches to the goal, it also leads into a memorable sniping mission, a high energy escape, and a segment where you need to hold your ground in an abandoned amusement park as a flood of soldiers pour in to assault you and your injured commanding officer. On higher difficulties this portion can be especially challenging but the mission concept alone helps it stand tall as it keeps shifting the kind of action you’re involved in while valuing your input on how it will unfold.
There are many other moments in the campaign that stand out for their setting and its evolution, the game having a fairly early mission aboard a ship for a location type that is incredibly different from what you encounter later and introduces not only gameplay basics to you but also shows how a stage can shift its concept as the end of it involves trying to navigate the vessel as it takes damage and begins to sink. Many of the campaign levels are retooled for the competitive multiplayer mode, that dual purpose design definitely one reason the main story is able to have levels with more open plans and approaches while also serving well for deathmatches thanks to interconnected designs and the extra space for plenty of players to run about. There is one unfortunate caveat to add here in that the online multiplayer for Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare is no longer functional on PS3 and I even needed to disable online connection entirely to play it as a warning when the game started otherwise didn’t let me proceed, although the PC version does have workarounds and you can still do splitscreen multiplayer or set up a LAN with multiple consoles to access the mode. You won’t get the progression that made this game so addictive in its time, but going up against other human players in such well designed maps can still be exciting and a nice extra way to play on top of having an excellent campaign for a grounded military shooter.
There is one little thing about the gun fights in the story and multiplayer that keeps them from being as engaging as they could be, this being the time it takes for most guns to kill a target. Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare uses a health system where you can survive taking fire so long as you avoid it for a short while, recovery automatic and thus able to allow the game to sometimes press harder on you in the story since you can bounce back from a quick bit of damage. In the campaign the game can balance this pretty well, the player facing many enemies at once and understanding pretty well when they die because they were overwhelmed numberwise or hit with specific weapons, grenades even having a special indicator pop up since they can be so deadly but you also can hurl them back at the enemy before they blow if you’re feeling daring. Conversely though, your weapons can chew through the enemy soldiers rather quickly, every bullet not a guaranteed kill by any means but the automatic weapons on offer fire quickly enough to usually end them if you have them in your sights. This works well in a story where you face constant opposition from large numbers of troops at once, the firefight as the whole a challenge and enemy reinforcements not only abundant but sometimes essentially infinite if you loiter too long rather than pressing forward.
The weapons being so effective can lead to many of them feeling rather similar. There are appreciable differences between the many automatics in this game’s arsenal, recoil making it harder to sustain fire for example and possibly preventing you from quickly landing the few bullets needed to end someone, but it can sometimes feel like clip size is the major difference between them. The M249 SAW stands out for having 100 bullets to a clip and taking a long time to reload as the price for it and some guns do have things like a grenade launcher attachment to better differentiate them, but even the shotguns can be surprisingly strong at range. A sniper rifle’s slow fire and focus on fighting at a distance and obviously the rocket launchers won’t play the same as automatics, even having some differentiation with the RPG-7 being a traditional rocket firing weapon while the FIM-92 Stinger locks onto targets. Where we hit our issues is in multiplayer though, the competitive play certainly still exciting because of the map design but when you encounter another player it can often feel like a fastest finger contest or you might not even see them before their gun quickly ended you before you even realized you weren’t alone. Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare is definitely better played with a larger group as smaller skirmishes are often too quick, game modes that emphasize things like defending points benefiting by centralizing the action so multiple gunners are running around an area rather than a slow hunt where things are brief flashes of action that end a bit too quickly.
The multiplayer uses a loadout system where you are able to swap between them on death but are locked into the weapons you bring with you per life. There is an Old School mode that evens the playing field with all weapons found throughout the map, but most modes like the kill count race Deathmatches involve you picking a weapon set up and going into battle. Limited to a main gun, sidearm, and a grenade, it can become a bit of a race to the middle as trying to be eccentric with your choices leaves you less capable of responding to shifting battlefield situations or unexpected encounters and so the automatics become king. Perks are a more interesting part of the loadout system though, players able to pick a set of extra abilities to enhance their unique capabilities. The gunplay already features an interesting touch where firing at certain types of cover or walls can let your bullets pass through but you can use a perk to make that more likely, Overkill lets you swap out that sidearm for a secondary like a shotgun so you can dabble in other weapon types more, and some even introduce new ways to fight like the player pulling out a pistol on death and firing as they fade. Multiple perks can be set and some need to be earned but these do help mitigate some of the centralization and open up your options a bit more, and people who do play the game more can no doubt start to see where certain weapon types line up with these extra abilities to make the usually small differences more meaningful.
If you do manage to get a few kills in a row without dying yourself in multiplayer, you can get kill streak actions. When it’s only three kills you call in a UAV to reveal enemies on radar, a helpful tool but not quite as game changing as getting an airstrike or attack helicopter to provide back up at five and seven kills in a row respectively. These definitely fit into the school of “win more” options where an already skilled player is given the means to further gain an edge against the competition, and while it can be satisfying to deploy one, it’s a strange bit of skewed balance towards people already better at the game and since killing others and not dying is already the main point, it doesn’t really drive players to play too differently. The structure of kill count focused modes does make people value an individual life less though so it could be a way to try and make them more cautious instead of blindly running into the fray looking for trouble so you can at least try to avoid feeding the kill streaks to prevent snowballing.
THE VERDICT: While the multiplayer has a few rickety ideas like its implementation of kill streaks and quick player kills, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare also offsets those with a deep perk system and map designs that keep the action exciting and varied even if death is a little too quick at times. The campaign has very few major blemishes to it though, the incredible variety in mission concept and the contained openness to many firefights allowing for battles with varied approach options and memorable set pieces. The story isn’t afraid to break from the gun firing action to set the stage, show a less glorious side of war, or slow things down for a segment with a different feel, the player presented plenty of different engaging ways to play before the multiplayer gives the game a longer life under the right conditions.
And so, I give Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare for PlayStation 3…
A GREAT rating. Designing a multiplayer component with long term appeal is a difficult one, Call of Duty likely leaning on the simple satisfaction of kill streak kills and a progression system to earn the perks that open up the multiplayer to give the player some goals and surges of exciting change to keep players on board. It’s not always the best for keeping the playing field even, but at least some ideas do start to ensure the multiplayer won’t absolutely stagnate into running around playing “who saw who first” with a set of similar automatic weapons. If it could have embraced it inherently without needing to lean on long term adjustments earned through immersion in the play then the multiplayer wouldn’t have a barrier to entry and periods where things feel unfortunately skewed, but the broader whole of the game’s design does mean that it can still work even at its most basic and the story mode ends up so memorable because of the tight reins the developers have on varying up its battle conditions. Stages can test the player’s abilities and strategies more actively and introduce segments that play into different weapon options or provide enemy placements that actively encourage breaking out a new tactic, and while Soap and Jackson are pretty basic leads, it is easy to get attached to Price and other troops during the story’s events. The broader picture of the plot provides many memorable moments even if it’s mostly working to get you to another cool idea for somewhere you can get in a large and layered series of gun fights, but taking the time to sometimes accentuate other aspects of the war than the ground troops at work does keep this from becoming a string of excuses to do cool things. Having the focus on the broader war also lets your squadmates shine as part of the firefights as well without sacrificing the difficulty, and while you can sometimes see the systems at work when enemies keep popping out of a doorway until you push forward, it doesn’t change the fact that the battles are laid out well to keep you on your toes and fighting in situations that don’t feel samey.
Like any trendsetter, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare is better than the complaints laid at its feet for what its low quality imitators did following its release. Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare tries to do more with its war setting than give you a reason to shoot other people, it structures missions in a wide variety of ways instead of being corridors you travel down to shoot people, and some of the balance issues in regards to things like kill streaks really didn’t harm things too much until they got out of control in future games. Setting the war in then-modern times helped Call of Duty set itself apart from the plethora of World War II first person shooters, but it was a mix of creativity and systems like the recovering health that really helped it influence the shape of the genre for years to come.