I’ve been having a lot of fun with the Call of Duty 4 campaign this week. Between the Xbox Live downtime, and some problems with my ISP I have been unable to join multiplayer matches without lagging out mid-game, so I have returned to single player campaigns to keep me entertained.
I am a Bungie fan, and I loved the Halo series. After playing the campaign of all three games to death, the first thing that I noticed about Call of Duty 4 was how ‘gritty’ everything looked in comparison to the shinier more cartoonish look of the Halo 3 single player campaign. It immediately sent back to eight years ago when I was playing an entertaining FPS called ‘Delta Force 2′.
This game was introduced to me by two guys that I was on an IT course with, after listening to them talk about how great this game was they slipped me a CD-R and a slip of paper with a CD key. That night I had my first experience of Software Piracy and of Online FPS Multiplayer. For those of you wondering I went out and bought my own copy of the game that weekend; it still gets used on the odd nostalgic occasion, along with my copies of Dark Forces and Tie Fighter.
As I played the first few missions, I became amazed at the almost dual nature of the game. While playing as the SAS you have to play the game more like a stealth game like Splinter Cell than say a game like Halo where you can just charge in and let your shields take a pounding. Then you switch to the US Marine Corps, and the game changes slightly. You are now in pitched battles with insurgents. The usual tactics of sneaking up and knifing the opposition will not work. They know you are there and they want you dead.
This tonal change in gameplay threw me at first. I had done the SAS missions on Veteran difficulty without to many problems, but playing as a Marine was kicking my arse so hard it had turned me into a hunchback. I had to drop down to Normal to progress through the storyline. It amazed me how difficult more ‘realistic’ games could be compared to the typical sci-fi shooter I was used to playing. Grenades could, and routinely did take my legs out from underneath me. Death came on swift wings for me on more than one occasion, I was left staring at the screen wondering how I died.
For the first time in ages I actually found myself stopping to think before I acted. Even on Legendary in Halo 3 you could get away with infrequent acts of stupidity, but in COD4 stepping into a doorway without checking first could and would leave you face down in a pool of your own blood. After the initial confusion and frustration wore off I found myself quite fond of this game and cannot wait to get on to my ISP so I can jump into the multiplayer as well.
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