Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare PC Review San Francisco CA

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Ever since the very first release, the Call of Duty series has been considered a top tier shooting game time after time. Focusing on the very popular World War II era, the COD series always managed to combine cinematic story with action packed gameplay that oozed quality and attention to detail, taking home many GOTY awards over the years. Unfortunately for us PC junkies, COD 3 never made it to the world's best gaming platform and quite honestly it appeared that Activision were nevergoing to bring the series back. Fortunes change however, and with the release of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare comes the return of COD to the PC platform, and what a return it is.

COD 4: Modern Warfare, as the full title would suggest, is no longer based on the WWII era of warfare that defined the COD series. This must have been a tricky decision to make by Activision and developers Infinity Ward as while the WWII shooting genre was starting to reach its peak with COD 2 let alone COD 3, the modern warfare shooting genre is not exactly needy itself, already featuring considerable quality mainly from the Ghost Recon and Rainbow Six series.With this in mind, COD 4 really needed to be something special and something very impressive to take such titles on, and not only is this achieved, but COD 4 could quite easily be the best modern era shooter you have ever played, if not the best shooter in general.

With today's world of global terrorism and nuclear warheads spread across multiple powers, it isn't hard to imagine the type of storyline that the singleplayer campaign mode in COD 4 portrays. With some special exceptions aside, the vast majority of the campaign mode puts you the gamer into the shoes of either a British SAS soldier by the name of 'Soap', or a US Marine by the name of Sgt. Paul Jackson as you ultimately try to prevent notable figures in extremist Arabic and Russian factionsfrom securing and using nuclear arms on the Western nations. Most missions in the game are either located in the urban Middle East or country side Eastern Europe regions although a few exceptions exist here and there.

The first impression you'll get from the gameplay in COD 4 is just how well rounded and solid the engine is. The feel as you move about is very authentic, from the kick back on the game's many included real world guns to the earth shattering physics of explosions. Even the very simple stuff like being able to hurdle objects and obstacles to effectively using objects as cover shows not only how much attention was directed at making the small but important things work right but it also shows the emphasisput on the engine to be versatile enough so it wouldn't restrict any of the action. There is no better proof for this than the game's variation, and by that I don't just mean changes in scenery and changing in weapon types - I mean variation in the core gameplay itself.