Call of Duty 4

My first introduction to CoD4 was on the xBox 360 at a mate’s house. “Here, play this - it’s great” he’d say, showing me a flashback where you stealth around the ruins of Pripyat in the Ukraine, the city that was evacuated because of the Chernobyl disaster. Stealthing around in a ghillie suit was fun in a way, but something lurked in my mind: I don’t like consoles. I don’t like how they age. I don’t like the idea of having zero control over the media, over of the lack of modding, over the price of games. Most of all, I hate the controls. A keyboard and mouse are such a better combination for accuracy than a malformed controller. Consoles make me feel distanced from the game, too. There you are, twelve feet away from the screen trying to take it all in. On a Mac or PC, you’re about a foot away, marvelling at the details or the little touches. In theory I could take a few steps forward to the TV and get a similar experience, but it’s not the same! Consoles are designed to be pickup and put down - quick and easy gaming. The Wii has got it right. It’s a simple experience in bundles of fun, but the Playstation and xBox series try and bring depth and persistence to something that for me, just isn’t the medium for depth or persistence. I say again: I hate consoles!

Not a good introduction to CoD4, I must say. But when CoD4 arrived in the post from Aspyr I was rather excited. CoD4 is a hugely popular game, both for it’s singleplayer that focuses on the modern rather than the by-gone wars of the previous games, and also for it’s multiplayer that’s quick and addictive and has taken the clan I’m a member of by storm. I was interested to see how the game plays on a Mac and how well Aspyr had faired porting it over.

As CoD4 focuses on modern warfare it’s RPGs, automatic silenced weaponry and night vision. Instead of large battling armies on coastlines or in bombed out cities, it’s small, elite squads in urban environments that are crowded and alive. Following the SAS and the USMC in a fictional (but bizarrely possible) story in the near future, you play a variety of roles, both past and present, in an attempt to take down Al-Ashad and an assortment of goons that are hoping to nuke the west. Chock full of unsubtle Aliens references (”I like to keep this handy for close encounters”), bingos and tangos - CoD4 catapults you into the vicious and challenging battles of the possible future. There’s an extensive range of missions from a cargo ship rolling around in bad weather full of tangos, to the misty mountains of Russia, all the way back to the close quartered combat of the inner city somewhere in the Middle East.

I find CoD4 dull. I dislike labelling things like that. One word answers? Inherently flawed. It’s not just boring. It’s something else, usually more complex or unconsidered. I dislike reductionism, but I feel CoD4 has reduced itself to a series of repeated acts - shoot, run, shoot, run, with nothing extra, nothing special, to define it. Graphically, the game is impressive. Glenda Adams of Aspyr stated in a recent interview that games like CoD4 have shaders so detailed that it’s added months to their development when porting them to the Mac. And it shows, the environments in CoD4 are stunning; smoke tumbling from bombed out houses into the darkened sky, laser sights feeling their way through the dust filled air. But graphics are the shine, the smoke and the mirrors. There needs to be something more.

Senseless violence can be liberating. It can be caveman. I applaud senseless violence (in video games only!) not because I wish to inflict violence on the people around me, but because it’s so damned taboo. And it can be downright hilarious! Kieron Gillian from Rock, Paper Shotgun writes about a marvelously violent experience in the game Syndicate:

We’re both wearing our biggest Bad Boy grins when something makes our faces fall. It’s a noise. High pitched and sharp, it cuts through the general aural melee of a city firefight. We realise its coming from the tiny people. They’re on fire. The explosion must have sprayed them with petrol or something, and now they’re reduced to living torches: Living torches in incredible pain. We sit, dumbfounded and disturbed. My brother’s the first to speak: “Kill them”. I open fire, trying to put them out of their misery…

Marvellous. This is what ultra-violence is about. So ridiculous that it’s somehow acceptable, even funny. Hell, do you even have to justify this level of comic, ultra violence? (For some reason, Total Recall comes to mind. You know, the bit when Arny (sorry, Doug Quaid) uses an innocent bystander as a bullet shield? Awful, unjust. But great!) CoD4 doesn’t know what or where it is. Instead of medics and medkits, CoD4 auto heals you. All you have to do is hide for a while when injured and you’re A-OK to take another grenade to the face. This isn’t realism, this is entertainment with a facade of depth and shine. Why have two incredibly violent cut-scenes, both depicting similar events on either sides of the moral and political quandry designed to cause the player to question the nature of authority, good, evil, right, wrong, and then forget about them? Auto heal them! CoD4 has this problem throughout. It takes elements of the current situation in the Middle East and throws petrol on them. Lights them up, makes some fairly uneducated leaps and jumps, and then auto heals, washes over the difficult bits with a soothing spray of mindlessness. The combination of elements and reasoning behind the game just don’t work.

In the mission Death From Above you protect the SAS on the ground using a AC-310 gunship. You’re the guy who sits using night and thermal vision and an assortment of high calibre weaponry, high in the sky. The mission itself is startlingly similar to footage I’ve seen of real combat footage from aircraft. The high contrast of the monitor, the hum of the aircraft, the detached feeling of combat. To be honest, this mission really weirded me out. It was too real. I don’t want to sit and pretend I’m killing people. Killing people is not cool! War is not cool! Something about the subject matter of the Middle East, the blasé attitude to life, the disparate elements, it was just too much. This coming from a fan of ultra-violence in film? The violence in CoD4 just seemed too permanent, too close to home.

I don’t like CoD4 for another reason, namely that it feels scripted - too scripted. Max Payne is one of the most scripted games I’ve ever played, but it used it’s linear and progressive nature to entertain the player in a way that’s not really been topped since it’s sequel. Where Max Payne had comedy and wonderfully scripted re-playable moments (hundreds of them), frankly CoD4 is on rails. At times those rails let you run up some stairs or flank the enemy instead of charging in, but it’s essentially a train ride. It seems that your squad are also on rails and have been asked, no - told - not to do anything. Your squad of bad ass, wise cracking death merchants manage to miss every single enemy, anywhere. It’s up to you, armed with your auto heal, to dish out the death. And that’s where CoD4 goes wrong - it’s just shooting. Over and over and over. Enemies on a hill. Enemies in a house. Enemies in a helicopter. Enemies in a truck. On rails.

I’ve no doubt that CoD4 took a huge amount of development to get right, but alas, it’s nothing special. It looks great, really it does. But it doesn’t play great, and that’s what’s important. It plays like a sub-standard game, another in a long line of a franchise that’s never going to end. Infinity Ward seem to have understood the need for depth, but failed somewhere along the lines. Attempting to expand something to a raw, in depth experience does not mean putting it on rails and scripting everything. When I saw CoD 4 originally on the 360 I was impressed with some of the dark moments in the game: a nuclear attack, an execution. But these play no part in the run and gun attitude of the game, they’re presented as fluff, nothing more than a stage. What could have been an interesting look at the way things are (or could be) turned into a fluff filled action pseudo-epic.

Something positive! Hats off to Aspyr: the game runs marvellously on my Mac Pro with all settings on High. Judging from the comments on my interview with Glenda from Aspyr, CoD4 runs fairly well on a range of Mac systems too.

Aspyr are currently working on the 1.7 patch for CoD4 to bring the game (read: the multiplayer) up to speed with the PC version. I’ll hold off reviewing the multiplayer side of CoD4 until it’s released.