TAFA Times
Call of Duty 4Thursday, May 21, 2009 By Chase Kingsley
Call of Duty 4 – A Closer Look at Modern FPS’s. You may have heard already from your friends or have played it yourself, this game is said to be the most popular, latest and greatest FPS to come out for all platforms that is in the running with Halo 3. I, myself have put some long hard hours into this game and love it especially the game’s mechanics. First of all I am going to focus upon the multiplayer part in this game which is by all means the best part of this and probably the main focus of this game. It has a level system or rank’s if you will and you level up by gaining experience from getting kill’s in the game, unlocking achievements and a number of other ways including match bonuses. With a higher and higher level comes more weapons, more achievements to unlock to get you custom gun skin’s, sights and scopes and of course more skill at the game. As you progress in the ranks you will of course unlock new things each level but that’s for you to find out, I will tell you that when you reach the max level console users will gain something PC users wont. By console I mean an Xbox 360 or a PS3, this unlocks the ability for you to prestige up to ten times and this basically means loose all of your weapons, achievements and of course level. Now, moving on from the rank and prestige system I am going to cover the array of weapons that you unlock with each new level. When you first start out at level 1 you are granted 3 default classes of weapons and perks such as the main Assault class, Sniper class and the Demolition class. With a few more level gains you unlock the other two default classes and then once you reach a certain level you can make your own custom classes with your own choice of weapons, perks and grenades. I personally think this was a fabulous move on the game developer’s part because without this, this game would be missing a huge, huge chunk of game content. Another cool part about the custom classes is that with all that your already available to do by using a certain weapon you can unlock certain achievements for that gun that give you the ability to attach sites and scopes later on and the ability to put custom weapon skins on the weapon. This is available to every gun in the game and makes it that much more worth it to try out every gun for a while and maximize your arsenal accuracy and fashion wise. There are quite a few weapon classes so be prepared for that, and each weapon class has its own set of achievements and all of that wonderful stuff.You also unlock more side arms, also known as pistols throughout your game play such as the deadly Desert Eagle. I will say that each weapon class pays off at the end of achieving everything possible but I will also leave this up to you to figure out. On to the perk’s, what these do is basically just increase a certain aspect of your profile. As you progress in the ranks you will unlock perks which help your or give you certain features such as at level 39 you unlock a perk called Overkill which allows you to carry two main weapons instead of just one main weapon and one side arm. This is a nice perk if you want to go in for a frontlines assault or your have a special role in a game, your allowed 3 perk’s per custom class and the first one is giving yourself a choice of having special grenades or other explosives like C4 or even an RPG. The second one you can make whatever you want and the same with the third, like for the second one you can have the perk to sprint for longer distances and your third increases your accuracy when not looking through the sights of your weapon. In my personal opinion this is another important part of the game also to make it to either your advantage in a certain aspect or another aspect. Now that I have covered the custom classes’ part of online play I will begin discussing the game types in which you can play in multiplayer. There are a few to choose from and they are: Free for All, Team Deathmatch, Search and Destroy, Domination, Capture the Flag, Headquarters, and Sabotage. Most of the names are pretty straight forward such as Free for All or Capture the Flag; I will explain a few of the ones that aren’t so self explanatory. In Search and Destroy you objective as the offensive team is to find the bomb site and plant the bomb and then wait for it to go off and during this time the team on defense will be able to disarm it so keep an eye on the bomb; if it detonates your team has won the round. Your objective as the defensive team is to protect the bomb site from being destroyed with the bomb and there is a time limit to each round, you have a few ways of winning this time around; you can either wait for the time limit to run out or if the bomb has been planted you can go and disarm it to take another win for your team. I like this game type a lot myself and find it far more enjoyable than some of the others. The next game type I will be explaining is Headquarters, if you have ever played a game like Halo its exactly like King of the Hill; your objective as either of the team’s is to go to the randomly spawned radio equipment anywhere on the map and hold it until its setup and then you have to secure your headquarters for a short time. Doing this your team will score a lot of points and you will have won the round; if you failed to defend your headquarters the other team gains it and has the same chance to defend it as you did. When one of the team’s wins a new round will start and another random spot on the map will be chosen for the headquarters. The last game type I will explain is Domination, it’s like Headquarters but not quite the same; there will be specific areas on the map which are marked by colored flags and your goal is to go and capture them and you will get experience for capturing one of the areas as you would for getting a kill. Once one of the teams has gotten the certain amount of experience set your team will win the match. Respawns are sped up in this game type so the action never stops, it will also take a little bit to capture an area and the more people helping you capture the faster it goes. Now that I have talked about game type’s and explained a few of them I will talk about teams and maps. There are four overall teams that you can “be” on, They are the Spetnaz, U.S. Marines, S.A.S and OpFor; in games like Free for All it doesn’t matter which team you choose it then is just personal preference but in team games it matters because that will choose which team you play on. There are things that will give you or your team advantages in a game that have to deal with how many kills you get in a row, it’s sort of like a killing spree in Halo. 3 kills in a row will get and your team an active radar that every few seconds does sweeps to show where enemies are on the map, 5 kills in a row gets you an airstrike that is basically just like a carpet bombing all in a straight line but does massive damage. The pinnacle of these special additions to game play is 7 kills in a row which gets you a chopper that fly’s around the map for a while getting you kill’s unless it’s shot down by someone on the enemy team which is possible and would be helpful to do because it shoots at your teammates pretty heavily. This is basically an overall explanation but I left something’s out which you will have to figure out on your own. I will now talk about the single player experience for a while. I liked single player solely because of the storyline and quality of it, this was the only reason I played through and also maybe to test out some of the weapons in the game before you do in multiplayer. Its story is full of action and takes you over a course of events ranging in years from the present to give you whole basis of the story so you know what the background is to what is going on in the present of the game. It’s fun to kill time with if you don’t want to play multiplayer or are hesitant to jump right in without having any game experience. I played multiplayer first and thought it was a blast to play with people learning to game rather than by yourself. You play actually as two people in single player, one S.A.S Member and a Marine. So really in single player you have two events going on but later on it focuses more upon being a Marine rather than being an S.A.S unit because it would be hard to incorporate two totally different full length campaigns into to one game without confusing people or spending a lot of time on it and spending less detail on some more important parts of the game like multiplayer. As a marine you’re hot on the trail of terrorist leader Al-Asad and hunt him down throughout the Middle East after he executes one of the Middle East’s presidents which are allies with the US. Every once and a while when your able to play as an S.A.S operative you are doing missions which are flashbacks of the character “Soap” MacTavish and you take part in a number of special missions which makes the single player experience even better. Both characters in the game have missions that overlap of the current events that both are dealing with and it may seem confusing but it only makes the game better in my opinion. Overall I liked single player but to me this game is all about the Multiplayer because all of the fun, detail and quality is spent there but also in single player too. I think I have mostly gone over the concepts of the game and feel that there is not to much more to discuss rather than the upcoming expansion of the game which will be Modern Warfare 2 but, we will save that for another time. But I will inform you now that this is going to be a great expansion leading on from all the previous events in Modern Warfare and will put you in a whole new setting and plot to thrill you through another great Call of Duty game. The only thing that I do not know is how the multiplayer will turn out which is making me anxious because that’s my favorite part of the game and I’m sure I’m not the only one either. Hopefully I will get more information about it and some hands on time with it so I can make a follow up article with this one on the expansion of this draw-dropping game. I hoped you enjoy reading my article because I sure had a fun time writing it; that’s it for me guys I will see you next time. |