Call of Duty (4) is not a good game

So I've played through this game now and its not very good let me elucidate on that opinion:


Story

Starting with the least important part of almost all games story, games can give you a story in two main ways. The first as a consequence of the gameplay, happening dynamically from the way you interact with the environment you exist in. Like in Halo, Left 4 Dead, EDF or in a more structured way in Mass Effect, Fallout, Deus Ex etc.

The other crappier way is to just paste a standard narrative based story into a game usally presented in cutscenes, text or pseudo-cutscenes.

Call of Duty, following a pattern of choices for most of the game, goes for the crappier one. On top of how the uninspired the method of story telling is the actual story is really naff like a substandard episode of Ultimate Force and very confusingly told; about 10% the game is a flashback to ten years before the events of the rest of the game (the Chernobyl levels).

But forget the story whats at the core of what make this game so naff?

I managed to write a similar review a week after the game came out by watching a video of 'No Russian' and reading a plot synopsis on Wikipedia.

Fuck playing games.

For an interactive experience I enjoyed it for the 6/8 hours I played it. Would I play it again? No. Would I play the multiplayer? No

CoD4 was one of my least favourite "gaming" experiences ever. It bored me from start to finish, as did the (many) hours i put into the multiplayer.

Graphics

Using the creaking Quake 3 engine (1999), the game suffers from the same feeling you get from the later Halo games (which all use the same Halo 1 engine (2002)) where it looks current gen in screen shots but has a strange limited, 'last gen game, with a thin lick of next gen paint' when you play it. Compounded by a slightly limited FoV and not quite running in HD (600p fact fans), the game, while never looking really awful, never looks good, let alone great. Its WOW moments are almost all (Stormy boat landing/Driven to be executed/Dieing of radiation etc) restricted to background animation that you cannot interact with and thus may as well be FMV.

Anyone who wants to know more about why CoD4 is not a good game, check out the SWGP review!

http://tinyurl.com/swgCOD4