Call of Duty 4 had me at "tracer-fire"

I have been blown away by Call of Duty 4. This doesn't happen to me that often where I am consumed by a game, but this one totally pulled it off. I was also consumed by Resistance (back in January of '07), but this is better in so many ways than Resistance.

For starters, COD4 looks gorgeous. I love everything from the level design (details like the bicycle on the hill in Russian countryside) to the general art direction and the framerate whch is kick-ass on PS3. The Chernobyl level is set as a flashback (brilliant use of story telling by the way) sniper mission set in a post-apocalyptic setting, over grown, destroyed, and partially on fire. The look here is depressing yet beautiful at the same time.

Let's not foget the writing which is equally well done considering how crap most games in this genre are written. COD4 is written intelligently and still remains climactic. There's a chase mission at the end of the game which is nicely done and the various slo-mo moments really help to plant the player into the world. I felt totally connected to the plot. The flash back to Cernobyl was especially nice. So often, you see writers take the easy way out by maybe going to a cinematic for these story points. However, I really like how here we actually get the opportunity to re-live the events, which make them far more meaningful to us the players. By comparison, RFOM was told in the past tense, so it sort of did this for the entire game, which also worked fine. It's sort of exempt from this criticism which one might still have of other games.

Lastly, the thing that left me feeling so much less annoyed than when playing RFOM, was the save mechanism. I'm so sick and tired of games that force you to replay a bunch of crap whenever you die. Nothing takes you further out of a linear-style game than this behavior. One reason for this is that you totally see the wizard behind the curtain when the same spawn points and trigger points are revealed upon replay after replay after replay...

On that note btw, I AM totally replaying this game on hard, since I played on normal the first time and had so much fun doing so. It's noticeably harder, but Im getting through it without too many re-dos. I can't wait for that Chernobly level again. That was truly amazing.

Go buy this game right now.