Review: Call of Duty 4

When the CoD4 online multi-player servers find a shred of cohesiveness and manage to get every player in the room into a match, it's like unlocking the wardrobe door to Narnia. There's a bit of euphoric bliss and amazement, followed by a lot of war and death.

For the past two weeks now, since Christmas, Xbox Live has been broken. There have been so many people trying to play online with bad code, that your lucky if you get in three rounds of play in an hour. And people are trying. Because this game is awesome.

Online aside, the single player campaign is probably the most visceral 1st-person war shooter game to date. Everything in the game screams realism. Especially in an AC-130 shooting through night vision. And things that normally hamper a single player campaign aren't evident in CoD4. No annoying computer A.I. that get in the way or don't do their job. Stupid enemy A.I. that run out of cover just to be shot. Repetitive levels with no design. It really shows the work that Infinity Ward put into their game.

flashbackSo far my favorite levels are the AC-130 leve, Death from Above and the sniper mission, All Ghillied Up (the videos don't do this game justice for realism). But every level, really, makes you feel tense and eagle eyed, because this is one of the few games that really makes you realize that if you shot someone with a real gun, it really doesn't take much to hurt them. I don't own a gun for that very reason. And for the same reason, I found myself discarding my usual tactics of head first, shoot fast and adopting a much more self preservative style, often letting my A.I. teammates breach the next corridor and allowing me to come in and clean up.

I think the reason that the online game gets me so riled up is the fact that I like sneaky, hiding games. It reminds me of hide and seek as a kid and that I always preferred hiding as opposed to the seeking. There's a bit of ingenuity, patience, and voyeurism involved. I always wanted to wait for the seeker to walk by, unassumingly, and then jump out my hiding place and scare their pants off. So many times, I think I'm backing into a corner on a street and end up getting shot. If it weren't for the KillCam showing me where I was shot from, I'd swear someone was cheating by glitching their gun through a wall. And half the time it's a guess-grenade being chucked from a block away that just happens to land right next to me, primed and ready to blow.

Sadly, every time I try to play it online, because I finished the campaign, the room closes by itself or the connection drops because of all the server problems. I hope this game gets cleaned up over the next month. I'm still plenty busy with all the games in The Orange Box and Mass Effect. If it weren't for server problems, I don't even know how much I'd be playing these offline games. So maybe it's a blessing.