This year has been ALL about shooters, with few exceptions, such as Mass Effects, Assassin’s Creed and more. But we’ll talk about them later on. Right now we’re going to sum up what made Call of Duty 4 one of the greater shooters of 2007.

Call of Duty 4 – titled “Modern Warfare” is the first time when Infinity Ward is touching the modern warfare topic. The previous 3 games (2 of which were developed by IW) were set in the World War II era, and after the second game, IW decided that the topic is stale and they should go for modern combat. While they were making the fourth installment, another developer made CoD3 for PS3, the 360 and Wii as launch titles for the platforms. They were pretty much the same as CoD2, just other stories.

So what’s up with Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare? It’s a superb experience, that’s what. It’s multiplatform, with PC and Xbox 360 / PS3 being the landing places. The thing with Infinity Ward is that it is a developer that makes EVERYTHING perfect. So they had 4 teams developing 1 game. 1 team was responsible for the OVERALL game, while the 3 others focused on adapting that OVERALL game to the platforms. Also, each team had people assigned to it that were responsible for multiplayer. So instead of first developing the singleplayer and then switching to MP, the two were developed head to head, and as a rep from IW said, they wanted to focus on both and bring a truly epic experience – which they did.

Call of Duty 4’s singleplayer isn’t all that long – about 6 hours or so. When I finished it in a single evening, I had the wtflol face. Then I saw the Multiplayer button. Allrighty, pressed it and got onto Xbox Live. Wow, just wow. More about that a bit later.

So the single player – while not being too long – is a once in a life time experience that you’ll want to… uhh… experience more than once? Lol. Never mind. So Russians and Muslims are the bad guys, it’s up to you to save the world from a nuclear disaster and whatnot. And honestly, the story is just amazing. Unlike most “kill all bad guys save the world” games, the story is _really_ unpredictable and doesn’t end all that pretty. I’m not going to spoil it, but if you’ve played Metal Gear Solid games, you will definitely know what type of stories I’m talking about. No, it’s not filled with clones and cyborg ninjas, but it’s really intriguing…. And not everybody makes it to the end. You really grow attached to the characters. One of the missions has you sneak through a military base filled with enemies, and the game does an amazing job of guiding you through it. It actually feels that you have to keep your head down and not get spotted.

In other instances, you are never left alone. There is always someone besides you telling you what to do. So it’s impossible to get lost or don’t know what to do. Another mission – which is a flashback – has you going through an abandoned soviet city, climbing on top of a tower and sniping a guy – hitman style. And then you just rush for survival. The events are all pretty much scripted, but hey, it’s still awesome.

With multiplayer, you get a roleplaying part to it. You get to customize your character. While earning points ingame, you get promoted. Promotions open up new perks that you can use to customize your character. And also, they (promotions) open up new game modes. There is a good dozen of different game modes. Initially, all the noobs are thrown into team deathmatch, then things like domination open up (which is a conquest clone from Battlefield), and much more.

The graphics are…. Sub-par. Thing is, the games looks TERRIFIC. But it’s few tricks that make it look like it’s good, but actually it’s not. The game is 600p native resolution on the consoles and is upscaled up to 1080p. That causes a lot of jaggies. And while the textures are a bit low res, and there are no physics whatsoever, Call of Duty 4 still looks pretty sweet. And is definitely an experience worth checking out this year.