‘Member last week? With that Singleplayer overview? Yeah you probably didn’t read it either but now is the well anticipated Multiplayer overview of Call of Duty 4. Even though I’m still halfway through the white-knuckle Singleplayer campaign due to my preoccupation with Bioshock’s hard-ass “Historian” achievement, CoD4′s Multiplayer proves to be reason enough for my return to LIVE. The multiplayer is formidable in its undeniably large presentation without having to overwhelm the players, which is excellent on our side because of its replayability. What excited us the most is the premier Create-A-Class feature unlocked at Rank 5, Lance Corporal, or Corporal I forgot but what tops that is the multitude of gamemodes that builds upon the original CoD staples such as Objective, Sabotage, Tactical, Hardcore, and my personal favorite Ground War.

Despite the omission of a refreshed server list the game wittingly loads the player into a lobby with other similar players in a random map with the occasional long wait. At times it can be an awkward pain or it reduces the effort of having to search for an adequate server, though we didn’t come by too many annoyances or obstacles aside from the occasional “can’t-find-game-so-we’ll-make-you-a-host” BS. Considering our play Zone is Family, the matches we played on included some pretty laid back people due to the automatic matchmaking. Others may have to put up with different experiences with a little more… wackier characters. Other than that, CoD4′s multiplayer is undeniably an addition the game would be incomplete without. In fact- no for real- I was taking a break from a Ground War match in Overgrown during the time of this writing. Badass map.

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Nearly five years has the Call of Duty franchise progressed in the genre of Historic First Person Shooters. Call of Duty set the scale of soldiers not fighting alone but with an AI squad in the different Allied fronts against the ever persistent and hard-headed Nazi war machine. What distinguished the Call of Duty series was the often memorable scenarios where the player experiences the full intensity of a firefight where ambiance is key, in conjunction with visuals and audio. After the widely lauded Call of Duty 2 and the faithful though controversial Call of Duty 3, Infinity Ward finally decides to advance sixty or seventy years into the future of modern warfare.

Modern Warfare proves its namesake with the expected load of the Clancyian military intrigue comprised of Islamic extremism and Neo-Stalinist beliefs returning as a scourge to the modern world. In short a civil war begins in a still recovering Russia between the Democratic ultra nationalist military and the Neo-Communist rebel regime while an Iran/Khmer Rouge-esque military coup overthrows the government of an undisclosed Middle Eastern nation. In turn the superpowers of the US and UK set their own operations.

Gameplay-wise, nothing to shout about in comparison to the prior two console installments. With that said it is much more adventurous and “in-yur-face”. The two campaigns vary from each other by play style as the series did earlier. The British S.A.S missions are a more special operations approach where infiltrating, sabotage, and espionage is required whereas the U.S. Marine Force Recon missions involves directly hitting the targets in the middle of their territory in a fireteam style. While both groups are special forces, their scenarios defer distinctively.

Though the length or rather the alloted time of 6 to 10 hours depending on the difficulty, is disappointing but passable due to the trend of shortened next-gen shooters. What overshadows this flaw is the replayability in the form of a time-limited Arcade Mode and an amusing Cheat Mode, both of which are unlocked after the first completion of the campaign. Oh and theres an addictive multiplayer- but thats for the later entry due to time constraints. More like length constraints.

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