Okay... so after a hell of a long time not giving a shit about this game or really being inclined to try it, I decided to bite the bullet and do it. Mostly it's because I've recently been getting bugged about taking my gun to the range with a buddy, and finally got ahold of some ammo, so been in the mood for something with guns (and not magical space monkey guns like Borderlands). It isn't that often I get in the mood for a military shooter, but when that happens, there's really nothing I can do but go play one... and since there isn't anything else that's come out in the last while that sounded appealing, I stopped by the MUS and grabbed a copy of CoD4. I figured it was time to see if the hype was really true and whether or not I'd have to eventually come around to the dark side like most everyone else.
I haven't beaten it yet (within a couple missions of the end), but I'll say this... it's both better than I expected and worse than I expected.
I won't say that I'm not having a good time, though. I can definitely see why it gets people excited. Some of the characters are well portrayed even if this isn't an even remotely character-driven game... but there's enough personality there to make you worry about them if they're in a jam. The set pieces are jaw-droppingly awesome. The first couple were pretty averagey, but then they really picked up and got very convincing in a hurry. Pripyat in particular was really well done, and I'd say that mission alone made the game worth playing for me. And as iPPi mentioned in the MW2 thread, there are some big "wow" moments that do make you sit back and take it all in, and some of the gameplay segments are pretty good and intense.
So that's the stuff that surprised me a little bit and made me think, yeah, people weren't kidding about this game. The counterpart to this is the fact that the game just feels... sort of thin. I don't know exactly how to say this, but some games just feel beefy. They have a real sense of tangibility to them. This game lacks that utterly. The player movement is too smooth and fast a lot of the time, has no sense of momentum, and everything just feels kind of floaty, like it was made of paper. Some of the guns are perfectly fine, but a lot of them feel really thin and unsatisfying, not so much because they don't get the job done mechanically within the game, but because there's just no sense of weight or punch. The player feels to me like a disembodied head that floats around with a gun sticking out of its chin. There's just no sense at all of really being there, which is in stark contrast to the well-modeled companions you have and the pretty convincing environments. This is made even worse by the couple times when you pick people up and carry them around, and they instantly disappear behind the camera, and no matter how you turn your head, you can't see them. That's just fucking terrible.
The other major issue I have with the campaign is just how poorly designed a lot of objectives are. I get that it's a heavily scripted game, but it's way, way too fucking scripted. There was one mission in which I made it to a waypoint I was supposed to go to, but even though I took the quickest and most logical route, it wasn't the one they wanted me to take, and thus my squad didn't follow. I literally spent 10 minutes trying to figure out how the fuck they actually wanted me to go, and it turned out to pretty much be the longest and most uselessly roundabout way there was, since every time I tried to take a shorter and more obvious route, nobody would follow me. That's just pathetic. On top of that, a lot of the objectives are just... really vague. It's like, "Hey, go do this thing I'm sort of only half explaining! You'll figure it out!" Then die when you don't figure it out, and repeat the process until you eventually do. And it happens tons of times, with everything. "Oh, those endless enemies that wouldn't stop spawning before? Now they end after this objective has been completed, but you have to kill the remainder first. But you don't know that, so just wander around until you figure it out." And it's like... what do you mean you want me to get to the LZ on the other end of the field with 8 billion fucking dudes and no cover? Take point? What, do you hate me that much, captain? Fine, I get it, I'll just go kill myself. I ran into that kind of just really backward-feeling development an awful lot in the game, and it was a pretty major irritation for me.
I was also unimpressed by the multiplayer. Now I'll say right off the bat that I didn't get to experience it for real, since I had no choice but to play with the PeZBOT mod, but the problem is that straight off you lose all the stuff about the SP that makes it feel so cool, and you're left instead with a somewhat uneven mix of weapons and set pieces that just don't carry the weight they do in the SP. The combat isn't bad by any means, but it's hardly the best thing ever. I can think of a lot of shooters in which I enjoyed the actual shooting a good deal more than this one. Surprisingly, though, I kind of like the leveling up mechanic, and I think that's solely because I'm playing with bots rather than real people. It's sort of cool to feel like you're getting some persistent rewards for continuing to play, but I still can't wrap my head around how that balances out.
So yeah... it's a weird mix for me. Would I have paid $60 for this? No way in hell. I've barely touched it and I'm nearly done, and I honestly don't think it would hold a great deal of appeal for me going through it a second time. Certain parts, perhaps, but some of the worst parts really drag it down and would seem like a chore to go through again. If the actual design of the game was better, objectives were more clear, and the game was smart enough to let you at least occasionally step off the beaten track for even just a short moment or two, then I could see playing it through several times and really getting into it. As it stands, while I definitely see what the buzz was about, this strikes me as another colossally overrated game that could have easily been a thousand times better had more time been taken with the design. But even as it stands, this definitely warrants playing at $20 or so, even if just for those couple of epiphany moments where the game manages to transcend its shortcomings and just feel like something truly special (the Pripyat mission did that for me).
