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I was given Call of Duty 4 for Christmas, and have played it a number of hours. And, I feel there are a number of things wrong with this game.

First of all, the single player game difficulty is ridiculous. Some missions are extremely easy and others are extremely hard. If you play on increased difficulty settings, you’ll find that the average skill of the opponents increases, but only because there are more magical, machine-gunning enemies. These guys can snipe you from a mile a way with an AK-47 that has infinite ammo, as far as I can tell. No joke about the sniping thing either because on the “One Shot, One Kill” escape where you are wielding a sniper rifle, I find it very difficult to even see them sometimes, but they find me every time.

In contrast to the failure extreme increases in difficulty, your “team” never improves. This becomes very apparent if you spend any amount of time wearing the night-vision scopes because you can see their aiming flailing about. That part doesn’t bother me so much as the fact that because they are so bad, the game has to treat them differently with respect to the opponents. Just because you see your teammate standing in a hallway does not mean the hallway is clear; I find that on the “hardened” difficulty, this often leads to surprise deaths from those magical, machine-gunners. They expect you to flashbang the hallway and take them out, which is fine, but I get misled by the fact that my teammate is already standing in the middle of it. Why doesn’t he take cover?! I realize he isn’t allowed to die, but geez.

In both multiplayer and single player, I am tired of the “last stand” nonsense. I find it equally annoying in both modes of play. You kill a guy, but oh wait, he isn’t dead; he gets to shoot you with a pistol from the ground. Or, more annoyingly, he drops a grenade which you often find yourself unable to run away from in a timely fashion. Which brings up another complaint, the grenades: how hard would it be to tell me how far away it is so that I can decide whether to run away or try to throw it back. From playing the single player missions, I’ve found that I often don’t need to move despite the indicator being on the screen, so it’s impossible to know your fate simply because the indicator came on the screen.

Another complaint about the single player game is how random it is. Most of the really difficult missions seem to come down to random chance. I demonstrated to my brother how random the game is by being in a life-or-death situation at the start of saved game; you can do absolutely nothing and sometimes you’ll die and sometimes you’ll live, never know. This has a serious impact on gameplay for me, because I feel like my skill has little input into the result. And the way enemy spawning is done doesn’t exactly lend itself to skilled play; it is often best to just go in hard and fast to get the next checkpoint. Otherwise, an infinite number of bad guys will just keep coming your way.

And perhaps the most annoying thing for me in the game is the dogs. On the “One Shot, One Kill” escape, I found myself having to restart an absurd number of times because the dogs killed me. You basically get one chance to kill the dog before it bites your neck off.. and it’s not that the timing is so bad, it’s that it’s mapped to the same button you use to knife the dog prior to it jumping on you. More often than not, I would miss grabbing the dog because I was trying to knife it. So anymore, I just let the dog jump on me so that I don’t miss the grab. This has the unfortunate side-effect that I am rendered useless for precious seconds of the game and, most importantly, standing upright. Somehow you can go from being prone, jumped on by a dog, to standing upright, go figure on that one.

If it wasn’t obvious, I’m right now stuck within mere minutes of the end of the game in one of those impossible fights with impossibly great machine-gunners..

Monday, January 7th, 2008 at 10:17 am.
Filed under Games, General, Ranting.
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