Call of Duty 4: A Love/Hate Relationship
I’ve gotten a lot of mileage out of Call of Duty 4, playing with my friends during LANs, playing online, and playing through the campaign multiple times. But I’m not here to review or explain Call of Duty 4. I’m here to tell you why I love it, and why I hate it.
First off, Call of Duty is probably the new benchmark for FPS multiplayer action games. It started with the original, then with Call of Duty 2, and now Call of Duty 4. Plenty of people play it, and plenty of people enjoy it. We’ll start off with the reasons why Call of Duty is incredibly frustrating and sometimes just plain not fun.
It’s no mystery that the spawn system on Call of Duty 4 is atrocious. It finds a ‘safe’ spot around a random teammate and spawns you there, nevermind if an airstrike was called in on that particular location, or if there’s a group of enemies
crowding around that area. Getting killed with a grenade, airstrike, or just regular gunfire as soon as you spawn is sadly not very uncommon. Why this was never adjusted in patches, I don’t know, but as it stands right now, it’s pretty ridiculous.
Of course, there’s also bunny-hopping. Bunny-hopping has been around in FPS games for quite some time, I think the term got the most notoriety from Counter-Strike, but for those of you not in the know, it’s when a player who is getting shot
at will jump up and to the side, sometimes multiple times in rapid succession. It’s most common with shotgun users, and while most people will complain about juggernaut (which is pretty stupid, in my opinion, since all it takes is one more
bullet), I consider this tactic to be far more annoying. The worst part is, there’s really no penalty for it. Your accuracy doesn’t suffer that much when you’re jumping, and with shotguns obviously it doesn’t matter how much it would
suffer. Players might argue that it’s a viable tactic, and sure, it works, but if it’s necessary for a player to bunny-hop in order to stay alive and kill someone else, then I don’t understand the satisfaction in playing.
Damage also seems, at times, to be completely random. There are multiple occasions where I’ve shot someone once or maybe twice in the chest and they’ve dropped, and on the other hand, I’ve shot someone with almost half a magazine, maybe 8 or 9 out of 15 rounds making absolute contact, and they’ve still been standing, only to finish me off with a single round. These tests were done with the AK-47, using Stopping Power and Steady Aim. I don’t quite understand why damage would differ so drastically, as I’ve read into multiple weapon analyzations for the game, and while range is a factor in how much damage a bullet does, the tests I followed through with during a few games where at generally the same range, mostly close to medium range. In fact, damage has become so seemingly random to me, that I’ve resorted to using my firearm ‘secondary’ and my knife as ‘primary’. In most of the games I’ve played recently, the majority of my kills were from using the knife.
Plenty of people complain about grenades across all Call of Duty games as well. While they attempted to fix the grave error they made in Call of Duty 2, where everyone spawned with FOUR grenades, by reducing the number of grenades a player spawns with to one grenade. There’s a perk that gives you three, instead of one, but it’s a step in the right direction. Despite this limitation, ‘grenade spam’ and ‘random grenade kills’ are still very much prevalent in Call of Duty 4. Here’s something fun you can try at home, kids; load up a multiplayer match for Call of Duty 4, find a server that has twelve or more players, listen closely. Begin counting off the time it takes from the sound of one grenade hitting the ground and exploding, to the next. Not very long, is it? This is commonplace in most games, unfortunately. Though you have the ability to throw back grenades, most players will cook grenades for two seconds at least, so by the time you’ve managed to pick up the grenade, it’ll have exploded either in your hand, or just as it leaves your hand, killing you regardless. Most players just cut and run when they see the grenade indicator.
Grenade launchers and a perk called ‘Martyrdom’, which drops a live grenade from your corpse when you die, are also consider an annoyance throughout most of the CoD 4 community. So much so, in fact, that quite a few servers have banned the use of grenade launchers and Maryrdom. The reason as to why Martyrdom is so disliked, is because the fuse on the grenade that’s dropped when a player dies is about 2.5 seconds, definitely not enough time to pick up and throw away unless you know the player has Martyrdom and are able to grab it immediately. Naturally, this is even more difficult when you’re combating more than one player. The problem many people have with grenade launchers is, much like grenades, these can be spammed, only they’re much more controllable and explode on impact, rather than on a timer. There’s an arming distance for them, so while you can kill someone instantly by shooting them with an unarmed grenade, the grenade won’t explode unless it has flown for a certain period of time. Instead of being used for room clearing and taking out groups, they’re generally just used like any other weapon; killing single targets instantly. Personally, I don’t mind grenade launchers all that much, Martyrdom annoys me mildly, but I can tolerate it if there isn’t a server full of people using it.
However, all is not lost. Call of Duty 4 has some great things going for it that keep the game enjoyable for me.
The perk system is really great, for one. I’ve redone my custom classes over and over again, just experimenting with different perk combinations and seeing how well they work in conjuction with certain weapons. While probably the most commonly used perk ‘pack’ would be Bandolier, Stopping Power, and Steady Aim, you sometimes get to see some really clever perk combinations in action, and that’s always cool to see.
Knife kills are incredibly satisfying. Granted, in the heat of the action I sometimes forget I have one when I’m in a close proximity firefight, when I manage to remember I have one, there’s nothing better than weaving a bit and stabbing someone in the eye while they’re unloading a magazine in your general direction. Though it’s never really advised that you charge someone who’s already noticed you and has opened fire, ambushing someone from behind or around a corner is a great way to get knife kills. Using a silencer, UAV Jammer, and Dead Silence almost ensures you’ll get at least a handful of them at any given time, couple those with Bomb Squad and you’ll usually never have to face an embarassing sniper trap when you were on your way to rearrange his spine.
When teams actually work together instead of splitting off on their own, which sadly usually happens, you can get some truly awesome moments from multiplayer matches. Moving in a group of two or more may make you effectively a larger target, or ‘two for the price of one’ for a grenade, but the benefits can far outweigh that when you’re all room clearing together, sweeping 360 during movement, and teaming up on lone targets. The point whores will argue that doing something like that would take away from their precious kill count, which is fine if that’s how they choose to play, but I personally don’t just play to see how ‘heug my e-pen0r can get’, I play for fun.
Despite some pretty frustrating and glaring shortcomings, I continue to play Call of Duty 4 and have my ‘good’ and ‘bad’ days. Lately, the ‘bad’ days seem to be outweighing the ‘good’, but that probably has something to do with the sizes of the servers I play on. I find that anything larger than a 32, and in some cases a 20, player server generally ends up being a cluster-fuck of getting spawn killed, grenade and airstrike spammed, consistantly flanked from all angles, and generally you winding up dead before you even know what happened. I do better, and tend to enjoy playing, on smaller servers. Anywhere from 10 to 20 players and everything in between. It makes me somewhat jealous of the Xbox 360 Call of Duty 4 players, because they can filter by server size and in general their matches tend to have smaller player numbers. Playing with a smaller number of players tends to make the matches a lot more friendly and personal, and ends up being less about how high their score is, and more about figuring out how their opponents and allies play. Also, it makes it a lot easier for me to knife, but we won’t get into that.
Overall, this rant was a long time coming, since I’ve been playing a heavy amount of Call of Duty 4 and World at War lately, and I’ve been playing CoD 4 consistantly for quite a while now. Obviously, there will be people that might disagree with some of the points and opinions I’ve listed here, and that’s all well and good. Hopefully I’ll continue to get enjoyment out of Call of Duty 4, despite World at War fixing a lot of the problems I had with CoD 4, but coming with the obvious handicap of being back in World War II, once again.
But that, is a rant for another time.
