Call Of Duty 4 sets new standards for shooters, anything less is not worth the time.
The single player is very short, and I mean SHORT. I bet you racks up about five to six hours of game play and that is it. Now although it maybe short it is still quite worth a run through at least once. The quality of this game is beyond great, one of the best yet. The single player uses multiple perspectives to lay the story out for you. You play as a United States Marine sometimes and other as a British SAS operative. Now at first this might be confusing if you are not paying close attention to the storyline. The best thing about the story mode is you can never guess what happens next. Most of the time in shooters you do your mission and go home and the good guys always win, well Call Of Duty 4 gives fresh slap in the face twists that will leave you amazed and surprised from time to time. Though the game does leave you not carring much about what happens or about the characters around you. There is alot of political jargon that gets in the way and kind of leaves the mind wandering. Most times you go into a mission with no clue what is going on.
The game play is quite standard as most shooters. You have a compass at the bottom of your screen that points you in the direction you need to go, though it is not that easy. Though it shows you where you have to go, there is no telling how to get there, except sometimes your team takes the lead which makes it easier to know where to go. Sometimes you have to take the lead. Which you will have to pay close attention, because it could cost lives if you go the wrong way or lead everyone into a battle that could have been avoided. You team for the most part is seemingly smart, until you get into gun fights were your teammates can alot of time get in your line of site. In which you must move to keep yourself from blowing their heads off. Other times they will be shooting at someone a hundred yards away and not the guy five feet away that is shooting you. It leave you wondering "Why do I have a team?" sometimes. Though that is the only real down fall to the single player game, it does get annoying fast and will have you screaming at your television alot.
The multiplayer game is by far untouchable by any other game to date. The most indepth multiplayer game made and all online shooters should look to COD4 as the Bible of multiplayer shooters. The multiplayer goes up to eighteen players at a time, which depending on the game style you choose to play differs. There is a total of sixteen maps altogether. Most of the levels are taken from portions of the single-player and they offer a healthy mix of wide-open, sniper-friendly areas and tight, cramped spaces where grenades and SMG's are the order of the day. There is a total of six game type for you to choose from. The classics such as team deathmatch and "Free-for-all" (your standard deathmatch), which have their fun, but there is a few others that are more interesting. The other match types are well more team objective-oriented in ways of placing a bomb on one of two areas while the other team tries to stop you. Or one were both teams fign to capture conrtrol points (flags) to gain points. Also there is a "old-school" mode which leaves weapons on the ground for you to run over to pick up.
Also making the online play more interesting and more competetive, you get some bonuses for having high skills in the art of shooting. If you get three kills in a row you get to set up a UAV drone that lets your team see where the enemy is for about 30 seconds on the map. After you get five kills in a row, you get to set up an air strike located anywhere you choose on the map to plast your enemy away. Then if you get to seven kills in a row, you get a chopper to come in and mow down the enemy, which the enemies can shoot down. All of these are not at all hard to get, after all you get kills for the air strike and chopper, so that only helps your odds of getting these streaks.
In multiplayer mode you basicly always be working teward something. Which is nice making the game very addicting and hard to put down. Basicly everything you do in the game gets you experience points for everything you do. Getting kills, capturing control points, planting bombs, defusing bombs, all of it. All of these things gives you points that go tward your experience level, or rank if you will. Most of the things in the multiplayer become unlocked in reaching surtain ranks.
The class system is very innovative and interesting also. Each class has a different weapon loadout and different traits, called perks. Ranking up also unlocks the ability to create your own classes. This lets you pick your own main weapon, your sidearm, attachments for both weapons, what sort of special grenades you want to carry, and three perks. The perks are broken up into three groups to help keep things balanced, and as you continue to level up, you'll unlock additional perks long the way. These class traits, or "perks" is what really drives COD4 online to go above and beyond other online shooters.
Perks in the Perk 1 group are more focused on explosives, such as having extra nades, or special nades like flash or smoke. Or letting you have RPG's (good for shooting down enemy choppers) or C4.
Perks in Perk 2 have things like juggernaut which is extra health or slight of hand which lets you reload your weapon much faster (my personal favorite).
Perks in Perk 3 are things like last stand, which activates when you are killed by dropping you to the ground and switching you to a pistol, giving you a moment to kill the guy who took you out before he realizes you're still alive. Maybe sometimes taking more than one out if you are lucky. Or martyrdom (my perk 3 favorite) which when you are killed you drop a live nade to blow up any enemies standing around you.
There is so many reasons to play Call Of Duty 4. The single player is fun about sometimes over annoying, the multiplayer is the best yet and thr graphics and sound of the game on both sides is awesome. If you are looking for a great multiplayer shooter that will never get old than this is the game for you. Addicting, innovative and all around fun for hours at a time.