Looks great, but it's just COD wrapped in a new skin with a few extra features.
For starters, the game does look great. The graphics are pretty sharp and the developers did a great job of modelling the weapons and uniforms to a realistic level. The environments, especially the urban ones, look outstanding. It feels like you are walking around a wartorn city. The animation is pretty good, although watching the same 3-4 death animations in multiplayer gets pretty dull. They could have at least mixed in some physics to go along with the death animations.
The best part about the graphics would be how well the game scales on older hardware. I am still running 8xAGP and the game has a steady framerate with most of the bells and whistles cranked up. This is quite impressive.
The audio is also really well done, except for the voice acting. The sounds of explosions, helicopters flying over head, grenades, and all the weapons are really well done. Each weapon has a somewhat different sound to it that you would expect to come from that particular type of gun. I'm no expert on what guns sound like, but nothing seems out of place so it's all thumbs up on this aspect.
The voice acting is just annoying. The "british" squad leader has a horrible accent. I've heard Texans do better english accents before.
The single player campaign is a huge disapointment. It feels like watching a big budget movie with crappy acting and a bad script. Everything about the story and cutscenes feels contrived and just outlandish. The characters evoke zero emotion because of the ridiculous amount of "baditude" they put off. Early on I really wanted to just shoot most of the secondary characters, but unfortunately this results in a reload to last save point. Bummer.
the opening sequence of the game is very similar to an intro movie that you would expect for a big budget terrorist related flick. You get to sit in the backseat of a car and watch the driver and passenger cruise around a middle eastern town, while a military force takes over the place. At first this seems pretty cool, but then the painfully obvious scripting of it all starts to rear it's head and by the end you just want it to be over with as soon as possible. It just seems a bit too convenient that all of these particular events are happening at the exact moment you are driving by. It's just wholely unbelievable.
There are plenty of "in action" story sequences to keep the game moving along, but they feel half baked. Burying a game in scripted scenes does not make for a compelling story. There are often times in the game where what is going on in a cutscenes totally contradicts what may have happened during game play elements. Like all the sudden, just for this one cutscene, your character is virtual invisible to enemies 2 feet away. Specifically the level "All Guilly Up" where you run around in one of those sniper costumes that looks like a bush. There is a very artificial sequence in the middle of this level that just feels completely ridiculous and sucks almost all of the intensity out of the game as it happens. I was sitting in my seat just shaking my head and the sheer stupidity of it all.
This game actually has never ending enemy spawns. That's right! A "realistic" military shooter that will spawn enemies over and over and over until you cross the magic "stop the spawns" line. This is how the game handles difficulty. There is basically no difficulty involved in trying to hit an enemy since they just stand in front of you waiting to get hit. Instead, you get faced with the "challenge" of having to shoot way more of them then could have possibly been hiding in that building you are trying to capture. Again, more sheer stupidity.
Another major downer to the single player is how little you actually have to do. Your teammates do a lot of the shooting in this game, so you can often just sit back and wait for them to take out a bunch of the enemies. After that just make a run for the next blind check point and you are making progress. Even funnier then that is when your buddies take cover and get locked into a fire fight with the enemy, yet manage to never die, or hit the enemies at all. These points are basically instances for when the game is telling the player that now they actually are required to participate. These moments are chained together artificially between moments of when your team is just mowing them down. It feels like the game is basically babysitting you throughout the entire campaign. "We're moving, we're moving, now we are shooting, we're moving again." The final result of this is that even on the cranked up difficulty, the game is extremely easy.
One of the biggest problems with the single player campaign is how it scales difficulty. Early on you get to pick if you want "Normal" or the next step up. I almost always pick one step up from the default in games because default has started to become the mode for the average joe. It seems that this only means faster enemy respawns and a whole lot more "chaotic" mechanics chucked in to keep you distracted. It basically sucks out what little fun may have been left.
The biggest travesty of the campaign would easily be the final sequence. I won't ruin it for you too much, but if you have played any of the other CoD games then you have played this sequence at least 5 times before. It's getting old. In fact it got old years ago.
The multiplayer is also a big problem with the game. It can be fun for awhile, and the level of fun to be had is really going to depend on what settings the server you are on is using. There is a popular "hardcore" mode which results in single bullets causing death really quickly. This is the mode that everyone claims to be more realistic. Unfortunately it does nothing to adjust other aspects of the multiplayer, such as healing. If you do manage to survive a bullet hit, you will actually heal back up to full health (although there is no visible health bar, you will know it when you see it). This doesn't seam very hardcore to me.
The biggest problem with the multiplayer is the piss poor netcode and hit detection. There are some major lag issues between what you are seeing on your screen and where your enemy actually is on their screen. I know this is a problem for almost all online shooters, but plenty of games have fixed it and I full on expect that a game that gets this much attention for the multiplayer would be one of them. Sadly it is not. If you are playing on a "killcam" server you will often see how your enemy killed you. I have laughed out loud numerous times because of the discrepency from what I saw on my screen and what the killcam ended up showing. Since what you see on your screen is about half a second later then where someone is actually moving the game ends up boiling down to who can take advantage of the lag the best instead of who is the better shooter.
It happens quite often that you see an enemy and start to unload on them with your gun, only to miss with every single one of the 20 bullets you launched there way and they end up getting you first. However when you watch the killcam it seems that what they saw was you just standing there, not shooting.
The game's hit detection seems to be a big imaginary box around the targets. If anyone tries to tell you this game has pixel perfect hit detection then they are just flat out lying. It is normal to get headshots with a sniper riffle when you were aiming a foot behind someone. I've seen this numerous times from sniper views. Evidentally the military uses guns that just need to be aimed in the general direction of the enemy to kill them.
Another big downer about the multiplayer is the amount of grenade spam that goes on. It's quite normal to play an entire match and have every single one of your deaths come from a grenade, RPG, or launched grenade. This is not fun. It never has been and it never will be. Nor is it realistic.
The respawns for the multiplayer game are also quite ridiculously broken. You will often respawn right in the middle of a bunch of enemies only to die immediately because, well you are standing in the middle of a bunch of enemies. A few of the maps in particular are more prone to this, which makes them very annoying. This doesn't happen nearly as often in the bigger urban maps. This may be something that gets patch fixed later on, but I wouldn't count on it. If we are this far past release and it hasn't been fixed yet then it probably won't be.
I've played many online shooters over the years, and with most of them you can at least have fun while you are loosing a game. That is not the case with CoD4. The only time the game is ever fun online is when you are winning. It's difficult to figure out exactly why that is, but I just know that I always find myself turning the game off when on a long loosing streak. Other online shooters I keep on trucking because I am at least still having fun. Maybe it's because the entire entertainment value for the multiplayer comes from winning and nothing else. The actual gameplay mechanics are pretty much the same all the time. You will never see anything new happen after getting in at least 2-3 hours of the online play. There will be absolutely zero surprises memorable moments after this point. You've seen it all already.
The game mode options in the game are at least plentiful. My favorite one would be headquarters. This is basically a "hold the moving point" mode that can be cool because of how it moves the action around the map. Instead of just mindlessly running around shooting each other you have to actually try and accomplish something. This mode can be a lot of fun sometimes. Most of the time you end up with teammates that couldn't give have a crap and just want to shoot people. It's quite normal to be surrounded by 5-6 teammates and be the only one capturing a control point because they keep running off to go rack up kills. This isn't necessarily the game's fault, but it sure doesn't do anything to try and promote teamwork over soloing.
Unlockables. What a terrible idea. It was a big reason that Battlefield 2 was complete trash and it brings CoD4 down just as much. The multiplayer has all kinds of unlockables, leveling up, and "challenges" that attempt to make it last a bit longer. This is basically just pandering to all the people that can't figure out how to have fun with the actual gameplay itself. All this means is that you have to play for a stupid long time before getting on an even playing field with anyone else. You are not dying because you suck. You are dying because you have a sucky weapon to use. You might actually be pretty good.
The single most aggrivating thing about CoD4 is that there are indeed good things going on with it. I am super pissed that I hate this game as much as I do because at the same time I like so much about it. Only the multiplayer however. The single player could have been completetly cut out and I wouldn't have even flinched. It is just a total waste of time.
Had Infinity Ward spent the time to fix all of the broken aspects about the game then this one may have been elevated to "classic" status. Unfortunately they decided to just shove it out the door in the form it is in, and have made no effort to fix it.
Long story short, it's got a few great moments for the first few hours, but after awhile it just falls flat on it's face.
Nothing new to see, move along.