Thankfully, it didn’t. Call of Duty 4 is arguably the best in the series to date and uses a Clancy-esque plot filled with Russian megalomaniacs and crazed terrorists as players hop about to experience the best of the action.
It kicks off to a hell of a start too. The first level sees players form part of a crack SAS squad conducting a raid on a cargo freighter to salvage a nuclear missile in the middle of a typhoon. Rain hammers down, waves crash on the deck and players silently creep from room to room, killing bad guys in their sleep. When it all goes wrong and the ship starts to sink the whole world starts to turn upside down quite literally there’s a terrifying moment when you think you might not make it back to the helicopter in time.
Then the credits roll and you realise that you’re only five minutes in and that that level was just the introduction; a sign of things to come.
From there things get better in spades and players get to experience a regime change first hand, fighting on both flanks as the battle starts to build. The singleplayer campaign isn’t massively long—in fact it’s pretty damn short—but at the end there’s still plenty of intelligence to track down, an arcade mode to try and, of course the glorious multiplayer which is superbly put together.
The multiplayer mode alone is plenty praiseworthy too, using ranks and levelled unlockable attacks to create a multiplayer tactical FPS game with a distinct RPG feel at times so that the game is almost universally appealing.
The game may not be everyone’s cup of tea and there are plenty of people who will argue that the Call of Duty 2 was the high point of the series, but whether that's true or not doesn't detract from the fact that Call of Duty 4 is still one of the most involving and dramatic war-shooters we've played in a long time.
Source: Bit-Tech