A gentlemans disagreement
By Kentish & SolidChris

You have to feel almost sorry for your average, run 'o' the mill FPS shooter at the moment. Take BlackSite: Area 51 for instance. Who on earth is going to take a chance on its B-Movie pretensions when you’ve got Halo 3 and The Orange Box for your space opera /sci-fi kicks.

And what about Clive Barker’s Jericho - a game which displays its literary pedigree like a badge of honour, only to have it ripped from its arm (along with the arm) by the magnificent BioShock.

Last and somewhat least, there is Medal of Honour: Airborne, which takes a valiant melee stab at doing something different with the military FPS, by creating levels that play out in non-linear fashion. Its fate? To have a size 12 jack boot stamped on its windpipe by rival franchise and erstwhile fellow WW2 fetishist Call of Duty 4.

In fact COD4 - codenamed Modern Warfare - is a match for any of the illustrious FPSs on the roster. But exactly how good is it? We've invited self-confessed Halo hard-nut Solid Chris and commando Kentish to debate its worth in public, and settle their differences man-to-man.

Kentish So old man, many are calling Call of Duty 4 the best FPS of the year.

SolidChris But they'd be all manner of wrong. It's all kinds of short for a start. Not even short like a short person. It's shorter - in fact, at 5/6 hours, it's Titchy McShortarse the littlest lad in all the land of midget half-measures. Where Halo's campaign is a strapping mate of decent height and Bioshock is a delightful svelte beanpole of a stranger COD 4 is an admittedly well proportioned dwarf. But, you know, we wouldn't want to dwell on it.

Kentish But what is length when the quality is so astronomically high? COD4 is just so beautifully realised - show me something as stunning in Halo as that ride over the rooftops in the helicoptors before you touch down to commence Black Hawk Down-style battle in the streets. It is like Francis Ford Coppolla meets David O Russell.

And then there is the tempo of this baby - full on Hurricane Force 10. You couldn't handle 10 hours without a note from your mum!

SolidChris That aside though chap. Quality is all well and good but it's nice to share with your mates. Why, in the name of all that is good in bullet riddled middle Eastern towns, can you not play this co-operatively? It's been a console staple since Doom 3 on the X-Box and you could do it 4-player in Halo 3. The game is tailor bloody made for it as well. Even the flashback mission has two blokes in it. It stinks of missed opportunity and it's just not acceptable.

Kentish Look, the poet and leading death-matcher of his day Robert Browning, once wrote that "imperfection suggests perfection hid". Now quite what that has to do with this review I am not sure. But what I can say - and I know Browning would agree (even his surname is a gun) - is that yes, the lack of cooperative play is a minor irritation, but you did not see anyone complaining about that in Orange Box or BioShock now did you? And besides, the online component positively thrives on clan ethos. Everyone working together, clearing rooms, covering alleyways, playing hide the soap in the showers afterwards.

So co-op then - something for Call of Duty 5 to shoot for. A minor evolutionary footnote in this Darwinian champ of a game. And while we are on the subject of the online aspect, just what in Halo 3 can match the cachet of having your own specially upgraded weapons? A pal of mine now never goes anywhere without his throbbing golden shotgun and bright pink camouflage!

SolidChris Friends aside my good man we are yet to mention one of the biggest sins so far - vehicles. Or rather the lack thereof. What war based shooter in its right mind can afford to leave out the destructive potential made possible by having a glut of go-faster carnage-mobiles? It's a crippling miss and certainly not saved by the uncomfortably realistic 'bomb the faceless West-Asian town to shit' level which is an exercise in pretty explosions viewed through thermal goggles. No sir, the lack of vehicles is a criminal offence on a par with the lack of co-operative multiplayer. People like vehicles, they break up the game, they allow you to maim more bad guys and they get you from A to B quickly.

Kentish Well may I refer to Browning once again, who in 'Ode to the Waterways' said:

The life that floweth through you
is but a soothing remedy
to the shitquad of Half Life 2
and that fucking never ending level on a boat.

Ok, seriously (and there is a point buried in there), show me a FPS other than Halo that has actually used vehicles to any great effect. You've been spoiled by Halo 3 old son which, thanks to the extra grunt of the 360, can afford to chuck tanks, buggies, warthogs and more besides at the screen. Call of Duty 4's failing is shared by almost every other FPS, and that is no disgrace.

SolidChris I'll show you a decent FPS with vehicles and you don't have to look too far.

Call of Duty 3.

But that's enough about that.

Did you not feel a bit uncomfortable shooting people from a helicopter in ultra real heat-vision? Aside from struggling to figure out exactly who to kill there was a sense of discomfort as you indiscriminately blow the shit out of another nameless foreign village. Granted it's technically stunning and visually brilliant but it's a bit iffy. Just a bit.

Kentish No, I wasn't troubled by it in the slightest. It is merely the logical progression of the vehicle sections to which you allude in Call of Duty 3. A rather on-the-rails change of pace to the main game. Yes, it achieves a certain eerie realism, but then CoD4 sets out to capture the sound and fury of war - and then fires it in your face as you sit comfortably in your armchair.

Perhaps more troubling is the opening credits in which you watch Middle Eastern chaos through the eyes of a soon-to-be-condemned man. I hesitate to suggest the plot is in any way mature in a story-telling sense, but it is certainly hard-hitting. And, might I add, I found it rather easier to follow than Halo 3's (Cue booming voiceover man - This time the fight comes to Earth, except when disappears through some portal half way through and literally ends up in a sphincter.)

Don't get me wrong, I loved Halo 3. But I started both games side by side and within two sessions I had shelved Halo to concentrate on COD.

SolidChris Aight. I reckon 4/5. It's good, potentially great even, but it's missing a few key things that we've gotten used to. The lack of multiplayer is frankly bobbins.

Kentish Nah, it is a 5/5. One of those games - like Crackdown - where the whole is more than the sum of its parts. So it may not be better than BioShock, The Orange Box or Halo 3. But it ranks alongside them. And that is good enough for me.

January 2008

Comments