War? It’s a little bit overrated. In spite of common sense, military leaders tend to be ignorant cretins, sending men to die without ideology or compassion. It’s violence for the sake of it. Blood is shed, families are torn apart and mankind degrades to the very depths of inhumane possibility. Prisoners are tortured, while the politicians and media attempt to misconstrue it all into having some sort of meaning, and an eventual outcome. One type of person, though, wins out: the gamer. Call Of Duty 4: Modern Warfare is so obviously an amazing reinvention of a traditionally Churchillbased franchise, giving the fictional war that it portrays the degree of drama that WWII games now lack.

We’re not completely desensitised to a fictional war, of course, and this lack of a predetermined chain of events has gifted Infinity Ward with the opportunity to craft its own timeline. The environments in Call Of Duty 4: Modern Warfare often feel like they’ve been drafted out of Call Of Duty 2 (the exceptional 2005 Xbox 360 title, rather than Big Red One on the PS2), but a lot of the overhauled level design is a true imagining of how the franchise should be reborn. It’s a little short, but the pacing of it means that there are only a few moments in which you truly feel like the game has run out of ideas. Some of the levels are clearly indicative of a team at its creative peak, and with further instalments in this era a certainty down the line, we’re clearly of the mind that this is a positive change for the series. We’ve been ready to leave World War II behind for several years now, and finally we have the game that dares to undergo a drastic and thematic leap into the unknown.

We’d already played the first two levels a few months in advance, but we weren’t averse to playing through them again, such was their brilliance. As you may have read in last month’s issue, the training level does away with the fairly pointless helmet shooting exercise from the WWII settings and lands you in an SAS warehouse, facing target ranges, stabbing melons and besting an assault course. Call Of Duty 4 is quite obviously using these to emphasise the fact that the game is set in modern times, but it needn’t have bothered. The majority of the levels are set in areas such as burning streets, and the sheer volume of detail on each environment is indicative of a franchise that has left its previous artistic direction firmly behind.

Initial levels maintain that frantic contemporary feel. From storming a TV studio to shooting a tank with homing missiles, Call Of Duty 4 feels like a post-9/11 rush of blood to the head – the pace is breakneck, the weapons scream louder than ever and the smatterings of urban warfare evoke fear. Terrorists rule the roost, while a narrative plays a bigger role than it ever did in previous COD games. For one, you’ll be surprised to note that the game is set over a number of days, GRAW-style. Instead of spanning multiple years and a whole range of large-scale events, the time frame here packs every battle into a short burst of military extremism.

The modern setting has influences on the gameplay, too. Bullets can shoot through cover, which will almost certainly be responsible for a large proportion of your deaths in the game, as well as your kills. This feature completely alters the duck-and-fire mechanic that we’re used to, and every square inch of the populated streets feels unsafe. Your best option is to shoot your enemies as quickly as you can, merely to save yourself from being pumped in the back with hot lead while crouched behind a concrete wall. Do it to the enemies, however, and it becomes technologically savvy and hilarious: the image of enemies falling victim to you while ducking for their lives is actually quite amusing. A DualShock 3 would maximise the feel of the firepower, though, as it somehow feels jarring to hear these aggressive bullets roar through the speakers while the controller sits sadly still in your lap. This isn’t the game’s fault, because the audio quality is top-notch. The surrounding bullet and background effects are uncannily dramatic and immersive, while Harry Gregson-Williams’ original score is ballsy, without ever being too melodramatic.

The visuals match Infinity Ward’s promise of 60fps for the PS3 version, too: this is encouraging proof of how developing for all platforms in tandem will give PS3 gamers a port worth experiencing. This wasn’t the case with Call Of Duty 3, of course, since the PS3 version was littered with bugs and visual atrocities (bighanded Nazis, anyone?), but the transfer here is distinctive and competent. Perhaps the visuals are slightly washed out in places, but we really couldn’t find anything else to complain about. Animation is clean, the detail adds realism that wasn’t there before and the lighting effects – perhaps the most noticeable visual aspect when done wrong – are triumphant.

Infinity Ward has omitted the ability to choose your campaign, as well. Since the story is branched together with an all-conquering narrative, the jumps between the British SAS and the US Marines are at the will of the game. In fact, one of the transition points between the two is a massive, expectation-shattering turning point. Please disregard the next paragraph if you’d rather not spoil it for yourself, but there’s no way of us conveying the very brilliance of Call Of Duty 4: Modern Warfare without the magnificence of that moment.

Two words: nuclear bomb. The levels of the game preceding this turning point are somewhat standard fare for the Call Of Duty games, but when you reach the end of Act I (out of three), you realise that Infinity Ward had been saving this trump card for that exact feeling of security. While playing as a US marine in pursuit of the Russian Ultranationalists (that’s the villain of the piece), a routine rescue mission suddenly becomes an unabashed disaster. One of your team discovers a nuclear device, and screams at you to pile into the helicopter and flee as quickly as possible. You make it to the helicopter and watch as the device goes off: a mushroom cloud, bigger and more realistic than you could have fathomed, is frothing in the distance. As you watch fearfully from your fleeing chopper, helpless, an unstoppable wall of pure, smokestrewn fire consumes everything. You awake within the eye of the explosion, a smouldering hellfire of lava-temperature heat and burning bodies. You crawl, but everyone around you is dead… every helicopter was brought down, and the terrifying sound within the blast radius confirms that this, ultimately, is the end. For two minutes, you engage in one of the most jaw-droppingly tragic scenes that FPS games have ever been blessed with. You’ve been killed in action, the game confirms. Stunning.

Aside from this magnificent justification of why games are better than films, Call Of Duty 4 can be a bit of a letdown in other sections. The art direction remains consistent and beautiful for the most part, but other sections leave you questioning whether you’ve just stepped into El Alamein from Call Of Duty 2. The detail is denser than previous games, of course, but the gameplay remains exactly the same. It’s impossible to open doors, there’s no choice in how objectives can be met and it’s still impossible to get lost. Some wickedly bland sections crop up when playing as the SAS, and certain settings even repeat themselves.

Infinity Ward clearly has trump cards in Call Of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. They’re played at almost the precise times in which the game becomes too bland, however, leading us to believe that the developer designed the game around the sparks of creative genius, rather than as a continuous display of good ideas that mount up throughout the game.

One later level, the much-lauded sniper section set in Chernobyl, is evidence of this. For around 15 minutes of solid tension, we were on the edge of our seats as we tiptoed through the empty city. We’d fought ridiculously hard to get to the exit, and we still hadn’t found an escape: we had to call in a rescue squad from a Ferris wheel, while our soldier and a Scottish team-mate sat at a grassy vantage point, massacring the hordes of pursuing enemies. To describe the level in any further depth would be futile, as the slow-burning drama is inspirationally unique during this section. Pitifully, though, Infinity Ward bookends the level with some of the more generic and badly-structured sections, implying that the developer felt that using amazing ideas sparingly was more effective than being consistently exciting.

Attempts to add variation fall short, too. In the Chechnya level, it’s necessary to assassinate the leader of the Russian Ultranationalists with a window-mounted sniper rifle. Sadly, the developers transformed this simple activity into a pointless minigame. Finding the right moment to pull the trigger is dependent on the wind, because bullets have a nasty habit of veering completely off course unless it’s timed right.

This makes absolutely no sense, because there’s no way that a small breeze could possibly affect the path of a speeding bullet, but variation just for the sake of it isn’t a justification for this kind of boredom.

Concerns about the life span are pretty moot, though. The game is a good seven hours long on Medium mode, while the standout levels warrant at least another play through. Call Of Duty 4 is often a compilation of the best bits from the FPS genre, and it even goes as far as achieving uniqueness when the developers focus on the set pieces and plot twists that defy user expectations. Certainly, the aforementioned plot spoiler was one of our favourite moments in the history of FPS games, but the title has a lot of merit and likeable characteristics outside of that.

The AI is superb, and you’ll definitely want to complete it in one go. This is the most exciting instalment in the series, with the GRAW-style veneer unleashing new energy upon the FPS stable, while the story keeps your attention focused throughout. Infinity Ward has triumphed. Pay attention, now, because all third-party publishers will start to cash in on the extravagance of modern warfare. Call Of Duty 4 is evidence of why embracing a brave new world is important with any genre, and it looks to be the guiding light of the PS3 FPS for many years to come.

Samuel Roberts