As soon as my friends and I heard that Infinity Ward would be hosting a public beta for their upcoming game Call of Duty 4, we rushed over to the site and registered – just like thousands of other eager fans. Fortunately, one of our registrations was selected for entry and so, after a quick download, we eagerly launched ourselves into the experience. And here’s what we found:

GRAPHICS

From a visual standpoint the game looks about average. That being said, however, this does not mean that the game is at all bland, as there are some interesting visual elements throughout the game. One of the more drastic of these elements is the depth of field blur, which helps make the overall experience feel quite authentic. The blur activates as soon as the player sights their weapon by pulling the left trigger. It eases in pretty fast, blurring everything up close so that only the far reticule and the target remain in focus. Upon releasing the trigger to zoom out, the blur quickly fades out to reveal your surroundings – and, of course, your enemies, right as they are about to ambush you. All three maps also include high dynamic range lighting along with all the other lighting and shading techniques that we have come to expect from modern games. But, besides the depth of field blurring, there is nothing all too special – yet.

MAPS

The beta includes three maps so far: Overgrown, Vacant, and Crash; all set in the eastern hemisphere. Overgrown is set in a small, rundown, rural Russian town, and, as the name suggests, features plenty of overgrown vegetation, ideal for snipers. The map is fairly large, with plenty of open and exposed areas, but it also has plenty of cover. If you’re patient and willing to crawl around in the tall grass, you can rack up plenty of kills as a sniper. The map is pretty well balanced, however, making it pretty easy to defeat snipers if you manage to lure them into the more urban parts of the map, where their long range weapons are rendered useless.

Vacant is probably my favorite map so far. This map is centered around a dilapidated, single story, Russian office. The small rooms and narrow hallways are the perfect catalyst for some very intense close quarter combat, where the player has to be on constant guard. Thanks to a plethora of large windows and numerous doorways, it’s impossible to hold yourself up in a single location for very long, without getting ambushed or running out of ammo.

The last map in this beta is Crash, set somewhere in a small desert town, presumably in the Middle East. The setting of the map would suggest a Black Hawk Down type of scenario, where the good guys had to crash land their helicopter in midtown and then fight off the enemy in an attempt to survive. Like all of the other maps, this one is pretty balanced as well, and there aren’t any glaring advantages to being on either side. Like any good urban map, this one is honeycombed with plenty of alleys and roads, making it once again very tough to hold out for very long without some serious backup.

GAMEPLAY

Okay, so here’s the most important part: it’s a blast. Out of all the games in the Call of Duty series, this one is far and away the best: it’s intense, rewarding, and pretty clever – yes, clever. And here’s why: the developers have done an excellent job at rewarding players for certain achievements, while not making it impossible for mediocre players to get their fair share of kills as well. One of the major new gameplay elements that CoD 4 brings to the table is the addition of perks and rewards.

Let’s start off with the perks. Upon choosing your class, you get a choice of how you would like to modify your character’s abilities. Each player can choose three perks that he (or she) would like to have during online play. There are 15 perks in total, divided up into three subsets. The first perk category allows you to choose if you would like: the ability to seek out enemy explosives, remotely detonate explosives, place trip mines, carry an RPG-7 with 2 rockets, or if you would like to carry three special grenades. The second perk category allows a player to choose whether to: increase their health, reload faster, boost the explosive power of their weapons, increase the damage of their rounds, or make themselves undetectable to the UAVs flying overhead. The third, and final, category let’s players: improve the penetrating power of bullets (so that players can shoot through thin walls), improve their physical speed, drop a live grenade upon death, increase their hip-fire accuracy, or – and this one is quite popular – upon being shot, pull out a side arm in an attempt to kill any aggressors before finally bleeding to death.

Not all of these perks are available right away. As a player gains more and more experience, he’ll unlock more perks as well as weapon upgrades. Much as is the case with the perk system, players will need to gain experience before they can unlock the best weapons and the best mods. Gun modifications include the addition of a silencer (which renders you invisible on enemy radar), various scopes (you start with iron sights, then go on to reflex sights, and eventually you can equip low-power scopes), and camo patterns for your guns (urban, rural, and digital).

Another neat gameplay element is the notion of actually rewarding players who manage to achieve a killing streak – instead of just announcing it to everyone a la Halo. If you kill three in a row you’re allowed to perform a radar sweep using a UAV, so that your team temporarily knows where the enemy is and how to best attack them. After five consecutive kills, you’re allowed to call in an air-strike, which has to be designated on a map. And finally, possibly the best one, when you kill seven in a row you’re allowed to call for backup. When you do so, you’ll hear the low roar of propeller blades cutting through the air, and pretty soon your enemies will be mowed down my automatic gunfire from a CPU-controlled attack helicopter.

GAME MODES

The four overall game modes that the beta includes are: Free-for-All, Team Deathmatch, Team Objective, and Team Tactical. The first two are pretty self-explanatory, so I’ll just explain the other two. Team Objective consists of a variety of different modes, including: Domination and Search and Destroy, Capture the flags in Domination (with respawning), and objective-based Search and Destroy (without respawns). And then there’s Team Tactical, where players form small two, or three, man teams and simply go at it.

GRIPES

Since this is a beta, the game is obviously not entirely bug-free. So, here’s a (very short) list of issues that I’ve seen so far:

• The helicopter might be too good. At one point, I was prone, half-way under a bush, and when the helicopter flew by he had no problem seeing me at all, and I got owned. This would be acceptable if I was a machine-gunner or so, but I was a sniper, wearing a Ghillie suit, which should have made me a lot harder to see.

• Since the game strives to be pretty realistic, I would like to have the ability to switch between firing modes (i.e: semi-automatic, burst, and full-auto).

• …and that’s about it for now. More to come later.