Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare

Also known as: CoD 4

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Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare

WWII is left behind for a brutal new battlefield

Words: Jamie Sefton, PC Zone UK

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Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare has really improved visually, as you would expect for any new next-gen game, so you’ll be seeing realistic foliage in the Russian levels, gorgeous rippling water, birds and butterflies flying around. If the beautiful terrain wasn’t populated with mad Commie terrorists trying to kill you with rocket launchers, you’d believe it was a sneak-peak at a new Elder Scrolls game. Also, to aid your immersion, Infinity Ward has gone further by reducing the amount of HUD information than in other Call of Duty games - they’ve got rid of the mini-map in single-player, and information on weapon choice pops up then fades away quickly.

In the final level we got to look at, your character and the Force Recon soldiers go into an area deep in Al-Asad territory to find a crashed helicopter, at night, in hugely dangerous, boggy wasteland littered with war debris and derelict buildings. As with all the levels, it begins with a satellite view of the terrain, which then zooms in quickly to show the battle landscape at eye level, like a military Google Earth.

Amid the intense fighting, Collier demonstrates the night-vision goggles that give you a bright green-eyed view of the ensuing chaos, allowing you to spot targets easily in the darkness.

“We’ve created new technology to emulate what the human eye sees, so we’ve looked through real night vision, filmed through night vision, compared the two and then modified it. We’ve found that eyes and cameras are very different. Also, there’s a depth of field system, so when you’re staring at someone down a sight, they’re in fine detail, but in peripheral vision, you don’t really have them full focus. We don’t want people to notice, we just want it to feel natural.”