Call of Duty 4 is much more than just another war game for the trigger-happy — it evolves the way you experience pain, and even death, through your game character’s eyes.

Every year around mid-to-late summer, we all wait while the upcoming games get spit-polished leading up to their fall release dates. E3 begins the I-V drip of anticipation and the payoff rests on the horizon. But the question is, what to play in the meantime? By now, I’ve finally finished the overflow of games I bought in last year’s holiday glut, and the one or two big spring releases worth my precious coinage. So, I’ve taken to using this barren corner of the calendar to pick up one or two of the previous year’s big hits I neglected. The past few years this has worked out perfectly, by letting me get in some quality Dead Rising and Crackdown time during the summer gaming doldrums. This year’s selection: the much-talked about Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare.

Obviously, I’m unfashionably late to the COD party. Considering over 10 million gamers beat me to it, most people don’t need to be told about its outstanding graphic engine, tight shooting controls, great presentation and amazing sound. And I haven’t even dipped my toe into their super-popular multiplayer yet.

COD4 is, regrettably for me, a case of prejudices getting in the way the first go-round. As far as I was concerned, any amount of chatter around the game amounted to “Blah blah, another war game, only with terrorists instead of Nazis, and a new venue for shooter fiends to murderize each other. Who cares?” And even if my instincts were right, if COD4 were no more than a slick shooter with great graphics, I’m sure it still would have been fairly successful. Then I started hearing terms like ‘groundbreaking’, or descriptions like, ‘I’ve never seen anything like that’, and my ears perked up. Of course, it took a few people I know personally to play through it and say, “Yes, I’m not a shooter person either but I’m telling you, you have to play this game,” to finally seal the deal.

Having finally finished it myself, I can see now why this game deserves a level of praise Generic Military Shooter 4 would never get. The designers at Infinity Ward are about much more than just making another war game for the trigger-happy. With Call of Duty 4, they raise the bar for first-person gaming  – evolving the way you experience pain, and even death, through your game character’s eyes.

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The advantage of this genre has always been the uniquely immersive element of the first-person perspective, and using that aspect in new ways has produced its most memorable moments. Truly talented game designers realize that highly detailed gun models and enemy blood splatters aren’t the only ways to make a game better. They put the increased fidelity of current PC and console tech to good use, by doing more and more with audio and visual cues. They use camera and control effects not just to enhance action sequences, but induce emotion during high-impact narrative moments. When Gordon Freeman gets tossed across a gorge strapped into a bombed out car, or pinned to a wall by a psychic monster in Half Life 2, you retain camera control while your life is essentially out of your hands, and feel the vulnerability and fear first hand as the player. When one of Bioshock’s Big Daddies knocks you clear across a room with a belt of his massive arm, that second of blurry disorientation afterward gives the sensation of a real gut punch, which takes a terrifying second or two to recover from before you can get back into the fray. Both obscure or limit the player’s pure ‘game’ experience to greater effect.

Plenty of merely good shooters are content to just let you glide through a murderous rampage, and that can be fun too — I played the Halo trilogy just like everyone else. Great FPS games go beyond flat-out massacre, and are able to not just immerse players in the tension of battle, but in moments that convey the confusion, pain, helplessness, or tragedy of war as well.

This is what raises Call of Duty 4 above the standard. Before the prologue even wraps up, the game manipulates player perspective in two fresh and brilliant ways. One recreates the sense of panic in fleeing a sinking ship, taking what could have been a flat stage with a simple ticking clock or rising water level, and making it exponentially more intense simply by rolling it sideways. Not just because it’s harder to complete when you can’t walk a straight line or see through the cascading water, but because by putting the player as off balance as his character would be, the game playing experience better matches the in-game one.

From there you’re put in the shoes of a doomed man, something that — but for reading reviews like this one — you only suspect as the minutes go by, and you slowly realize you’re not about to be suddenly saved or spared. The sinking feeling of being a hopeless captive, right up to the moment of execution, isn’t an experience many game makers would dare to put their players through; nor would players who are used to being the invincible hero ever expect to face that moment. Limiting control to one basic ability, looking frantically at the madness taking place all around as you’re dragged to your death, isn’t a cruel trick by the game makers. It’s an honest depiction of the cruelty of war, done in the way truest to the gaming medium. 

COD4’s other highlights evoke equally strong emotions. The head-spinning helicopter crash, and subsequent crawl from its fatal wreckage, confronts the player with the harsh war zone reality that everything can go wrong at any second.  The amazing climax goes from a bridge explosion to an assassination, with chaos, hope, despair, loss, and victory all wrapped up in an expertly crafted two minutes. It’s these scenes that will become part of gaming canon, and rightly so. They do more than play out highly dramatic story moments, but do so in a way that draws out vivid reactions from the player. You feel for yourself what it’s like to realize you won’t survive a crash, and that your story is coming to an end. Or how time slows as you muster the will to fire the last shot for your fallen teammates even though you’re too dazed to stand up.

While the term ‘cinematic’ often gets thrown around for sequences like these, due to the Hollywood scale of the set pieces and well-choreographed action, these same segments, done as cinematic cutscenes, would lose a large chunk of their impact. The word ‘empathic’ sounds so much more pretentious to describe them, but it’s certainly the game’s ability to immerse you in those instances, and experience the attendant emotions, that gives them their gravity. By putting the first-person perspective to its best use — by innovating in the depiction of those moments of pain, or trauma, or fear, or even death – Call of Duty 4 earns more than just credit for being a fun shooting gallery. They prove that a first-person game can be a lot more than just aiming down a barrel, and save themselves a place among the future classics that people will point to as a step along the path to evolving the genre.