E. M. Esq.

I’ve been playing a lot of CoD 4 multiplayer lately. Basic rundown is as follows:

• Normal: Mildly entertaining. Two stars, occasionally scratches a third.
• Hardcore: Gibbering heaps of fun. Five stars. Occasionally slips down to four and a half.

The combat in Call of Duty games has never grabbed me – too half-arsed for a tactical shooter, not drawn out enough for a conventional deathmatch – but this new option makes for some of the most exciting gameplay ever committed to… servuloid? Whatever.

To paraphrase a friend of mine, the basic reason hardcore combat is so much more fun is because now bullets kill people. No longer can you take five to the face only to heal yourself with a quick hop into cover and some manly grimacing. As a result, smart play is not just encouraged but enforced, and face-to-face engagements have been boiled down to microsecond twitch-offs.

This is a big deal because in a tactical shooter, combat shouldn’t completely take over – straightforward killin’ is fun to a point, but when it’s the only focus of a match you might as well be playing whack-a-mole. Under the new system actual one-on-one engagements are pretty much incidental, rarely distracting from the sack-shrivelling back-and-forth intensity of the wider game.

A lot has been written about the unlockables and such like (if every minor achievement in my life was commemorated with a rockin’ guitar riff, I’d be a whole lot more productive) but even without all that the game easily vaults into the highest ranks of online shootery. It’s been a long while since one this good has come along, and it’ll be a long while before it’s beaten.