Late to the Game

With the recent release of Modern Warfare 2, I finally decided to take a look at Infinity Ward's first Russian killing simulator CoD 4: Modern Warfare. The reason it took me so long to get around to it was that I was afraid that it would play like the earlier installments in the CoD series. Don't get me wrong. I loved CoD 2, but there was always something wrong with the pacing. The game forced you to do everything on your own, plus allies were dumb as posts, grenades could kill you from halfway across the map, and you needed to unload entire clips into enemies before they died, but the game had good action and fun characters, so I stayed playing.

Modern Warfare got immediate points for making enemies die very quickly. This made me feel pretty cool as I mowed down legions of enemies with a single clip, and improved the pacing. Unfortunetely, Modern Warfare didn't address my main issue, which was that the game makes you do everything. And I do mean everything. Not only do you have to plant all the C4, snipe all the bad guys, and take point every time, but in most gunfights enemies infinitely spawn until you decide to push forward.

The last point is the one I would like to discuss. While I'm fine with being to go to guy to complete objectives, I am not okay with making my success a crapshoot. Every time we got pinned down and had to advance it was up to me to do so, and most times I would get gunned down running into enemy fire. To make up for that I decided to stay back a bit, kill some dudes, and then try to rush their weakened defenses. Of course, the defenses were never weakened. Enemies respawned so quickly that, by the time the guy I had just shot fell to the floor, another dude was taking his place. This meant that I had to just run like hell through enemy fire to get my allies to move up and to get the enemies to stop spawning. When I died, instead of feeling like I had made a mistake, I felt like the developer had.

While I can understand enjoying frustrating gameplay, I can't abide by gameplay that relies mainly on luck. If I was lucky I managed to survive the hail of bullets, and enemies stopped spawning. If I wasn't, then I would die and have to try again... and again, and again etc. Game devs need to look at why their players are having trouble with sections to analyze difficulty. I'm fine with dying for making a stupid mistake like stepping on a grenade, or trying to run and gun in a CoD game, but I shouldn't have to make a leap of faith to advance the combat. Dying because I was unlucky pisses me off, whereas dying because I messed up makes me want to try again.