I know this was released yesterday, but I've just had to play through this a couple of times because .. unlike previous Call of Duty games, it's actually a bloody good laugh.
Something that's always irritated me with the whole WW2 aspect of the CoD series, is since they moved from the Playstation 1; they've become more and more arcade style gameplay with the claim of real stories from the front yet not really much in the way of feeling part of the war.
CoD4 however is a move from not only WW2, but to something that feels more like Rainbox Six Vegas than Quake 3 to play. That to me has made it enormously fun to just get in to and have fun.
They've changed the whole dying dynamic and keep the regenerative health system from CoD3 which worked really well. So while it only take a couple of bullets to actually kill you, provided you stay behind somewhere you'll be able to wait for about 10-20seconds to regain your strength to continue.
Dying, also doesn't always mean you're actually dead; but there is now a bleed-out system (made popular by Gears of War) where your team-mates can drag you or you can crawl to safety to try to revive. This doesn't just apply to you either but the enemy soldiers too! Who actually have some decent intelligence this time around.
Being in a modern combat battlefield now makes the game better, I don't know how or why... but the WW2 thing just feels not done to death so much, but more just not done as fun as modern warfare.
This is definately going to be my first Call of Duty I'll actually buy because I want to rather than simply to pad out a lacking game collection to justify a new console purchase.
Although the demo is a bit large for about 30-40mins of gameplay, almost 2GB hopefully the full game will reuse alot of media meaning it's not going to be stupidly huge to install. I mean when you have a 250GB HDD or larger and you start wondering if you'll have space for games to me something is wrong with game sizes.
Either developers should start trying to compress better, or they should switch to DVD-running games. I mean I've yet to figure out why we can't have an option to run from DVD or install to hard-disc. After all this is going to be a multi-console game too, and they don't install to HDD just have longer loading times.
Still that little gripe aside, this again is another game that while absolutely beautiful is surprisingly not graphically demanding enough to require a top-end graphics card just to play.
The requirements specify a 6600/X700 but it ran perfectly fine with the options turned down low (still looking better than most games) on an on-board 6100 at a very respectable speed.
Didn't actually check, but it was certainly over 25-30fps at all times and very smooth.
I'd highly recommend that people check it out, you might be surprised at how much fun it is. Especially the new features, and ability to blow away part of buildings like Red Faction only DONE PROPERLY, was freaking cool.
