It was a good game. It's just MASSIVELY overhyped. Reasons why I didn't like it:

1)THAT STUPID FREAKIN' CHECKPOINT SYSTEM THAT IS THE WORST I'VE EVER EXPERIENCED IN A GAME!

2)The dogs. As soon as I saw myself go down, I pressed the melee key as quickly as possible. I got presented with the "sticky keys" display, and a death screen.

3)The ending. It was like in the article in National Lampoon, "How To Write Good;" "Suddenly, everyone was run over by a truck."

4)Did I already mention that awful checkpoint system?

5)The length. 5.5 hours of gameplay? Nuh-uh.

6)I think the checkpoint wins another mention.

It wasent nearly as good as Call of Duty one.

The storyline was shit (especialy the ending).

The controlls, AI, level design and general shooting feel was excelent.

It had alot of variation(but way to little time with each part.

It also feld exhagurated at times, i mean come on; two guys with sniper rifles fending of between 100-200 enemies? Thanks but no thanks.

All in all a well made game, but one i wont remember for long.

sammyfreak:
It also feld exhagurated at times, i mean come on; two guys with sniper rifles fending of between 100-200 enemies? Thanks but no thanks.

It's the SAS they specialise in winning battles that everyone else thinks are impossible to win.

Back to the topic at hand. I thought it was a great game and would have been a whole lot better if they had just made it longer.

Scripts + Constantly Spawning Enemies + Checkpoints + Veteran = FUCKING IMPOSSIBLE.

Right now I'm in TV Studio and I'm really NOT looking forward to Chernobyl.

It can't be the best because it lacks fun for friends who are playing against eachother on the same console.
Don't get me wrong, shooting the shit out of my friend is fun, but the lack of bots make it the same game over and over.
The only real time we would be able to play multiplayer properly is if we both have playstation 3s and a copy of the game and interent acess, and even then your room gets flooded by people who play the game way too much and have horse-shit microphones.

I just got CoD4 last week, and its a pretty good game but frustrating at times. Im playing through on veteran for single player. For the TV station on veteran it took me probablly 20 tries over the course of an hour. I ended up sprinting to be back wall in the room where the exit is, hiding and returning grenades until my squad cleared up most of the room. The grenade spam is freakin rediculous at some points.

I havent really notcied anything horrible about the checkpoint system yet, just that I would rather be able to save my own game like im used to on most PC games. :P The single player could do with alot more slower paced sections. Its fun as hell facing volleys of machine gun fire trying to get an angle for a shot on some of the 40 guys spread out before you, all while trying not to get outflanked(because lets face it, your squad members arent looking that way). Its less fun as that same sequence continues for 45 minutes of gameplay, and again and again in different locations. Maybe it would be better on lower difficulty, but difficulty should be made by smarter enemies, with more damaging weapons perhaps(or better positions, etc), not by throwing masses of the same ones at you.

Multiplayer is fun and exciting, with alot of options. Maps can feel to cramped on the servers with more players, and the ones with less players I still just get dominated by the better players. The class system and unlocking upgrades is fun for me, although the progression for different guns could have been done better than just based on rank(I would prefer to unlock guns in the class of weapon ive been using).

Its a good game, but personally now I think about it more COD4 just makes me rather nostalgicly think about COD2 & 3. Best of the series still imo

All of you complaining about it being to hard:
Change the difficulty level. Seriously. That's what it's there for.

H0ncho:
All of you complaining about it being to hard:
Change the difficulty level. Seriously. That's what it's there for.

I played on the second lowest difficulty level, and the "One Shot, One Kill" and "Heat" missions were both ridiculously hard.

Also, to the one talking about impossible odds; no team of two men alive can hold out against 100 bad guys. Not possible.

It was fun to play once, but goes too much for scripted sequence and little for anything very dynamic. Almost every one of my plays of All Ghillied Up have been all the same. Also, the story, including all dialogue, was something Tom Clancy probably could've dreamed up in his sleep.
Ah well. It was fun once or twice.

H0ncho:
All of you complaining about it being to hard:
Change the difficulty level. Seriously. That's what it's there for.

But achievement whores won't get their points!

I played on the second lowest difficulty level, and the "One Shot, One Kill" and "Heat" missions were both ridiculously hard.

Also, to the one talking about impossible odds; no team of two men alive can hold out against 100 bad guys. Not possible.

Then set it to the lowest difficulty level...
Although personally I think its better for a game to be too hard than to be too easy.

I've played COD 1, UA, 2 and 4 and it's hard for me to decide between COD 4 and COD:UA as the best(Until COD 3 is released on PC it can bite me).

The checkpoint system, yeah, it's annoying, but it's been part of the series since too, so you have to blame COD 2 for introducing it.

Agree on the dogs being farking annoying. And parts of the game were crazy hard("No fighting in the war room" does come to mind).

The ending I can't really fault, other then the fact that "Mile High Club" seems tacked on. It's dark, but then again, so is most of the game and the ending works suprisiningly well in that respect. Actually, that and the nuclear bomb scene really helped the game for me(The fate of Sgt. Jackson really shocked me since the game wasn't even half over by that point), because some really bad shit does happen and the heros don't come out smelling like roses. "Suitably tragic" is the term I would use.

Though COD4 is one of those few games I played through the campaign.....and then a few days, replayed the game just because I enjoyed it so much. And I still have the urge to do it again. It had a great sense of "Fun" for me.

No, I don't think CoD4 is the best game I've ever played.
Most of the reasons have been already mentioned, but...
The game is basically one gigantic script. When you play it a second time, you're just doing the same things over and over again. The AI doesn't do anything incredible besides for having an NFL throwing arms. It isn't like Bioshock, where your enemies are somewhat randomized. The Multiplayer is fun but gets old very quickly, IN MY OPINION. The difference between Veteran and Hardened is rather jarring. The Checkpoint system is ridiculous.

All in all, CoD4 has problems. Its very fun the first time you play through, and the Multiplayer is intense, something that Halo 3 lacks. Unfortunately, it suffers from a SP that has absolutely no replay value, and a multiplayer that feels a bit dated.

Can't say it was the best, definitely great. But I'm still a huge Unreal Tournament 3 whore.

Its like the same thing as Soldier of Fortune 3 many people would say.

The controls are even the same.

If it were not for Halo 2.5, I mean 3, COD 4 would be the most over-rated game of 2007. That does not mean that I don't think it was a good game however. I still prefer COD 2 to 4 and it was not close to the best game of 07, that honor lies with Portal and Crysis with Bioshock coming in a close third. COD 4 is a good game but far from great.

JOE COOL:
Its like the same thing as Soldier of Fortune 3 many people would say.

The controls are even the same.

the games not THAT bad, but its not anywhere near as good as everyone makes it out to be?

you said you play a lot of shooters? i claim bulls***. ive been playing shooters for over a decade and ive played quite a few games that kick cod4s ass in EVERY way (cod2 being one of them). the games level design is nothing but subpar, 5 foot wide corridors and the game holds your hand so much it might as well be a freakin rail shooter. it takes you from scripted, boring, lifeless shootout with 4 million of soliders that have the WORST ai in a non-budget game released in the past several years, the only times it shows any sembelance of intelligence is when it is scripted to do something special (in which case its piss easy to tell its scripted), other than that its just spawn, go to point, shoot and nothing more. all firefights play out the EXACT same way EVERY TIME you play though the game with no varation (again, due to the ai being literally non existent).

the bullet penetration (i mention this because its one of those features that everyone praises and acts like cod4 did first when anyone hows been playing shooters for the past decade knows is false) is buggered up the arse at best. lets see, in real life does a handgun have the capability to shoot through 2 feet of solid concrete? no, but for some reason its possible with the "extremly realistic" call of duty 4. and to make it even worse its NOT POSSIBLE to EVER shoot through a barrel, a quart of an inch of crappy metal cant be pierced by a barrett m95, a weapon that has the capability of piercing an engine block in real life, but a handgun can go though 2 feet of concrete? right.................

criminally short. the only purpose the sp serves is to tell a story, and a crappy tom clancy rip off at that.

mp is fun for a while, but has less depth than counter strike. theres NO teamwork, not even in clan matches (at least not the 10 dozen ive played), the modes are just the same old same old, or if their not they are crappy rip offs of cs or bf maps but with much less depth. all the mp is is use grenade than run around and shoot the first thing you see. its fun, but games like cs, bf and tf2 have much more depth and dont get old as quick as cod4 gets.

overall, its average AT BEST and EXTREMLY overated.

The respawning enemies are my biggest problem with it. It's a massive case of the devs wanting their cake and eating it to. It's supposed to be realistic, and yet you can't fight from cover as you'd do in real life, because the enemies just keep coming. And it's all up to you to make some impossible sprint to more cover. And (on the 360 at least) fighting from cover is hard to, because there's no leaning whilst aiming. I think if they ditched the spawning enemies, added a aim-lean feature like MOH: Airborne's, and a basic squad command system like in Republic Commando, it'd be pretty close to ridiculously awesome.

EittilDratsab:
The AI doesn't do anything incredible besides for having an NFL throwing arms.

Watching an enemy do a little underarm flick of a grenade...which goes about 50m to land at your feet...so lame...

the mp is overrated
nade spaming doesnt take skill

2ndclasscitizen:
The respawning enemies are my biggest problem with it. It's a massive case of the devs wanting their cake and eating it to. It's supposed to be realistic, and yet you can't fight from cover as you'd do in real life, because the enemies just keep coming. And it's all up to you to make some impossible sprint to more cover. And (on the 360 at least) fighting from cover is hard to, because there's no leaning whilst aiming. I think if they ditched the spawning enemies, added a aim-lean feature like MOH: Airborne's, and a basic squad command system like in Republic Commando, it'd be pretty close to ridiculously awesome.

EittilDratsab:
The AI doesn't do anything incredible besides for having an NFL throwing arms.

Watching an enemy do a little underarm flick of a grenade...which goes about 50m to land at your feet...so lame...

The respawning enemies is the gameplay mechanic of CoD games. Its the way the games work and have allways worked and if you don't like it then buy another game. Its like buying Half life and hating having to use a gravity gun or buying fable because you hate cartoony RPG's or buying counter strike because you hate Online Gameplay.

And to other people:

And cod4 is not designed to be REALISTIC. ITS DESIGNED TO BE A GAME. get your thumb out of your **** and stop claiming that cod4 fails in the realism aspect.If you want a realistic game play something else because your obviously playing the wrong game. Just because a game takes place in modern times dosn't instantly label it as "realistic".

I'm not saying that the game is perfect but I feel like the people who try and label some of the bad parts of CoD4 usually end up ignoring the real bad parts of the game and instead pick on parts of the game that are supoosed to be in it.

Fire Daemon:

2ndclasscitizen:
The respawning enemies are my biggest problem with it. It's a massive case of the devs wanting their cake and eating it to. It's supposed to be realistic, and yet you can't fight from cover as you'd do in real life, because the enemies just keep coming. And it's all up to you to make some impossible sprint to more cover. And (on the 360 at least) fighting from cover is hard to, because there's no leaning whilst aiming. I think if they ditched the spawning enemies, added a aim-lean feature like MOH: Airborne's, and a basic squad command system like in Republic Commando, it'd be pretty close to ridiculously awesome.

EittilDratsab:
The AI doesn't do anything incredible besides for having an NFL throwing arms.

Watching an enemy do a little underarm flick of a grenade...which goes about 50m to land at your feet...so lame...

The respawning enemies is the gameplay mechanic of CoD games. Its the way the games work and have allways worked and if you don't like it then buy another game. Its like buying Half life and hating having to use a gravity gun or buying fable because you hate cartoony RPG's or buying counter strike because you hate Online Gameplay.

I've played past COD games and they never seemed to be as bad as 4.

Fire Daemon:
And cod4 is not designed to be REALISTIC. ITS DESIGNED TO BE A GAME. get your thumb out of your **** and stop claiming that cod4 fails in the realism aspect.

They hired people who have served in the Army to provide realism assistance. Everyone touts the game as "ultra-realistic." They make pains to point out how "realistic" the game is. THAT'S why everyone criticizes the broken penetration mechanic. Personally, I didn't like the penetration mechanic because it removed the "GET 2 DA COVAH" gameplay of CoD. I also didn't like the RPG trajectories. There is a fine line between "realistic" and "fun." CoD4 crossed into the "realistic" territory way too much to forgive the broken penetration.

The problem with realism in games is that real world warfare isn't fun. Most of the guns in that game should put you down with a single center of mass shot. Real grenades have a kill radius of more than 10 meters. A hand held knife is physically incapable of doing more damage than the cartridge fired by the m82 (seriously, that thing will rip a man in half: they use it to disable armored vehicles for Christ's sake).

I personally like the bullet penetration because it discourages the campy behavior that I generally LOATHE about tactical shooters.

About the RPGs I have to agree. It's way too difficult to hit a helicopter with one when you can just point a clip from an LMG at it. Also, it's splash radius is too small.

The thing that bothered me the most, strangely, was the total lack of selective fire settings for the guns. Every single automatic weapon in that game, excluding the MGs, has a semi-auto setting. Allot of the ARs and SMGs also have 3 round burst settings and a few of them have 2 round bursts. The weapon setting change control is just mysteriously left out.

For people knocking the story: keep in mind that military games basically don't have stories (Cod 1&2 having better stories? Seriously WTF? Shoot the Nazis cause they are evil is NOT a story). Some games from Japan actually try, but it usually ends up so corny and unbelievable (Front Mission, Ace Combat) that they shouldn't have bothered in the first place. The story in cod4 served it's purpose quite well, even if the last 5 minutes were pretty lame.

All told though, I'm enjoying the multiplayer immensely, even if its likely just a temporary distraction from TF2.

For the SP, I think it's pretty epic the first time 'round but it doesn't stand up to multiple play-throughs. BioShock, anty of the SP games in The Orange Box, and The Darkness are all higher on my list for best single player RPG of '07 than CoD4, with Halo 3 tied with it.

The MP is, again, tied with Halo. Matchmaking's great fun for a while, but then it just gets annoying. It's only fun in custom games to me now. TF2 is far better to me.