Continuing on with CoD4, I finished Act 2 today, and it did feel quite a bit shorter than the first one. If this trend keeps up, Act 3 should only take a couple hours…

The highlight of this act was one chapter that was essentially a stealth mission, where you and your commander have to infiltrate the area around Chernobyl while disguised in ghillie suits. At one point you’re right out in an open field and have to keep low while enemy tanks and soldiers walk right past you, and you still have to carefully make sure that they don’t run or walk right over you.

The other high point of the act is one where you’re sent on an assassination of sorts, and after completing the hit you have to scramble to escape a rather large number of enemy soldiers, holding out until the chopper arrives to pick you up. It’s supposed to be one of the hardest parts in the game, and I did have to restart a handful of times, but it didn’t seem quite that bad in the end.

I finally got back to more CoD4 today and completed the first act (which actually puts me halfway through already, going by mission number counts alone). The high point of this one was definitely a part where you take the role of an AC-130 camera operator, calling down weapons fire onto the ground below as you watch on an infrared camera as the squad you’re protecting moves forward. It plays out a lot like this real video of an AC-130 attack, and creates an odd feeling of detachment from the actual combat.

The end of the act is another unexpected atmospheric bit that sets a mood really well, but I’d better not spoil it…

After finishing GoW, next up is…another shooter, Call of Duty 4. WWII is kind of cliche as a setting now, so fortunately they’ve set this one in the modern era instead, based around a nuclear crisis involving the Middle East and Russia.

The most obvious difference that you notice right away is that everything is a lot more tightly scripted, and instead of being able to relax and take it at your own pace you often find yourself being swept up and forced to press onward. At the beginning, it often feels like you’re just tagging along with your teammates and don’t really get to do much on your own, but before long your teammates start depending more and more on following your lead and waiting until you act a specific way. It sometimes feels a bit stifling, like you’re being forced to play in a very narrow way, but it also gives the game a more cinematic quality. You often play out things that would have been relegated to a cutscene instead in something like GoW, like the escape from the sinking vessel near the start.

Cover is important, since you’ll get cut down quickly out in the open, but it’s just a plain old move-yourself-behind-something system, not the explicit cover-activation system of GoW, so I kind of have to unlearn how that worked. I’m already dying plenty of times even on the normal difficulty level, mostly due to my cover not being as safe as I thought it was, or grenades that I failed to notice and throw back in time, but checkpoint saves are also plentiful here.

It looks like the single-player campaign will be fairly short, as I’m already halfway through the first act and there’s only three of them, but it’s a pretty well-done story so far at least, with uncomfortable this-could-happen undertones.

The multiplayer is supposed to be excellent from what I’ve heard on various forums, with an RPG-ish experience and upgrade system keeping you interested in playing on and reaching for that next rank or unlock, kind of like the Battlefield series. Normally I don’t bother checking the multiplayer too closely since I’m always anxious to get on to the next game, but I might have to try this one for a little while at least. After the main campaign…

I finally finished off Gears of War today, though I hadn’t really intended to. I got up to the end of the new PC content, figured I might call it a day there, thought maybe I’d just see a bit more, and before I knew it I was looking at the credits.

The PC-specific content was mostly just more straightforward firefights, but at the end there was a new ‘boss’ battle involving a monster seen but not directly fought in the 360 version. It must have taken a good ten tries though, since although there are plenty of spots around to hide in, it’s tall enough that sometimes it can hit you even when you’re hiding behind a pipe, leading to a lot of unexpected deaths.

After getting back to the regular campaign, it was mostly occupied by a slog from one end of a moving train to the other, with a lot of firefights in a narrow space. At one point a berserker attacked, and I thought I botched the expected way to kill it (it’s immune to regular weapons), but it turned out there was another way too. And towards the end there was a section with my old friends, the Lambent Wretches… Fortunately they weren’t too bad here compared to Act 3, and I could run past a bunch of them at the end.

And finally, there was the fight against General RAAM. It was looking pretty rough at first, since you have to make sure you remain in a lit area so the Kryll don’t kill you, which is tough when some of the lights move. I wound up defeating him on around my fifth attempt, though it was a close one, as I was out of torque bow bolts, down to my last grenade, and the sniper rifle wasn’t having much effect on getting the Kryll away from him. I wonder if it was glitched though, as I wound up not having to move from the initial spot as RAAM didn’t come close enough to force me to run. Eh, I’ll take it anyway…

Overall it wasn’t quite as mind-blowing as the hype might have led me to believe, but it was still pretty fun. There were various spots that were frustrating, but that was at least partly self-inflicted by going for the Hardcore difficulty right off the bat.