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…