For you, the war is over, but the fight against terror has just begun...
Freedom from the historical battlefield has in turn meant greater freedom from the incumbent sensitivity. Modern Warfare pulls no punches throughout its 24-style story of stolen nuclear material, international terrorism, manhunts, torture and execution.
And don't expect some of these darker themes to be limited to enemy action. It's a slick thriller that far outstrips the sometimes-clumsy cutscenes and dismal voice acting that often tied together the disparate action strands of Call of Duty past.
Although you know straight away that this is a Call of Duty game.
The scale, lighting and texture-enhanced graphics still bear the hallmarks of the series, as do the classic COD controls (left trigger zoom, press thumbstick to steady etc.) Specific unpulled punches that fly straight at the nose and bring tears to the eyes would spoil the plot (and that there is a plot worthy of spoiling speaks volumes for this release), so suffice to say that in Modern Warfare things can and often do go very wrong, sometimes whole hard-fought missions ending in bitter disappointment, demanding new leads and opening up fresh objectives.
It's a treacherous game of fast tidal changes, often sweeping the player off his feet, not just with plot twists, but also with sudden changes in objective that immediately affect gameplay. A stealthy village infiltration will suddenly "go loud" and before you know it you're calling in Cobra strikes on weapon barns, blowing up churches and setting off batteries of claymores in the village high street as you desperately clear each house in search of a captured contact with information vital to the continued existence of 41 million citizens of the Eastern Seaboard of the United States. And then the enemy react, their own air support whupping in to deliver strikes and ground troops. Your infiltration-turned-assault has been set on its head and the mission becomes a desperate battle for survival as you retreat house by house with your squad, counting the seconds until the arrival of your exfiltration gunship.
And it's not just the gripping plot and rolling gameplay that keeps you on your toes. Alternating between SAS, the US Marine Corps (USMC) and later joint missions, with a 15-year flashback sniper mission at Chernobyl thrown in to great effect, the brilliantly judged pace of COD4 owes much to the changing locales. With the SAS mostly following nuclear leads through Russia and the USMC battling to maintain stability and track Most Wanted in the Middle East, there's always a fresh environment or new take on an existing setting.
The game starts (after the best interactive cut-scene ever!) on a massive cargo vessel wallowing through a wintry storm in mid ocean. Unlike many other shooter levels set on ships, this one really moves with the swells, waves crashing on deck and corridors lurching as your SAS team works into its heart.
Levels in the Middle East feature awe-inspiring wings of attack helicopters ferrying you into complex desert towns, whole tank battalions kicking up the dust beneath you, RPG trails feathering the sky and ground bursts chewing up fiery mushrooms and chunking whole buildings. There are tank escort missions, levels where you are the air strike commander protecting the team you were just fighting with as they escape, stealth sniper objectives, dark missions through ruined adobe towns using jelly-green night vision, pilot rescue, nuclear silo clearance, road vehicle chases and on and on. There is no weak level in the whole game. Each has unique merits and each is linked to the threaded plot as never before in Call of Duty.
It's a very personal experience this time and far, far from the sense of great set battles linked by dodgy cutscenes that we're used to. The integration of pace change is wonderfully subtle. An on-rails vehicle sequence as you man a helicopter door-gun segues into a foot patrol section after you abseil into a fortified desert town. This goes indoors for a Rainbow Six-style building clearance when your team blows a door with charges and then fight becomes flight and you battle your way out of town a la Black Hawk Down before diving for the back ramp of a helicopter gunship that's then shot down.
The game takes great care to ensure the pace changes link and make sense and this effort pays great dividends for an audience now familiar with the moreish swings and fast leaps of episodic thrillers like 24 and The Unit. While we mention Rainbow Six-style building clearance, we should say that sometimes COD4 begs for at least a basic cover and lean system and this would have made the excellent controls complete.
So what makes Modern Warfare so contemporary? Infinity Ward sat down and wrote a shopping list that would make an arms dealer thank Satan for accepting his soul as down payment. Top of the list were helicopters - what better to symbolise the end of World War II? And LOTS of helicopters, of every size and shape, for every conceivable combat situation.
Helicopters to hunt you down with kazillion-candle search beams. Helicopters to chase your jeep with rockets and cannon down busy Eastern European highways. Helicopters with grenade launchers for you to pound rooftop gun nests, burst tanks below and topple statues of Middle East dictators. Crashed helicopters with fixed miniguns to bear on terrorist armies pouring into Russian hilltop villages. Helicopters you rope from. Helicopters you escape in. Helicopters you crash inside. Helicopters whose pilots can be sniped. Helicopters whose passengers can fall out. Helicopters that nearly slice your damn legs off with their blades. Chinooks, Black Hawks, Hinds, Cobras... you get the idea. COD4 has more choppers than a gay porn star in a Raleigh bike shop in 1971. You know, the one round the corner from that massive helicopter factory. And they're all absolutely awesome exemplars of their fearsome breed, lifting Modern Warfare straight up to new heights and defining the sense of slick delivery, deadly poise and cold purpose that pervades the game.
But helicopters are just the tip of the arms dump. There's plenty of heavy ordnance packed with modern technology that you carry with you. Because despite the frequent helicopter rides, this is still a game for the foot soldier of the special forces advance team, yomping and sneaking behind enemy lines. Split between SAS and USMC squads, your two heroes will use Javelin rocket launchers that lock onto tanks and yes, helicopters, before delivering a payload that fires high, acquires the target and then slams it down into the earth with a high-explosive fist.
You'll plant claymore booby traps, use night vision laser sights, sniper rifles that penetrate walls, flesh-ripping chainguns and devastating airstrikes from jets. Oh, and from helicopter gunships in case you were worried. You'll also get to wield the godlike destructive power of the AC-130 Spectre gunship.
But apart from a slicker, moreish story, masterful pace and plot twists, massively upgraded battle scale, textures and effects, awesome weapons and very convincing enemy AI, why is COD4 such a stunning success? We'd finally have to mention the incredible attention to the little things. The SAS sapper stumbling backwards clumsily after he pulls away a section of chainlink he's outlined with liquid nitrogen spray. The bullet on a string that swings real-time from the rear view mirror of a terrorist Mercedes. The use of shadows to spot enemies behind walls and fire high calibres through compliant wall materials to kill them. The heat haze that rises from a spooling chaingun as it winds down. The ability to pick up key injured comrades to evacuate them under fire and the way some terrorists will fire off a last pistol shot, or detonate a grenade when you thought them already dead.
Call of Duty 4 embraces Modern Warfare with a passion that suggests this new love affair will burn for a long time yet. We'd be very surprised if Call of Duty 5 gets back into bed with the faithful old Second World War. It has moved on, tapped a rich new vein (for Call of Duty at least) and in doing so it has breathed fresh life into the contemporary shooter as a genre.
In every way this is the definitive 'real world' FPS, incorporating the best aspects of Rainbow Six, Ghost Recon and Battlefield, but bringing those experiences to a far wider range of gamers, many of whom would be turned off by those more hardcore titles. It even crescendos to a great and dark but conclusive ending. At Modern Warfare's core is very modern entertainment, but the downside to this dense and gripping delivery is that it's over far too quickly, five to six hours on normal difficulty. You do have a short bonus solo mission after the credits, the solo Arcade mode to beat your friends' scores at, and of course the enormously comprehensive multiplayer options, although many will be disappointed that there are no controllable vehicles over Xbox Live this time. Call Of Duty 4 is short but immensely satisfying and we can't wait for a post-modern revival.