brilliant...but not worthy of the ten score.
then multiplayer.
SinglePlayer
finally pulling itself away from the WW2 genre, COD4 is set in the now with now weapons and a now style of playing.
this maybe the first COD with an actual story and it follows around two people, an SAS solder named Soap (as Cpt. Price says "what kinda name is Soap anyway eh?) and a 1st Recon force guy named Jackson. you also get to play as Cpt.Price in a flashback mission. as you would expect, the SAS missions are all sneaky sneaky, silenced pistoling and the USMC missions are the equivilent of black hawk down in game for example they have no silenced weapons in the story. the story ranges from chernobyl to what seems to be iraq and hereford (SAS HQ) to a container ship off canada.
weapon wise, all upto date and very accurate. take for exapmle the javlin missle launcher, the missle is propelled out the tube and into the sky and comes crashing staight back down, just like the real one. silenced weapons dont alert the guards and the different versions of weapons finally give you ammo when you walk over them (in COD2 a scoped K98 would take ammo from a normal K98 wtf?) so you can run over an M4 and it will give you ammo for your M16. same with the AK and dragonov.
and the weapons dont sound plasticy anymore, due to the fact that IW went out and recorded real guns and worked with american, british and russian army blokes (maybe an SAS bloke as well?) to make the guns as realistic as possible. ive heard people over the COD4 online chat complaining that the M16 was burst fire and not automatic, thats what the real M16 is like im afraid. which brings me to the good part, online.
firstly, the customising of guns was a big plus, as was the ranking to get the parts and the challenges but my only problem with it are the maps. theres alot of them, but only 4-5 of the 15 or so maps are actually any good.
thats the reason for the 9.5 rather than the 10. other than that, top notch and worthy of a place on your recently played list.