Mass amounts of spent ammunition? Check. Potential nuclear catastrophe? Check. Thousands of militants to kill? Check.
As soon as the first level begins, you can't help yourself but stare open mouthed at the spectacular graphics. Textures look real and 3d, no more flat walls to look at. Characters show emotion and move realistically. Light reflects and refracts just as it does in reality. And that's just the first level. When combat kicks in, you get even more astounding effects including heat blur from rifles, motion blur from narrowly missing bullets, realistic looking smoke trails from those deadly RPG wielding terrorists. Everything looks and feels as it should, which is frankly quite terrifying when you're hunkered behind a car under heavy fire when a grenade lands right next to your feet.
The sound is just as pitch perfect as the graphics. Rifles sound deep and deadly. The dreaded metallic sound of frag grenades landing near you is terrifying. Bullets scream past you as you hunker behind cover. Your allies call out enemy locations realistically, and your foes scream at you and each other in their native tongue. The voice acting of the main characters is superb, from the highly disciplined SAS operatives Captain Price and Gaz, to the somewhat less disciplined antics of Marine Recon Sgt. Griggs.
With all the initial emphasis being on graphics and sound, it seemed as though gameplay had been pushed to the sidelines, but not so. The single player campaign isn't very lengthy, but it is white knuckled raw and brutal action at it's best. There's never a dull moment during the campaign and, as you get used to the game, the harder difficulties offer a perfect challenge to test your skills. Playing the game on veteren is stupidly hard, it just forces you to plan your attacks and movements. It forces you to be careful and, as such, it forces you to act far more realistically in the given circumstance.
The meat of the game isn't single player though. The multiplayer in COD has been completley redone, and boy is it addictive. As you play, you gain experiance which contributes to your promotion. With each promotion you unlock certain items, such as different game types, new weapons or perks to put in a custom class, or challenges. This adds a whole new dimension to the game as you try to rank up as fast as you can to get to a really cool item that wanted.
All in all, Call of Duty 4 is a solid FPS that scores high on just about every front. The only negative about it is that the single player campaign is short, but that's just a testament to how good the game is, because you don't want it to end.