First of all, I'm a huge fan of Call of Duty, owned every game they've had. But when it's raining grenades...
Being a Call of Duty "Veteran" not necessarily for on-line multi-player, but completing all the campaigns on Veteran so far, I thought I would be able to tackle this Campaign with the same amount of challenge from the previous games.
I was wrong.
This year, the programming for the game has got the better of it's self. In the single player campaign you have to battle through and unrealistic barrage of Grenades. No matter how many enemies you kill or how many ways you go, grenades (sometimes four at a time) keep coming with pin point accuracy. This gives the feel almost that they are being dropped from above not thrown from a soldier 70 feet away. This unwelcome feature makes the last two levels of the Veteran Campaign extremely punishing and require a very gratuitous amount of luck to complete.
The multi-player aspect of the campaign was a welcome thought to me before this game came out. I thought it would be played like Halo's Campaign where up to 4 players could play the campaign as separate characters and it would make the game much easier to complete on veteran.
Not only can you not earn achievements for completing the levels on multi-player, (unlike other games such as Gears of War 1 + 2 and Halo 3) You all are carbon copies of the exact same character. This gives the feel that this feature was thrown together very quickly prior to release and as far as cut-scenes go it does very little to immerse you in the game. Another problem I had was with scoring. If you play carefully and get lots of points, but your squad-mates perish they will be on the ground waiting for you to save them. You may get killed rushing to their aide and then all points are reset back to the last check point. It's a painful annoyance that gives you little control over your own score during the game.
I have quite enjoyed the Zombie Survival mode shipped with the game. Though the difficulty curve for the waves is a little steep, You are never short of action and Zombies are always coming. I didn't like the fact that there are sniper rifles placed in closets like they are big secret mega weapons. Because after the 7th level sniper rifles are kind of defunct against the speedy, numerous zombie horde. One map does get boring after a while too.
The online multi-player has a good set of maps and are usually pretty fun. Spawning can be problematic at times quite often you can be killed twice with the same air strike or killed before you even know you've spawned.
Though I have problems with the authenticity of a Japanese soldier wielding an MP40 in battle, it's nice to have that level of customization when playing online. You can really deck your soldier out to suit your strengths.
This Game gets 6.5 from me because I am a big campaign player and in this rendition of Call of Duty, the campaign was very little fun and the story was less then memorable. If you like Online multi-player with lots of authentic weapons to choose from then this game is right up your alley.