It has been a long wait since CoD4 was announced. Do you remember the date? It was waaaay back in the spring: Saturday, April 28th to be exact. The commercials for Modern Warfare premiered during the NFL Draft on ESPN.

Well here we are at the beginning of autumn and the PC demo for IW's latest foray into FPS gaming was made available on Yahoo! servers yesterday.

Have *you* downloaded it yet?

Well if you haven't, let me tell you what you are missing. I will be as unbiased and as objective as I possibly can.

Let's first start out with the download and installation process.

I downloaded it from Yahoo! Launch Central late last night (the first day it was released). I had read a lot about the slow download speeds and the random aborts that occurred for some. I had no problem. My download speeds ranged all over the place, from 700-800 kbps, with some occasional slowdowns to 150. The demo weighed in at 1.4 Gb and it took about 30 minutes to have it pop up on my desktop.

The installation process was a breeze. Selecting the "typical install", it autoloaded Direct X 9.0c and primed me for launch.

Performance

I had dismal expectations for my computer being able to run this behemoth of a game. By today's Dual-Core and 8800 NVidia standards, I have an ancient computer. But as I suspect many of you have not upgraded either, I am here to give you hope that you too will at least be able to get something out of CoD4. Now, I always see performance appraisals and specs for high end systems when new games come out - so in breaking with that tradition, here's some data on the low end of the scale.

My test machine:

The archaic 6600 (by today's standards) NVidia GPU, the very minimum recommended graphics card and a P4, 3.1 Ghz.  As a benchmark, when I play CoD2 online in 800x600 mode, I get a frame rate of 66 fps. I set all the optional graphic settings to off. Model detail was set to normal.

Here are my in-game frame rates as a function of screen resolution:

640x480 66 fps
720x480 60 fps
720x576 58 fps
800x600 49 fps
848x480 41 fps
960x600 35 fps
1024x768 32 fps

In comparison, some of BASHandSlash.com's forum regulars also tried out the Demo with their rigs and were all pleasantly surprised at the high frame rates they were getting. There was a great deal of fear that the numbers would all be very low (<100), but the state of the art machines performed reasonably well.

{DBTRS}Deuce, for example, using a 8800GTX/Intel core 2 duo E6700, with a screen resolution set at 1680x1050 clocked 50-100fps with all settings maxed out.

Here are his settings:

Lowering some of these settings will undoubtedly allow him to get some nice "competition-quality" speeds.

Some like myself, will require a new computer if online success is hoped for when MP comes on stream.

The Goods 

The Demo comes with one level: "The Bog Rescue", which features the much ballyhooed nightvision sequences. For those of you who missed the description of this level from Yahoo!'s site, here it is:

First Impressions

I will try to be as honest as I can be with my initial thoughts of the SP demo. I am writing this having played the complete level at all skill levels, from Recruit to Veteran - a total of ten times. I am using a computer with minimum spec requirements.

1. The install was a beautiful thing and put me in a great mood to play the game.

2. The splash screens, like the mood in the game, were very dark and somewhat depressing. For months I have worried that the depressing war in Iraq seen on the nightly news every night would spoil the fun of this game. I was conscious to try and set aside those thoughts, but as soon as the intro-movie started playing...I was reminded immediately of the Google Map views of Baghdad being shown on CNN. I must admit the virtual-world, pure fun aspect of the game simply vaporized at that point and real life poked its head in.

3. Immediately thrust into combat, I started off in the middle of a multi-lane expressway on my way to help out a tanker team in trouble, when just as quickly my platoon was ambushed!

4. My loadout consisted of an M9 sidearm and the M4 Carbine assault weapon. Both weapons felt great. They handled well and felt like they were part of me and not some abstraction. Contrast this feeling with that experienced in CoD2, where I never did get used to the ungainly behavior of some of that game's weapons.

Shooting the Tango's at the end of the street I was on, I quickly realized the following:

a) There is virtually no recoil in any of the two weapons I have. In fact the M9 shoots so straight it could be called the Sniper-pistol.  Both weapons are easily aimed if not deadly: it usually takes 2-3 rounds to take out an enemy combatant.

Note that some folks have already complained about the lack of in-game recoil. Fortunately, it has been discovered that the guns in MP may behave differently.

raf, on http://crossfire.nu has already found a workaround, he replaces the SP guns with MP guns to get some recoil back in the game. Here's his process:

1) Open "C:\Program Files\Activision\Call of Duty 4 - Modern Warfare Demo\main"
2) Open iw_02.iwd with a winrar
3) Go to weapons
4) Copy any you want from 'mp' to 'sp', removing the _mp extension from the gun:
e.g
1) delete iw_02.iwd\weapons\sp\ak47
2) copy iw_02.iwd\weapons\mp\ak47_mp to iw_02.iwd\weapons\sp\ak47 

He's documented his findings in the following Youtube videos:

5. The sounds are a disappointment. In CoD2, the weapon sounds and explosions were deafening and immersed me into the combat. The CoD4 Demo's sounds were dull, flat and rather unspectacular. The musical score, currently being worked on, was nearly non-existant.

6. The AI was spectacularly ineffective. The scene where three pieces of armor encircle you on an overpass and you are asked to dispatch them with a Javelin is the example I will use to prove this statement. The enemy infantry simply stood around in this engagement, completely exposed on the guardrail overlooking our Marine combat team which proceeded to rip them a new one - as they say in my 'hood. Move! Duck doods! Do something AI. All they were able to accomplish was to provide me with static-target practice.

I was very disappointed with what I saw in AI behavior compared even to CoD2. EA's Medal of Honor: Airborne AI are all Nobel-prize winners in comparison to CoD4's crew.

7. The sight of my own men lining up at the next "event" waiting for me to go first into the fray has officially become old.

This CoD4 AI tactic immediately takes you out of the immersion you are in when you see it. There is no "free-will" in CoD4 and for all you philosophy majors out there, this has become a problem. It is a predictable effect: You enter a scene; Duke it out; Then, you're moved to the next scene. As in CoD2, you begin to feel as though you were in one of those large people-movers at Epcot, being moved from one scene to the next. 

8. This was the CoD2 total conversion mod that the CoD modding community wished it had made.

CoD2 made the hair on the back of my neck stand straight up in some levels. I remember playing a Russian character in one scene during a German counter-attack where I felt so scared I thought I would need to retreat into my living room if the krouts broke through our lines.

I never got that feeling in the Demo. Having said that, I will  wait until IW puts in their usual magic touches, like upswelling music and more sfx sounds before I will make a final judgement on CoD4's pucker factor.

As well, the game seemed dated to me. Deja' vu, you might say: I've seen this "look" all before in CoD2. No question though, the new weapons are great, the graphics look very nice and the added whizzbangery (the javelin launches are quite spectacular) are great. But the demo didn't feature anything much beyond what I had in CoD2. Yes, there were a few cars that exploded near me - taking me to see my 14 virgins (there aren't as many of those in CoD heaven). The only part of the frangible environment that seemed to break for me...was a small clock I found on the floor in one of the lower apartments towards the end of the Demo.

Quickie Conclusions 

Based on this demo, the game is definitely a BUY. I can certainly see CoD4 keeping me entertained for another year - easily.

The game plays smooth and I was left with the feeling of wanting to click to the next level. Modern Warfare is not a breakthrough in FPS gaming; however, it is a really slick upgrade to CoD2.

Though the SP Demo was a bit of a let-down for me - undoubtedly caused by the massive hype surrounding the game - I can easily see that MP online will be a killer! And for that reason alone I certainly would recommned investing in both a new system and in this game.

Rating

To fulfill the need to provide some numerical rating for the CoD4: Modern Warfare Demo...here goes:

 1 = poor, 5 = fabu-tastic

You could consider this rating harsh. It is certainly somewhat lower than many scores I have seen on the net. In my defense, I have attempted to rank it with objectivity and commensurate with Activision's own hype.

What do you think of this game? Rate is here .