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The Call of Duty series has been one of the best first-person shooting franchises in the industry. The first three games take place during World War II as you try to defeat the Nazi regime. This time out, however, you're placed in the present as you battle insurgents in the Middle East and Russia, which is a good thing because personally, I was getting tired of all the WW2 games out there. But with great modern era war titles in form of Ghost Recon and Rainbow Six, can Call of Duty 4 even compete? Most definitely, yes.

You start the game in training as you learn how to shoot, run, throw grenades and the like. After a timed training run, the game suggests what difficulty you should be playing, but in the end, you can choose what difficulty you want play. The single player campaign revolves around you as a U. S. Marine and a British S.A.S. You're given a variety of missions, which most of the time involves getting from point A to point B. The thing is; it's really not that simple. The action in the game is so fast and so intense, that you might find yourself hiding behind a dumpster hoping for a break in the shooting from the dozens of insurgents. You won't be hiding there for long, unfortunately, because these bad guys seems to have an endless cache of grenades and RPG's, that if you stay in one place too long you might get blown to bits.

The control scheme is pretty much the same in previous games allowing you to only carry two weapons, usually a pistol and an assault rifle, and a handful of grenades, both flash and frag. But there's a wide variety of weapons you can pickup throughout the game ranging from your basic AK-47 to rocket launchers. The great and scary thing about these modern day weapons though, is that a lot of the time, the bullets can go through walls. So staying hidden behind the wall of some abandoned store front won't last too long. But you can take out the bad guys who refuse to poke their heads out behind a wall. CoD4 adds a little variety to the missions as well. If you recall during the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan there was footage released to the media of a gunship, with a sort of infrared vision, dropping bombs on Taliban and Al Queda forces as they fled buildings and running across open areas. There's a mission in CoD4 that looks exactly like that. It's chillingly amazing. Wait until you see the night vision battles too.

Once you get done with the single-player campaign, you can take the action online with a handful of different games. The most popular of course, is Team Deathmatch, where you join one team to battle another team to see how many kills you earn in a certain amount of time. The other games are sort of capture the flag type of games that have you trying to blow the enemies' bases or capturing certain points on a map until you control the entire area or until time runs out. After putting in time in the online gaming and beefing up your skills, your skill class goes up and you'll be able to get weapons and skills that rookies wouldn't be able to use. It's a pretty fun advantage.

With great graphics, intense action, a decent story and an addictive online component, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare is a must have for any video game fan.

Q's Rating: 5 out of 5

IGN: 9.4 out of 10

Gamespot: 9.0 out of 10