What scenes are you talking about specifically? I can't recall anything in the game being anywhere near as badly paced or relentless as you're saying, and in fact I can only think of one scene (the point where you're trying to rescue a damaged tank) that had respawning enemies at all.

It's possible that you and I simply have different playing styles, and there were some points where you tried to sit it out and I didn't, which would explain the discrepancy.




In a word: yes. I've played roughly half of the games you mentioned, but out of those, yes, I enjoyed COD4's single player the most. Quite easily. The Half-Lives were ok, but really didn't do much for me aside from the fun of playing with cool technology like gravity guns. Far Cry had a cool setting and that's about it. Far Cry 2 had some incredible ideas and gameplay systems, but they were executed with some flaws and didn't achieve anywhere near the level of quality they shot for (which is too bad, since I've met and watched several lectures by FC2's lead designer, and they had some awesome ambitions). Bioshock was amazing in every sense of the word, just... not as much so as COD4 for me. Same goes for the Jedi Knight/Dark Forces series. The others I either haven't played or I don't have much to say about.

The only game that really gave me pause was Portal, which was fantastic and right up there with COD4... but for utterly different reasons. I'd hesitate to even put them in the same genre; it's comparing apples to oranges, in game design terms.

COD4 did a couple things really well in my eyes (spoilers!).

First, it's pacing was damn near perfect. Perfectly spaced checkpoints, a great and well-thought out mixture of high intensity scenes (prologue scene on the ship, nuke scene, etc.), slower paced stuff (Chernobyl, that ambush near the end of the game, the mission where you're rescuing the russian informant), and just plain different experiences (bombing comes to mind).

Second, absolute masterful use of the first person viewpoint. I was utterly immersed from the moment I began playing the game. THis was affected by the pacing to be sure, but a lot of it was the way that your controls, actions, and feedback (in the form of blurriness of the screen, etc.) reflected the situation you were in so perfectly. For instance: that big cinematic opening credits scene where you're controlling a guy that is bound and gagged as you're being dragged through the streets, and eventually shot in the head. Or the moment after the nuke goes off, and you're controlling the mortally wounded soldier as he takes his last breaths and tries, futilely, to escape the destruction. Or the climax, when you're wounded, on the ground, with wobbly aiming, and you shoot the antagonist. These were well-crafted scenes, and this quality was consistent - it didn't feel like it was isolated to the climactic events.

Third, the atmosphere and context, although not terribly complex, were well done and quite entertaining. I felt like I was playing real life soldiers in Black Hawk Down-esque situations. Obviously real life military is nothing whatsoever like what COD4 depicts, but they successfully suspended my disbelief to the point where I bought into their fiction unquestioningly. This was accomplished partially through the aforementioned pacing and first-person, but also through high-quality voice acting, sound effects, the feedback when you shot your guns or stabbed an enemy, etc. All those little details really add up, and COD4 was extremely detailed.


And of course, all of these differentiators would be for naught if the core gameplay didn't hold up. Luckily for COD4, and for me, it delivered.