WW2 #26: Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (Nintendo DS)
Why tho?
This review was originally posted to Twitter on February 15, 2020
Initial release: November 5, 2007
Platform: Nintendo DS
Developer: n-Space
The second worst idea anyone has ever had in the history of video games has been to put FPS games on the Nintendo DS. The worst is to make you use the stylus to look around. I give you: Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare for the DS, incidentally developed by the same people behind Duke Nukem: Time to Kill and Land of the Babes for the PlayStation all the way back in the late 90s, pretty much their only real claim to fame.
Let’s get right to it: Call of Duty 4 for PC and consoles is a landmark, one of the most important games ever made. It brought a laser-like clarity of focus to gameplay and utilized the graphics technology of 2007 in such a way that even now, it still looks incredible. The DS version, meanwhile, is inexplicible. The nagging question is, who is this even for? Is it for die-hard Call of Duty fans? For young children who couldn’t afford an XBox 360? Or little brothers who wanted to play what their siblings were into? Or is this just a cynical cash-in utilizing the DS’ hardware gimmicks?
Despite sharing a name with its parent title, it’s not a port — Soap, Griggs, Price, et al. do not appear, instead it’s a parade of complete ciphers and personality-free NPCs with a story told largely through text and still images, set alongside the events of the main game, yet oddly rehashing several missions from it. It’s certainly not exactly important to the Modern Warfare storyline. At least with games like Roads to Victory the World War II setting is generic enough — and the basic beats of history a solid enough structure to hang a narrative on — that a story doesn’t really matter, but Infinity Ward were trying to build a universe with Modern Warfare. What does this add to it?
Alongside several interminably long missions set in generic Middle Eastern urban locales or bunkers, we also rehash the boat raid, the infamous AC-130 mission, the missile complex mission (and subsequent escape/bridge finale.) I’m honestly surprised they didn’t reuse Pripyat too.
Sure, the plotline is all different, set largely in the background of the greater narrative, but this game does feel at times like it’s meant to be a small-scale port for little brothers. And maybe that would even be okay, except the game is just complete garbage.
Graphically the game looks like a low-rent Half-Life mod. I’m not really convinced it’s not using the same engine, even. It’s some real Counter-Strike beta 1.0 shit. and speaking of Counter-Strike, in terms of gameplay it reminds me a lot of Condition Zero: Deleted Scenes, only worse. Deleted Scenes was a kind of disjointed, weird mess, with some strange difficulty spikes, but Ritual Entertainment’s abortive attempt at a single-player Counter-Strike had some real creative ideas in it. Call of Duty 4 for the DS in contrast is soulless and rote, with bad controls and worse minigames.
Let’s talk about the controls, shall we? They’re a fucking nightmare. I often wax sardonic about the ludicrous lengths Electronic Arts went to get FPS controls into their PSP Medal of Honor games, but after a while they start to make sense given the limitations. Nothing makes sense about the controls in this game. You hold the DS in your left hand and use the D-pad as WASD, left shoulder button for firing. In your right hand you use the stylus as a mouse.
Why?
Why?
What the fuck?
Why?
Why not just use the face buttons like on the PlayStation Portable? Why do we have to break our wrists like this?
I hate the DS, I hate the stylus, I hate Nintendo’s obsession with hardware gimmicks. And Call of Duty 4 for the DS using the stylus as a mouse represents the very fucking worst of what the DS makes possible. That it then dumps minigames on us… ugh. The most common ones are bomb defusal minigames which are just trace-the-wire jobs, or “hacking” which is turning tiles to connect nodes then you inputting a 4-number code. We also get bad ideas like a return of the “struggle” QTE from Call of Duty 3, only even worse.
The infamous AC-130 mission is faithfully recreated here, only it’s way more annoying. You’re not allowed to level most buildings, and friendly and enemy units are so tiny that they’re almost impossible to see or even differentiate, even on the closest zoom.
There is no reason for this game to exist. Even if they were bound and determined to make a terrible handheld FPS game, they could have put it on the PSP instead. This game feels exploitative, like they were trying to lure in the Pokémon crowd for violent imperialist propaganda.
Bad graphics, bad controls, just bad ideas all around: the history of hand-held FPS games has always been uneven but this is just infuriating. It’s not like the gameplay is even all that bad beneath the bad controls, it’s not grossly unfair, if I played it with a keyboard and mouse it’d be fine — it’s just boring, and slow, and checkpoints are few and far between. But that’s worse; it lures you in with the promise of a condensed version of a blockbuster hit that you can play on the go and what we’re left is a crappy clone of Counter-Strike: Condition Zero Deleted Scenes with a head injury. I’m going to put the ROM on a flash drive and fire it into the sun.
