Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare Impressions August 24,2007 - Beta: a dinosaur in the world of home video, but all the rage in the gaming community. Bungie saw great success with the Halo 3 public beta earlier this summer, and whether or not that played a role with this one, Activision is sure to see plenty of success with their Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare public multiplayer beta. Exclusive to the Xbox 360 platform and to the United States for the time being, players will have access to a few of the maps and game types, along with the new perks system.

After downloading the beta to your hard drive, you’ll have quick access through the dashboard’s demo section (take note: this is not a demo). There are four game types in all: Team Deathmatch, Free For All, Team Tactical, and Team Objective. During any game type, you’ll earn points from kills and being on the winning side, all going towards your rank. When the game ships, levels will surpass 55, but the beta caps you out at level 11. Kill points will vary from each game type: Team Deathmatch and Team Tactical will earn you ten points per kill, while Free For All and Objective earns you a cool five points. The number of players varies as well. Deathmatches and Objective will hold anywhere from 6-12 players and Tactical will hold 4-6 (this is based on the smaller scaling of the game type). All game types also have a max amount of points either yourself or your team can earn. Team Deathmatch maxes you at 750 points, FFA at 300, Tactical at 500, and Objective at 150.

One of the great features in the beta is unlocking different features throughout, the first of which is the class (character) selection. Each match will have you select from Assault, Spec Ops, or Light Machine Gunner (the game chooses your team for you). You’ll have to rank up to higher levels in order to unlock Demolition and Sniper classes. Unlike Call of Duty 3, however, you may not change your class after you’ve been killed. Instead, there is a KillCam that you may watch before you automatically respawn, but pressing X will put you immediately back in the action. While playing, you may notice varied players or modified weapons. That comes from the Create-A-Class option in the beta’s menu, which is unlocked after reaching level 4 (Lance Corporal). You can’t change your appearance, but instead change your primary weapon, side arm, grenades, and perks (we’ll get into that later). To reward you for killing streaks, the game will activate different options on the D-pad. If you get 3 straight kills, you can activate a UAV, and for 5 you get to call in an air-strike.

The maps included in the beta are Crash, Overgrown, and Vacant. None of these are too big, but they also aren’t too small. We guess you could say they’re about perfect for the amount of people playing. In Crash, you’ll find a downed helicopter in the middle of a town with plenty of rooftops and alleys to fight in. Overgrown will throw you into a very grassy area (it’s called Overgrown for a reason, clearly) of town. Vacant looks like an industrial-like area, with plenty of large size container-like objects outside to hide in, and plenty of hallways to gun your way through. Overgrown tended to be the biggest bore for us, but Crash and Vacant were plenty of fun, especially if you utilize the containers in Vacant.

In the Barracks part of the menu, you’ll be able to find clan tags (clans are inactive in the beta, however), view your stats, check your leaderboard status, and view challenges. There is a great variety of challenges and more are added the further your progress your rank. Some challenges involve getting a certain number of kills per weapon while others make you get head shots, and so on. Should you complete any challenges, you’ll gain XP rewards and weapon add-ons.

As for those perks, you’ll have access to a few of them here. Perks are modifications to the game to make your playing abilities better. Because they mod such abilities as reload speed (Sleight of Hand, which isn’t available), many people will be on the fence about these. Your standard Class 1 perk is Special Grenades, but you can change your Class 2 and 3 perks. You can see some of the perks that can be unlocked, but because of the beta’s max rank of 11, you can’t use them all. Wait until November, people.

Graphically, COD4 is…still very much a beta. While many people griped about Halo 3’s beta looking too similar to Halo 2, it still looked good. This looks good, but there’s still something about it that doesn’t make it look incredible. Yes it’s a beta, but the game is releasing in November, so they better hope they can make it look as good as the E3 videos.

So there it is folks, a hands-on look at Call of Duty 4’s multiplayer beta. Despite there not being too many options, it’s still a hell of a time and a showing of improvement over Call of Duty 3. It’s more than worth downloading, and the unlockable features make it even more worth your while. So head on over to the game’s Charlie Oscar Delta site while you still can to register for the beta, as they’ll be handing out download tokens on a first come, first serve basis.

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