Call of Duty: World at War

Derided as woefully short by some and nothing more than a bonus to the excellent multiplayer by many, for me there were moments in Call of Duty 4's single-player which I'd never experienced in a game, moments I felt genuinely pushed the medium forward in terms of storytelling and emotional involvement, moments that are sorely missed in its successor, Call of Duty: World at War.

The first of these occurs during the game's main title sequence, a scripted, on-rails scene that echoes the tram ride at the beginning of Half-Life. In first-person, unaware whom exactly you're inhabiting, and with only limited control of your character, you're thrown into the back of a taxi cab and driven off at high speed. Held captive by AK47-wielding men, you strain to look out of the car's windows. You see a Middle Eastern city, war ravaged. Sporadic gunfire echoes through streets. Civilians run through bombed out houses, clamber over mountains of rubble. You turn the right stick on your controller, trying to see what will happen to the group of men lined up against a wall. You move the left stick to try and escape as they're gunned down by a gang of soldiers. As you reach your destination, you're pulled from the car, dragged through a giant set of gates, into a town square. You look around you, watching as a baying mob screams with delight as you're tied to a post. At this point you figure you're probably a soldier, probably American. You look around you, trying to figure out where the exit is. You've played games before, you know how they work, you can second guess what's about to occur. Any moment, you think, a platoon of elite special forces will zip-line from a helicopter to rescue you. Or maybe they'll blow a hole in one of the walls and burst through, guns blazing. You expect the man holding the shiny gold Desert Eagle in front of you to take the first hit. Maybe you'll have to pick up his gun to fight your way out, maybe you'll be handed a different one. An M16 perhaps, or an M4 Carbine. You know the difference; you've played this type of game before. The man with the Desert Eagle raises the gun. You stare down the barrel. Any second, you think. Any second, and this guy is going to get it. You've played games... Then he pulls the trigger. The screen flashes white, black. Your jaw drops. The hairs on the back of your neck stand up. It's as close to death as you've ever felt in a game. This game sold ten million copies.

Martin Scorsese once referred to certain film makers as 'smugglers'. Directors like Samuel Fuller and Vincente Minnelli worked in the mainstream, producing movies that the masses wanted to watch and could enjoy, but all the time getting their own message across, smuggling it in. While much is written about the innovative storytelling devices of Braid or Bioshock, COD4 was a much more accessible and mainstream game which managed to smuggle in a genuinely surprising moment right at the start. Not only that, but it did it again, arguably even more effectively later on: After rescuing an injured comrade and rushing to escape an imminent nuclear blast, the bomb detonates, blowing your helicopter from the sky. You wake up in the wreckage of the burning Black Hawk. You try to stand, but fall over after a few steps. You manage to crawl out of what's left of the helicopter, emerging into near darkness. Dust and debris block out the sun; a blooming mushroom cloud envelopes the sky. You spend an agonising few minutes trying to figure out what you're supposed to do. You don't seem to be able to go anywhere, or do anything. You wonder whether the game has glitched, or whether you missed a clue. Gradually it dawns on you that the only thing you can do is die. Slowly. It's an incredibly powerful moment, one of the most touching I've experienced in any medium, not least because it's present in such an unexpected source: COD4 isn't a game which is sold as anything other than a blockbuster experience. It's presented as the kind of gung-ho, jingoistic, full on roller-coaster ride that Michael Bay would make if he was making computer games instead of movies.

So what of its successor? COD:WAW is the very definition of a game which ticks the boxes of expectation. From the multiplayer to the single-player, nearly everything in game has an analogue to its predecessor, yet none move the series forward and at times even regress it. Take the opening credits, for example: In COD:WAW, as the titles appear, you find yourself tied to a post. You watch as your fellow soldier's eye is burned out with a cigarette. You watch blood spray across the wall of the tent as his throat is slashed. Your captor looms over you, brandishing a bayonet. You're next... Then, the rest of your platoon bursts in. They kill the man that was about to kill you. They hand you a gun. You have to fight your way to escape. Whereas COD4 took your expectations of how a similar scene would play out and flipped them, surprising and moving you, COD:WAW merely reinforces every preconception you had and gives you the obvious. It's a problem that purveys the whole game: With only minor exception (the addition of an infinite flamethrower to your arsenal does change how you can approach some encounters), each level is an FPS cliche. There's the storming a beach level; the close quarters battle through some trenches level; the wide-open scramble from fox-hole to fox-hole while you're fired at by tanks level; the hold a position until reinforcements arrive level; the palette cleansing turret shooting and tank driving levels. Not every stage needed to be a revolution, but a near constant feeling of familiarity and the ability to second guess every 'surprise' event just keeps reminding you that this is very definitely a video game, and the result is that you feel detached from any of the dramatic incidents that occur.

Treyarch's Call of Duty games have always been in a tough spot. Forum fanboys hold the developer up as the guys that make holiday season filler entries in a franchise, while the series' creators, Infinity Ward, toil away on the next 'proper' instalment. It seems rather harsh to totally dismiss Treyarch's games as there's nothing intrinsically wrong with either COD:WAW, COD3, or their earlier side-stories. COD:WAW retains many of the things that make the series so enjoyable to play (the spot-on aiming and feel of the weapons, for instance) but be it because of developer disinterest or inability, or publisher pressure, never strives or amounts to being anything more than generic.