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So I managed to get into the Call Of Duty 4: Modern Warfase Multiplayer Beta. It’s not supposed to be out in Europe for another couple of days but I managed to get into it using the Recover Gamertag glitch. Which is pretty nifty. I managed to get a good bit of play out of it last night before I went to bed and I can say I was pretty impressed by what I’ve seen so far.

COD4:MW, as the Modern Warfare in the title suggests, the setting is not WWII was in the previous incarnations, but in a modern urban setting. It seems that Activision have taken the good qualities of the other games set in a modern setting, such as Counter Strike and Rainbow Six/Ghost Recon etc. and put them into their new shooter. The radio is lot better, when someone is reloading you get “Cover Me, Reloading!” and “Enemy Down”, which I suspect is heavily borrowed from Counter Strike. You also get a knife (Push down right thumbstick), which is an instant kill if you do it right.

The gameplay is good. I’ve only tried team death-match so far, but you respawn as soon as your killed and you get a “kill-cam” to view your death from the killers perspective. Also if you draw your pistol as your killed you get the chance to empty its clip, with the chance of taking your killer down with you. This is a pretty nifty idea. Grenades as usual and the weapons are pretty good. You get some decent ones with each class. And some of the classes, such as spec-ops, sniper and heavy assualt look very interesting.

You also have the option to make your own class, choose its weapons and names etc. I havn’t tried this out yet but it will be, in my opinion, one of the best features. I’m a big Counter Strike: Source fan and one of my gripes with COD3’s multiplayer was that you couldn’t mix and match weapons like CS:S, so this will be good for me.

The graphics, as you would expect from a new 360 game are stunning. I really wish I had an HDTV (Hopefully soon) but for me, the graphics were just as good on my 21″ TV. The player models are amazingly real, expecially in the way they move. Its hard to see the enemies, as they all blend into the background but the settings are extremely realistic. One of the maps is set in an urban city, and the tower flats look extremely real. The place has been bombed, and it looks exactly how you’d imagine it.

During the game, as part of the perks system, you can gain health upgrades, air strikes, helicopter strikes and more depending on your number of kills. And as you go through matches you gain XP, which gives you your promotions.

The game is still a bit buggy, for instance I sometimes get a “Downloading Settings” message for ages, but this is probably just due to the high load the servers are experiencing.

I wasn’t a big fan of the older COD games, but COD4:MW seems to me like its going to be one of the big games of this year. If you’r not into the beta multiplayer yet, Get in!