So I got caught up in the hype for CoD4. You know the story. Read previews in print and on the net, see all the pretty screenshots, watch the trailers that look awesome... Then you buy it and want to smash it into 1000 pieces.

I'm doing the single player right now and it makes me want to tear my hair out. I'm on normal difficulty and wish I could go back and set it to easy to give me a fighting chance. THE ENEMIES RESPAWN ENDLESSLY! Forever and ever, not even bothering to come in waves, but just a constant rush of them that never lets up, even for a few moments.

I should have learned my lesson from CoD2 and 3, as I had somewhat sour experiences with the sp in those games, but I bought into the hype and thought this one would be good. Their entire game design needs to be overhauled. You (usually) have a whole squad of marines with you, but you can't order them around at all. They do little more than blindly shoot at the torrential stream of baddies, although they usually find a good place for cover. Cover is another thing I'll get to in a moment. The best use for your fellow soldier I've seen so far is hanging back behind them when they're scripted to move forward on their own or using them as human shields when they've decided to root themselves to their spot.

Now for cover. So much of the game requires you to move from cover to cover. It really is essential to avoid being killed every 20 seconds (no exaggeration on that either). You would think they would have redone this part of the game since other titles like RS: Vegas, GRAW, and Gears of War have advanced the mechanic. Instead, you just crouch behind some barrier and hope to god it doesn't explode and kill you instantly like many of the barrels and cars in the game tend to do. The enemies have no problem leaning around corners or even blind firing over their cover, something you can't pull off.

Grenades are a whole other issue. Their 'nade indicator on the HUD needs serious work. It gives you a relative position once you're within a certain distance from the grenade. This sucks on so many levels. It will pop up when a grenade is 3 feet away from you, but you're behind a wall in a building. Sometimes they'll miss the window and stay outside, leaving you perfectly safe despite the warning coming up. Other times it will sail on through, land a few feet from you, but you think its still outside and get blown apart. If the it can't hurt me, don't warn me about it! I'm tired of leaving my cover to get shot to bits to dodge an explosion that never would have touched me if I stayed in my spot.

The biggest problem with the grenade warning is that it only tells you WHAT DIRECTION the grenade is, not WHERE IT IS. Are you safe behind your cover? Will it explode but not kill you? I DON'T KNOW! The only variation on the warning you get is that when you're close enough to grab it (and have it kill you instantly), you're given the option to throw it back. I can't count the number of times I've had the regular warning come up, walked away from it, and still been killed by one because I didn't run far enough. If you're going to make the grenade so powerfull that it stops you in your tracks, and have the enemies spam them, give me some better info about it so I can know if I should stay put, move back a little, or run like hell.

I can't stress enough how bad the constant stream of enemies are. The never end and never let up, which makes gaining any ground really hard. Most of the time, you just shoot a few and sprint past the rest, running around like mad hoping you find some cover or stumble across one of the invisible checkpoints. Off the top of my head, the TV studio, waiting for the evac chopper in the sniper flashback, and running through the launch facility at the end (where I've been stuck for the last 2 hours I've played) and just astonishingly bad game design. I spent 30 minutes shooting the first time I played the TV studio because I didn't realize they respawned over and over.

I couldn't even get past the sniper evac until I found a "glitch" on a message board post telling me about one tiny little spot you could hide where none of the soldiers would come and harass you. So much of your progress through the really tough missions seems to come down to finding the correct path across the map. They give you this huge play area, but if you don't follow the magic trail, you get cut to ribbons the instant you stray.

To give you an idea of how hard it is to make any progress on those missions, in the launch facility you have a countdown timer of like 12 minutes or something to reach your objective. I've hit some checkpoint and have about 7:45 left. From that point on, I'd say my average lifespan is about 15-30 seconds. Repeat ad nauseum while being shot at from 3 sides while your fellow soldiers hide behind some boxes and wait for you to progress past some invisible point before deciding to follow you. BAH!

I think this game is at least as bad as, or maybe even worse, than the notorious snipers from CoD2.

Multiplayer had better be the best game I've ever played to wash this taste out of my mouth.