K COD5 “World at War” Arrived today making a mochery of the release date this Friday. Which is often the case with stuff preordered from Play.com. However when you go into mutliplayer and it tells you theres about 200,000 other people playing two days before the release, any way.

After reading a couple of articles on escapist and a few other places, i must admit that on Monday i tried to cancel my preorder, so when I saw it was already in packing I was worried.  The game arrived today, and i’ve had a play!

Happily COD5 shares the COD4 engine, and not just the graphics engine, alot of stuff directly translates to the new game. Such as button layout which makes it super easy to pick up and how the mutliplayer xp, challenges etc work.  From my brief shooty battle I have had this evening, getting myself to rank 14 was fun. The game does comes across as a World War II mod for cod4 and heres the bad bit a mod developed by an online community, not a professional bunch of dudes who do this day in day out.  This is not to say that the game is bad.  Just that the Level design isn’t quite right in a cant put your finger on it sort of a way.  I remember clearly jumping into a mutliplayer game of CoD4 for the first time, the map was overgrown and i was taken back by the whole wowness of it all.  CoD5 you wont get that.

I’d be mad not to mention the tanks which are in some of the maps and can be player controlled.  There scale appears to be totally wrong, and you can quite happily ignore them with little penalty.  Not sure why they bothered there.  It seems odd that a game series clearly priding its self on its realism would plop a generic tank that would be at home in a fair ground.  If i were making the game ( which I’m not ) i’d stay clear of the whole vehicle area as its somthing that the Battlefield Series has down perfectly now, COD should IMHO stick to the gun battles.

That said it is clearly an excelent game taken on it own, though im sure its fate is already sealed as being another bad CoD game with an Odd number.

Update:  I discovered later on COD5 has introduced Squads which is a good addition, now im just hoping they will add it to cod4 in the next update if there is one ( though they are now busy on COD6 ). Also played Mirrors Edge demo last night, got annoyed by the whole balance across the pipe bit. So will be giving that one a wide berth.

Background

A couple of days ago, I took delivery of my PS3 a wonderful piece of kit that does 99.9% of the things my xbox 360 does. The PS3 purchase was mainly so I have the ability to play Blue Ray discs and also to be able to play GT5. I had no intension of playing COD4 on it, this was mainly because i have spent the passed month or so desperately trying to get my Gold AK47, and BTW was only 50 headshots with the MP44 off getting it. The saturday morning I sat in waiting for the PS3 to be delivered. I thought i’ll knock a few more of the those head shots on the erm,,,, head. The following happened.

So after my RROD I imediately paniced, and tried the towel trick, which worked, however be warned my xbox now crashes fairly regularly while in COD4. So i had to bite the bullet and pay for another copy of COD4 on the PS3.

The differences

• The aim and fire buttons on the PS3 are on R1 & L1 bit of a shock from the Xbox where there on the lower triggers. But this is no great shakes and should only take a few seconds to adjust too.
• Connecting to the games online is ridiculously quicker than on the xbox. UPDATE: This appears be because im not being put with other english speaking players, just any bunch of people who are ready.
• The PS3 visibly drops frames when the action gets heavy, never seen this happen on the Xbox
• You cant mute players in the Lobby, 360 excels in the ability to shut kids up, and the racists too.
• Net Code: Can visibly see people lagging and whizzing about to catch up with where the game thinks they should be. The 360 handles this much better
• You cant add people you meet to your buddy list until you quit the game, again the 360 excels in the xbox live integration.
• You can only invite people to your party who are in your buddy list AND!!!! happen to be playing COD4 at the same time as you!!, same again
• Spawn point: This is an odd one there appear to be subtly different spawns to the 360 version in the PS3
• I maybe imagining this but with the M4A you can sprint a bit further than the 360.
• Because the PS3 isn’t bundled with a headset small percentage of people use voice, where as its about 90% on the 360 (Whether you think this a good or bad point could go either way)

Note: These are all Multiplayer differences there may be some in the single player, but who plays single player these days?

The big problem with the PS3

Now the the biggest problem with the PS3 and some of this applied to the PS3 in general too is the networking support. When Sony announced there would be no charge for the PS Network offering, the equivalent of Xbox Live most people naturally assumed that Microsoft would be forced to follow suit drop the £30 a year charge. The fact they havnt speaks wonders. They didnt need too. The play station network hasnt really advanced much from its initial incarnation on the PS2. All the mutliplayer features in game are clearly designed by the game developer and not using standard libraries made availble rom thier dev kit. Where the xbox shines here is how they have forced (probably kicking and screaming) the developers to make all the xbox live interaction very similar, which makes for a great end user experience.

Overall

While there are some niggly things going against the PS3 version, its still the best title about at the moment by miles. I find it interesting that COD4 appears to run a bit slower on the PS3 rather than the 360 (but then you could argue my 360 got so hot doing so it died). So if you have a Next Gen Console (should really be “This Gen Console” now) you should own COD4, if you have a WII carry on flailing your arms about at your tele.