Hollywood action blockbusters like National Treasure hold little appeal for me these days, and games like Call of Duty 4 are a big reason why. After all, why watch a big name actor go through the familiar paces of fighting against impossible odds when you can be the star and do it yourself? The Call of Duty series, or at least the installments that were made by Infinity Ward, have always emphasized the cinematic aspect of the gaming experience, and true to form, their latest effort is probably the most refined example of the video game as interactive action movie on the market today.

Everything in this game from the slick loading screens that double as mission briefings to the constant running commentary of your ever present companions and the relentless linearity of the campaign serves to reinforce the impression that this is gaming Hollywood-style. The great thing about Call of Duty 4 is that it mostly works. When your squad members are screaming at you to get on with your mission objectives while the nearby explosion of a grenade is ringing in your ears and you see wave after wave of turbaned generic Arab terrorists coming at you and there’s shooting and confusion everywhere, you really do feel like living an action movie.

This latest addition to the franchise marks the first time it departs from its World War 2 roots. Instead of fighting a never ending horde of Germans, you fight never ending hordes of Middle-Eastern terrorists and Russian ultra-nationalists. This allows the developers to draw on more recent, and hence more relevant, tropes in creating their narrative. The Middle-Eastern country in which half of the action takes place in is unnamed, but it is obvious that the opening car ride sequence is so chilling and unforgettable precisely because of how much it reminds us of events in Iraq. Similarly, scenes such as door-to-door fighting in dusty palm-lined streets and helicopters coming under attack from RPGs fired from windows and rooftops are directly drawn from today’s newsreels.

Playing alternately as a U.S. marine and a British S.A.S. commando, you and your team are confronted with a near future scenario of a violent revolution erupting in the Middle-East while a civil war in Russia rages simultaneously. Plus, Russian nukes are loose and in the hands of dangerous and merciless people. As Gaz, your S.A.S. team mate, sarcastically puts it, “The world’s in great shape.” The game starts with a basic tutorial and obstacle course with you as a new S.A.S. recruit and recommends you a difficulty level based on how well you do. Then it’s off to save the world, beginning with intercepting a Russian nuclear device being transported to the Middle East on a cargo vessel.

Much as you’d expect, the scene plays out like the beginning of a movie: you and your team quietly rappel from a helicopter onto the vessel under cover of a stormy night. Lightning flashes dramatically, and glistening drops of water pelt the chopper while the ship is tossed around like a toy in the roiling waves. The ship’s crew is expendable, you’re briefed, so you and your team mates have no qualms about “expending” them, stealthily at first, and then noisily and hurriedly once the alarm is raised. Your squad members talk constantly. “Check your corners,” instructs your superior, Captain Price, as you move into the cramped confines of the ship’s corridors. Others call out the locations and numbers of spotted enemies and announce “All clear!” when all of the baddies are bleeding corpses on the floor. All of this is pre-choreographed according to Infinity Ward’s script of course, but when the bullets are flying and the blood is pounding hot and fast, the illusion is perfect.

The problem is that sometimes the illusion breaks down. Like Truman Burbank walking off his invisible stage in The Truman Show, sometimes you get it in your head to try something that wasn’t in Infinity Ward’s script, and the realization that all of this is faked comes crashing down. It’s puzzling how inflexibly the developers chose to hew to their fixed vision of how things ought to unfold. For example, at the conclusion of one mission, I’m instructed to move out of the house I’m in and escort a rescued informant to a helicopter in the field behind the house. I duly step out of the front door. There I can choose to go right or to go left to get behind the house. I choose to go left and stop in my tracks when I see a medley of odds and ends improbably arranged in a configuration to block my path, with the evac chopper clearly visible just beyond. Okay, so I was supposed to go right, but how hard would it have been to incorporate this tiny alternative path in the official script?

Another way the illusion breaks down is when the endless enemy respawns go overboard. They’re necessary of course in order to maintain the action movie feel, but there are moments when the developers should have made it a tad more subtle. An early fight in a newsroom is a particularly egregious example: try to fight your way through it and it’s a slog against a ludicrously large army that have somehow packed themselves into little side alcoves and stairwells, bull rush straight to your objective and suddenly the opposition just seems to evaporate.

Still overall the game’s frantic pacing and great set-piece battles makes everything flow along smoothly enough. As with previous Call of Duty titles, with the large numbers of allies and enemies on the field, you truly feel like you’re part of a larger battle whether you’re defending a stranded Abrams tank in the Middle East or assaulting a Russian base. The wide variety of battles in a mix of different locales keeps it from ever getting boring. A number of special sequences including a shockingly brutal stint as a weapon operator on an AC-130 gunship (I still can’t believe the developers dared to put that lighthearted banter in about ruthlessly killing enemies) and a stealthy sniper mission spice things up even more. I especially enjoyed the latter due its taking place in Pripyat. It felt a bit weird to find myself so familiar with the city due to having played S.T.A.L.K.E.R. last year.

The game’s graphics are good but not especially spectacular. Coming to it just after finishing Crysis, I thought at first that this game’s graphics looked shabby, but after a while I readjusted and decided that while its engine is nowhere as good, its art direction is markedly better and makes good use of what the game is capable of. Your team mates in the S.A.S. are particularly well drawn and interesting characters, though their plot-required invulnerability can be a bit jarring sometimes. Your squad mates in the USMC on the other hand are fairly generic and regularly get killed and replaced. I suppose this is meant to play on how deadly street fighting in Iraq is, but it does give the impression that the Americans are incompetent ground pounders while the British are smooth, elite operators.

The entire campaign is fairly short, with a corridor shooting sequence towards the end that is made fiendishly difficult by a poverty of save points to prolong its length. The shortness is probably a good thing in the same way that a theme park ride shouldn’t drag on for too long, or you’ll stop being awed by it and start thinking about niggling flaws like why your character never opens doors himself and always needs to wait for an AI character to do it for him. The problem with making games be like interactive movies is that it can come to feel too much like a movie and not interactive enough to feel like a game. Call of Duty 4 is like a roller coaster in a theme park. It’s linear to a fault and leaves no room for experimentation or improvisation but it’s one hell of a ride while it lasts.

Just don’t leave your seat before the closing credits stop rolling or you’ll miss out on a nice bonus.