Chinatown
Note how we said that Creek is one of the best-looking areas in COD4. As in, not the best looking. As in, “Oh my god, look at Chinatown, it will make your eyes bleed with its incandescent beauty.”
Seriously. The artistic and technical talent on show here is almost sickening. Okay, so it’s a reworked version of COD and COD2’s Carentan, but that’s really no hardship when we’re talking about one of the series’ most popular multiplayer arenas and the reworking is this good.
We’re used to graphical detail taking a hit for a game’s online modes. In fact we expect it. It’s cool. But when a multiplayer level looks hands-down better than a lot of single-player FPS out there then we’ve really got to ask what IW know that everyone else doesn’t. Chinatown is offensively detailed. It’s drenched with neon and it drips with colour. Shop signs, street decorations and windows hum with a warm, dusky glow, and the whole level has a garish vibrancy that sticks in the mind long after the final score has faded from memory. So much so in fact, that we were glad we got to the event early and had a chance to explore it at our leisure before the violence broke out. You’ll take a great many headshots as a result of stopping to look at the scenery, we can promise you that.
In terms of gameplay, Chinatown has pretty much everything. It’s a huge, sprawling mass of streets and buildings that gets denser and fuller the more you explore it. Street level gives you some utterly frenetic close-range fighting with a packed server, with the possibility of some massive kill counts if you can stay on top of things. Building interiors stretch up from basements to second floors, and bring about some great multi-levelled cat-and-mousing. Rows of high windows allow snipers to dominate the streets, but the bright interior lighting silhouettes them to those below, making holding those positions hard. Open grassy areas are tough to progress across when the high windows are full, but flanking around them into the city and infiltrating from below can really turn the tables. It’s a massive urban warzone that’s an absolute blast to tear up with a couple of big teams, and we really can’t wait to get back into it when the map pack is released next week. Yes that’s right, we did just admit to missing a place in a videogame, but we really don’t care. Chinatown is that good.
So, is the COD4 DLC worth throwing the money at? Yes. Yes it most definitely is. Rather than just being a collection of new areas to shoot your friends in, the maps really do add something new to the online game. Chinatown and Creek especially have an exciting feel all of their own, and once they’ve become blended into the regular roster of multiplayer maps the whole experience is going to be much richer overall. And when that kind of thoughtful design is wrapped up in visuals this striking and well-realised, well, frankly you’d just be plain rude to pass it up. Roll on April 10th.
