Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare is a 2007 first-person shooter video game, developed by Infinity Ward and published by Activision for Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 and Wii. A handheld game was made for the Nintendo DS. The game was released in North America, Australia, and Europe in November 2007 for video game consoles and Microsoft Windows. It was released for the Mac in September 2008, then released for the Wii in November 2009, given the subtitle Reflex Edition. It is the fourth installment in the Call of Duty video game series, excluding expansion packs, and is the first in the Modern Warfare line of the franchise, followed by a direct sequel, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 as well as the first game in the series to have a Mature rating. The game breaks away from the World War II setting of previous games in the series and is instead set in modern times. Developed for over two years, the game uses a proprietary game engine. On September 10, 2009, it was re-released in Japan by Square Enix.
The story takes place in the year 2011, where a radical leader has executed the president of an unnamed country in the Middle East, and an ultranationalist movement starts a civil war in Russia. The conflicts are seen from the perspectives of a U.S. Force Reconnaissance Marine and a British SAS commando, and are set in various locales, such as the United Kingdom, the Middle East, Azerbaijan, Russia, and Ukraine. The multiplayer portion of the game features various game modes, and contains a leveling system that allows the player to unlock additional weapons, weapon attachments, and camouflage schemes as they advance.
The player takes on the role of various characters during a single-player campaign. The characters' involvement in the plot occurs simultaneously and overlaps the events in the game. As such, the player's perspective changes from one character to another between missions. Each mission features a series of objectives; the player is led to each objective with the heads up display, which marks its direction and distance. Some objectives require that the player arrives at a checkpoint, while other objectives require the player to eliminate enemies in a specified location, stand their ground to defend an objective, or plant explosive charges on an enemy installation. After the credits, a special epilogue mission is unlocked for play, featuring a four-man squad retrieving a VIP from terrorists who have hijacked an airliner. The SAS rescue the VIP and escape before the plane is destroyed
