With Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare now a little over a week old, new players and those that have taken their time pacing through the single player campaign might find taking to the bullet frenzy of the online multiplayer a slightly daunting prospect.

CoD4’s ranking system is both a strength and weakness of the game – weak in the sense that a new player without all the equipment and perks that come with hours of play time can find themselves horrible out gunned, but that’s more than made up for by the fact that you are continuously rewarded with fresh goodies as you keep at it.

Having whiled away a few hours at the helm, we’ve put together a few hints and tips that will help you with your play. They won’t turn you into Teh Uberpwner of the online world, but they should hopefully give you a much needed edge to get you off the ground and safely holding your own in firefight. Hit the turn for some basic strategies:

Tool Up
First and foremost: lose your default weapon. Before you’ve started ranking up, you’ll find yourself stuck with a fairly weak selection of weapons to choose from. That’ll change in time, but for the start your arsenal is limited to piddly little peashooters with irons sights that obscure almost everything else on screen. Luckily, casualties of war leave the battlefield littered with far more advanced means of dealing death, so be sure to scavenge as much as you can as it’ll leave you far better defended for the shootouts to come.

Stick to cover
This isn’t like Resistance, where you can sometimes charge willy-nilly across the terrain, shaking off a couple of minor bullet wounds as you go. CoD4’s punishing realism means that if you pop your head into the open at anything other than break-neck pace, it is likely to get blown clean off. Therefore, sticking to cover is essential – the level design offers plenty of objects to duck behind and keep you partially protected from other players taking pot shots at you.

Going prone
While you find your bearings, don’t forget that you can also lay yourself flat (hold O) on the ground to steady your weapon and keep more of your body out of enemy sights. Going prone can seem like a disadvantage at first, as if you’ve followed the above advice and stuck yourself to the scenery like glue, you’ll discover that you movement can often be limited by the objects around you. Lying flat has distinct advantages though – patches of long grass or scrubland can camouflage you significantly and, best of all, if you lay perfectly still you can be easily mistaken for one of the many corpses that rapidly accumulate, thus giving a great chance of getting the drop on your adversaries.

Team play
When playing a team deathmatch, resist the urge to go all John Rambo and run off on your own. Players automatically spawn by each other and it’s very easy to wander into a situation where you’re significantly outmanned and outgunned. Keeping close behind a fellow team mate not only means you can protect their ass from enemies dashing in for a sneaky melee kill, but should they fall to enemy fire you can then easily loot their weapon to give you an edge when avenging their death.

Knife combat
Close quarters combat is a great way of getting some satisfying kills. The knife attack (R3) kills instantly and doesn’t show up on the radar in the same way as gun fire. There is a trick to a successful stabbing, which is to make the decision a fraction of a second early and letting the game automatically draw you in closer to your victim for the finishing blow. What you don’t want to do is to start by shooting and then decide to stab – by then the passage of red hot enemy lead through your body will probably have already finished the job. If you have the opportunity, the knife is always best because unless the other player gets a really lucky headshot, you’ll be able to survive a couple of stomach wounds.

Keep your ears open
Especially in free-for-all matches, listening out for footsteps can be just as important as spotting an enemy through your sights. When sprinting or moving upright, footsteps can be heard by people near by. You can use this to your advantage by keeping an ear open for the sounds of movement. You should be able to pepper an incoming enemy as they come round the corner or finish them off as they run in to stick a knife in your back.

Using the map
Unless you’re using a silencer, firing a weapon results in your position being marked on the radar map. Naturally this can be a great advantage for spotting where some sneaky bastard has holed up to take long distance snipes at other players. But you can also use this fact to draw adversaries into traps; a long burst of gun fire will bring in unsuspecting foes looking to find a wounded player or one low on ammo and you can find a neat hidey hole to pour down fire on your would-be hunters.

The R2 of war
Cunning use of R2 can mean the difference between life and death. First of all, you’ll find that higher level players might often use the Martyrdom perk, which drops a live grenade when they die. This can be enormously frustrating if you’re caught in the resulting blast, but incredibly fun if you can get in (very) quickly and press R2 to chuck said ‘nade back in the face of their team mates. You can do the same with ordinary tossed grenades, but you can prevent the same thing happening to your own by holding down R2 for longer, thus ‘cooking’ the ‘nade and hopefully having it blow up right in the face of those seeking to return the favour.

Time your special abilities
As you get more efficient at mowing down adversaries, you’ll find that you start to unlock one-shot special abilities that give you and your team a massive advantage on the battlefield. These are awarded for scoring successive kills without dying and range from UAV radar (3 kills) to air-strike (5 kills) right up to your very own support helicopter gunship (7 kills). Remember that you don’t need to fire these off as soon as you have them, and they will carry over into your next life should you die. The air-strike in particular is best saved for when you have a decent idea of where an enemy, or group of enemies, is gathering.

And there you have it; these may not get you signed up as a pro-gamer, but they should see you through as you learn the ropes. and once you start to climb the ranks in earnest, you’re guaranteed to have a heck of a lot of fun.

If you have any more tips and strategies, please feel free to share!

Related posts
Infinity Ward fixing online Call of Duty 4 for PS3 - seems too many of us love it
Call of Duty 4 set to be highest scoring PS3 game yet; internet braces for side-by-side console comparison barrage

Came straight to this page? Visit www.pspsps.tv for all the latest news.