Overgrown is a sniper-favorite map that takes place in a grassy farm area with two bridges. If you pick the sniper rifle as a primary weapon for Overgrown you’ll be wearing a ghillie suit that makes you almost invisible while lying prone in the tall grass. The problem is that you can’t see much that way so you’ll have to at least be kneeling which will give you a silhouette that an enemy can draw down on. Overgrown has some long sight lines but there aren’t any spots (that have been found yet) where a sniper can just sit and camp without being flushed out pretty quickly. If you’ve unlocked the ACOG sight for one of the assault rifles you can get almost as much range without sacrificing the automatic option but there is also a semi-automatic sniper rifle that does some serious damage.

Crash is a "Black Hawk Down" inspired map that takes place in a middle-eastern city with a crashed troop helicopter in the center. Crash is kind of a combination of the other two maps in that it has the urban combat element of Vacant with longer sight lines and outdoor fighting like Overgrown. There are lots of small alleyways and the buildings are packed close together. It includes a few high spots that give you access to some choke points but you can’t cover the stairs and still see the battlefield so there’s always the danger of someone coming up behind you for a knife kill.

Click the image for a bigger look at the Create a Class interface.

One thing that stood out to me was the use of exploding the environment to get kills. If someone is hiding behind a car or a truck (although not every vehicle will do this) you can sometimes blow up the car or truck and kill them. It’s just another interaction that makes the environment come to life and adds another layer of danger to the game. The game already feels very authentic with graphics that rival anything I’ve seen on the 360 to date. The smoke and dust is all represented very realistically - so much so that you’ll stop noticing it as a game element and it just becomes "smoke" making you react to it in a realistic way. The environments have a lot of detail but the players don’t dissolve into the background as much as they did in Call of Duty 3 - the ghillie suit sniper being the obvious exception. You can still pick out an enemy in a window or across the map and it’s easy to spot movement.

Another part of the game that works very well is the way it decides where to respawn you during team games. The game will always try to respawn you among teammates creating a reinforcement situation. What it does is keep the teams somewhat clustered so that you’re either attacking or defending certain sections of the map and it keeps the fighting centralized. You can still get killed by the occasional lone wolf out on the outskirts but you’ll frequently find yourself attacking a building with three or four enemies in it rather than out hunting for enemies on your own. It doesn’t force team coordination but it does make you work together almost by accident and you’ll almost never find yourself spawning far away from the action.

Overall I’m very pleased with what the Call of Duty 4 beta has shown so far and I feel like I’ve only seen a small portion of the game. There are still quite a few weapons left untried and maps left undiscovered. Infinity Wards just recently increased the rank cap to 16 which will unlock more perks and weapons but I didn’t have an opportunity to try them out before this writing. If you’re familiar with Call of Duty multiplayer you’ll feel right at home in this game. The fighting is fast and intense with an edge of realism. I can’t wait to see the final game.