I was a fairly late comer to Call of Duty 4, but I have no doubt that this is the new benchmark in FPS's.

I'll take a moment to comment about the Single player side of things first. The single player mode of this game follows two soldiers across the Middle East and Eastern Europe on a mission to stop terrorists from setting nukes off.

The single player mission story lines are expertly woven together to suck the player in and keep playing, which it does very well. The cut scenes are also brilliantly done as they play while your next mission loads up, there's no just head of for a drink or anything as your thrown into the next mission straight away.
Graphics are awesome, the environments have an attention to detail that I haven't seen since Half Life 2 days. The sound effects are also of high quality even the ingame voice acting is spot on. The only downside to the single player is the length...if you put the effort in you easily finish the game in a day.

The multi-player game mode offers the real goods with this game. When you first hit the ground you will be absolutely smashed, I still get smashed now after playing the game for the last 3 or so weeks. When you get over the being smashed part you will find that this is the first game where they have gotten things right. You rank-up regularly instead of the old BF2 style of things where you don't rank-up for like acouple of months of playing. With ranking up you get unlocks aswell and there are plenty of unlocks ranging from new weapons to skill upgrades called Perks.

Now this is the best part of the multi-player, you get to combine these weapons and perks into your custom classes. You can make up to five custom classes and call them whatever you like...it's such a simple but brilliant idea that I'm really surprised that no other big FPS game has thought of it before.

With the good there has to be some bad points, yes getting absolutely hammered the first couple of times you play is a bad point but the main bad point is the ingame server selection. It astounds me that somebody can make such an awsome game but stuff up the server selection screen. To rectify this just download QTracker and connect to the server you wish play on by this.

Overall this is an outstanding game with plenty to offer and likely to keep you playing for the time to come...which is pretty unusual for a FPS in my opinion. This deservers two big thumbsup from me.

Company of Heroes or CoH for short is a Real Time Strategy game based on the 1944 invasion of Europe by Allied forces.

This release is straight out of the THQ labs and like Dawn of War before it, it maintains the same resource management focus and the notion that the battle is fought around these resource points scattered through out the map and not at the front of your base. This concept has revolutionised the RTS genre totally in my opinion. Every battle that you play in this game requires one key concept strategy. There is no roll out of your base with acouple of mammoth tanks and crush all infront of you, it requires a careful blend of units each complementing each other all created within what can be at times a very tight population cap.

I must admit this game can become very frustrating at times with the AI so intelligent, you can find yourself being squeezed into one corner of the map very quickly, then finding yourself at your population cap which results in the inability to produce the required units to dig yourself out of trouble...but again this is when strategy comes back into it.

All in all this is an excellent game with a fantastic campaign which recreates the whole Normandy invasion right before your eyes, a fun skirmish mode to let you have a quick battle against the computer and my personal favorite the multiplayer aspect either via the net or a LAN (very enjoyable with a VPN utility like Hamachi).

Worth the dollars 9/10....Check out the official site here.

It's been a week (give or take) since I've been BFing 2142 style and I must say I'm laughing all the way to the bank...this game is friggen awesome. But in saying that I feel I must drop my Gamegab podcast score of 9 down to an 8 due to one major factor....EA being a greedy mofo and not releasing an official stats feed to respected stats sites like BF2142tracker.com, EA in their wisdom have informed stats sites that any use of the unofficial stats feed is prohibited and will result in further action being taken. This is a major kick in the guts to us gamers who just want to drool over our awards, and to suss out what your mates have got.
Very uncool EA......
Now lets look at the positive side of things:

• Fantastic unlock structure and rank progression
• Titan mode....tha goods..
• Getting an award for whacking phools 5 times in a row....how good is that???
• And the buddy list

Things of course can be improved....our stats feed for starters and a Valve-Steam like spot reserving feature on full servers where your buddies are playing, I'm sure when EA stop counting their money they will look at things like that for us.