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Content review for this game:
Pertaining to content listed in the upper left corner of this site.
Blood and Gore: When you stab or shoot an enemy, blood appears in puffs/spurts and moderately splatters on floors and walls, as the bullets violently penetrate the enemy, tearing them and their armor apart. When you throw grenades, the enemies' bodies go flying while blood and smoke fill the air, as they fall to the ground in contorted positions. When you use the knife, you see and hear as you plunge it into the enemy, resulting in blood spurting from the wound. Blood and bodies linger. There is no option to turn blood off in this game.
Specific scenes of blood & gore:
- One level's objective is to snipe and kill a terrorist leader. Throughout this level your only weapons are a pistol and a sniper rifle, so you will mostly be sniping the enemy in the head, which results in blood spurting from their head and onto nearby walls. Later in the same level, you see the enemy haphazardly disposing of allies bodies by tossing them into muddied puddles. Another area shows a wild dog feasting on a dead body. Once you are in place for sniping, you aim and hit the terrorist leader. Unfortunately you miss his head and instead blow his arm off, with appropriate blood effects in play. As soon as the enemy discovers your position, they send a helicopter to dispose of you. You then aim at the pilot in the cockpit and shoot him in the head, resulting in blood splattering in what remains of the cockpit.
- Your next objective is to find and capture the main villian's son, for information and leverage. When you finally catch up to him, he shoots himself in the head, resulting in blood and chunks flying, as he falls to the ground.
Intense Violence: The violence in this game is that of war, which means you will be killing hundreds of enemy soldiers with a variety of weapons, ranging from pistols to rocket launchers. The overall gameplay is very intense and suspenseful with graphic moments throughout. Again, as mentioned above, your character also has the ability to throw grenades and plunge a knife into enemies, with a close-quarter melee attack. Also, if your character is near death, the screen will go red around the edges, as you hear the characters struggled breath and ever-increasing heart beat. In other words, the overall violence is very intense, moderately brutal, and somewhat graphic.
Specific scenes of intense violence:
- Near the beginning of the intro level, as you and your men are infiltrating the crew quarters of a ship, you come upon two enemies still asleep in their bunks. You then see your men shoot the sleeping enemies dead.
- Near the very beginning of the game, there is a long interactive real-time cutscene, where you experience a middle-eastern president's capture. The entire scene is from the first-person perspective (you see through his eyes). The scene starts out with you being dragged by two armed soldiers to a waiting car. After you are roughly placed in the car, one of the soldiers hits you with the butt of his gun. When you recover, you see as they drive you to an unknown location. On the way, you witness chaos in the form of blown out and burning cars, tanks rolling in the street, small gunfights and skirmishes, and at one point you even see a row of men placed at a wall as they are being executed by gunfire. As you reach your final destination, and are taken out of the car, you view what appears to be your soon to be televised execution. After a short speech (too short) the captor shoots you in the head. The scene ends there.
- A couple times in the game, you are attacked by guard dogs. The only way to stop them is to shoot them or break their necks. If you don't, they will tackle you and rip your throat out, with bloody results.
- In one part of the game while in a helicopter, you are hit by the tail end of a nuclear explosion. The aftermath has you crawling out of the downed helicopter as you see the carnage the bomb produced. While crawling, you hear your character's struggled breathing and ever-weakening heart beat. He then dies.
- At the end of one level you see your commanding officer interrogate a terrorist, by beating him with his fists. During the interrogation, the officer gets a call on his cellphone. The person on the other side must have said something to incur what happens next, as the officer shoots the terrorist in the head.
Strong Language: The ESRB exaggerated a little when they gave it this rating. It doesn't even have the f-word. However there is certainly enough to mention. There are over 19 uses of h**l, 4 uses of d**n, 7 uses of s**t, 2 uses of a**, and 4 uses of b****rd. Your fellow soldiers will also use language like d**n, h**l, a**, and b****rd frequently throughout gameplay.
Closing Comment: This is one of the best first person shooters of it's kind (ever), and in many ways rivals the Halo series (though, granted, they are both a different type of shooter). It has incredible graphics, great controls, and some of the best gameplay in the genre. Compared to Call of Duty 2 & 3 this game brings the blood, gore, violence, and language up quite a few notches, which makes it definitely earn an "M" for mature rating. Although I'd recommend the previous installments of the series for ages 13-14+, I recommend this game for ages 17+.
