Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare

After every war, the countries involved fixate on a single battle and take that to be a microcosm of the conflict at large. For Russia, WWII is the scorched earth and savage fortitude of Stalingrad, while for England it's the Battle of Britain, when we defended our island and the few gave so much for so many.

For America, WWII is all about the Normandy landings, where the firmly entrenched German army simply didn't have enough bullets to keep 160,000 allied soldiers from swarming ashore and kicking their arses.

It was America's finest hour, so we were surprised to learn that Activision had decided to remove the Call of Duty series from the safety of WWII and place it in the swampier territory of the War on Terror, the signature battle of which is fast becoming Mogadishu, where paramilitary rebels downed two Black Hawk helicopters in 1993.

Call of Duty 4 begins with a similar scenario. Having fallen prey to a cheeky rocket, you emerge from the flaming wreckage of your helicopter and go in search of your comrades, some of whom have perished. You're in the middle of enemy territory, and you don't really know what's going on.

The action is taken in from above, with you and your occasional squad mates represented by small sprites in Middle Eastern towns. The pall of oily smoke that hangs across the top of the screen is a clever touch, and the character animation is good, but on the whole it's very standard top-down fare.

Control is pared down, with '1' to '9' moving your soldier in the corresponding directions and '5' firing his gun. You target enemies automatically, scrolling from one to another with '#'.

To throw a grenade, you press '*' to bring up the grenade crosshair, then move it over whatever you want to blow up and press '5'. And while we're talking controls, '0' brings up your sniper or rocket launcher crosshair, but only during the few instances when the game allows you to.

One of the most common criticisms of the Call of Duty series is that it relies too heavily on set-pieces, and this is especially true of the mobile version. While there are relatively few in Call of Duty 4's short playing time, those it has are triggered so mechanically that you can – and will – get through the game by memorising the stilted choreography of the enemy.

This isn't a major flaw in itself, but the degree to which the set-pieces assert themselves on the action can break the flow. In one instance, a comrade is doomed to always blunder onto a mine and die, and he does this wherever you happen to be. Even if you're in the middle of a fire fight, he'll still take his detour, as though hypnotised, and meanwhile you'll lose control of your own soldier so the camera can pan across to watch him die.

Both auto-aim and enemy AI are pitiful. There are innumerable situations in which it's perfectly plain that your soldier can see an enemy but the cursor fails to appear, and if you throw a grenade at an enemy without managing to kill him, he won't even be roused by the explosion.

Grenades, meanwhile, are underpowered, and the melee attack is so absurdly powerful that it often makes sense to wade through a hail of bullets, as though they were raindrops, and bop the shooter on the head with the butt of your gun. It goes without saying that if you tried this tactic in real life you'd have not only egg on your face, but also your brains and teeth.

None of these issues are completely fatal to the gameplay, and they're all common to games of this kind on mobile, such as the excellent Delta Force and Call of Duty 4's predecessors, if exaggerated in this case.

But while in general the game seems fairly hastily cobbled together, light shines from an unexpected source: the dialogue.

Between and during missions the soldiers on the screen frequently enter into rounds of corny banter, from the classic 'joshing rebuke for lateness despite the addressee having come through heavy fighting' to quasi-philosophical musings like, "Mah dad always taught me that the most dangerous animal is a cornered one," delivered by a squaddie before you set about flushing out human insurgents.

At one point, you rescue a Russian captive and magnanimously say, "You're a sight for sore eyes," to which he responds, "And you're a sore sight for my eyes to see."

Shakespeare couldn't have said it better himself.

"Um," says your character, "touché, I guess."

Of course, we're not saying that bizarre exchanges like this justify the price of the game, but they bring a small amount of colour to what is in other respects, unfortunately, just a token effort.