By: Tom Price




Ordinarily, multiplayer map packs aren’t the most exciting things. But this is Call of Duty 4 we’re talking about, the biggest multiplayer phenomenon since Halo. Players who’ve been playing for months may have advanced past the prestige level, but have played every single map in every single mode many times over, most likely. It’s time for some new stuff.

Developer Infinity Ward invited TeamXbox and their office mates at IGN and Gamespy down to their offices in the San Fernando Valley to get some serious hands on time with the game to road test the new maps. We played the four new maps – Creek, Chinatown, Broadcast and Killhouse – for about four hours, our butts handed to us repeatedly by the IW crew. But we did some handing ourselves, you can be sure. Here’s a quick breakdown of what you can expect from each when they go live sometime in April.


Creek – An outdoor map set in a small glen with the aforementioned creek running through it, Creek does not represent anything you’ve seen in the single player game. One of the Activision guys thought it looked a bit like Tom Sawyer island at Disneyland. With a fairly tall hill at the middle, a cave running underneath, and a canyon-like area where the brook runs through, Creek has some of the most vertical variability we’ve seen in a CoD4 multiplayer map.


This made for some pretty exciting game flow, with players going over, around or through the hill to get to the other side. Multiple paths is a definite theme of these new maps, with tons of nooks and crannies to take cover behind along the way. The cave area, plus the interiors of a few buildings scattered at the opposite ends of the map made for a nice indoor/outdoor balance, another common theme seen in these maps.

Chinatown – Chinatown is actually a remake of a map that appeared in Call of Duty 2, Caretan. The basic outline of the map is the same, but instead of a French village, Chinatown has the look of an inner-city neighborhood. Again, mixing the outdoor areas of the street and alleys with the two-story indoor areas of the building makes for a very nice mix of close quarters and long-range style fighting. You’ll want a shotgun and an assault rifle on this one.


Remembering to look up at the second story windows for snipers is key, and enemies really stand out against the inner lighting. But a team could hold one of those rooms if they were really determined, and the other team wasn’t so good at throwing grenades through the windows. The second stories also make for trouble if you’re trying to sneak along the walls underneath. More than once I felt the sting of death from above, once even when Gamespy’s Bryn Williams dropped silently on top of me and knifed me in the head. I owe him one for that.

Broadcast – This is the one map actually based off of a single player area in CoD4. You should remember the television studio from the “Charlie Don’t Surf” mission in the game. Broadcast seems like the largest of the new maps, but that could be an optical illusion. It does offer a ton of alternate routes and hairy choke points that make it fantastic for Domination and Sabotage game types. That big central room full of computer desks saw some pretty large scale firefights in the games we played with IW, with teams grabbing the upper floor perch to fire down on the room, and plenty of claymore mines hidden around the cubicles.


It’s a great map, and you have to wonder why it didn’t make it in to the original lineup of multiplayer maps based off of single player levels.


Killhouse – Killhouse is a free-for-all only map, and for good reason. It’s small and fairly open, so bullets fly and people die with a lot of regularity. This large open warehouse with small plywood barriers doesn’t make any sort of tactical play possible, hence the free-for-all style gameplay. There are some dark places one might camp for a few kills, but visibility is at a premium in this one. If traditional style deathmatch is your cup of tea, you’ll probably have a fantastic time with Killhouse.