There’s little doubt that Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare is one of the best games of 2007. Intense, smart, and fun, it’s literally breathtaking at times—and overall, it’s captivating, technically impressive, viscerally involving, and almost all of the other things that really good videogames should be. From frantic, frightening shootouts to creepily ominous treks through abandoned buildings in Chernobyl, the exhilarating COD4 packs a serious punch, and very much deserves all of the praise it’s gotten.

But COD4 also leaves a bad taste in my mouth. At times the game almost feels too real, with a creepy, ripped-from-the-headlines vibe that, more than anything else, channels CNN footage from Iraq. At its core, the COD4 is fun and slick and cool, and like every other great first-person shooter, it essentially updates and expands an old-timey shooting gallery to a convincing and engrossing virtual world. But while shooting stuff might be the core gameplay model, another important part of COD4 is its reliance upon actual wars and real-world events—while playing the game, it’s impossible to keep one’s mind from thinking about the actual wars that’re being waged around in the world, largely because developers Infinity Ward are so astonishingly adept at capturing the nuances of real world conflict… and then inviting you to jump in via one’s PlayStation, wading through sunbaked Middle Eastern streets and shooting gibberish-spouting terrorists to your heart’s content.

The first things that impress are the graphics: In its globe-trottin' single-player story, COD4’s immaculately detailed locations and weaponry run the gamut from punchy pistols to massive rocket launchers, and from frigid Russian mountaintops to dusty desert alleys. All of it’s astonishingly conveyed--it’s not photorealistic, but its close enough to it for the visual experience to be utterly immersive. And it’s all so well-conceived: From the way a fire’s undulating heat waves distort the scenery behind them to how helicopters’ brilliant searchlights starkly illuminate the leaves of the bushes you’re crouching in, every single technical element seems to have been flawlessly considered and executed.

After the visuals have impressed, though, then its the gameplay's turn: Smooth, responsive, challenging, and fun, COD4 is a blast to play, with the shooting and navigation starting out basic enough to get comfortable with and then ramping up in difficulty. And then there’s the way that the story is told: Via voiceovers from non-player characters, surveillance footage, and in-game events, the story isn’t that great or unexpected, but its fluid competent at getting you from Mission A to Missions B and C and D, and the way that the developers at Infinity Ward have managed to make the plot feel like a vital, natural part of the gaming experience is something that plenty of other developers could learn from.

But yeah, back to the point, and the thought that inspired this far-too-long blog entry: Call of Duty 4 is impressive, no doubt, but it’s also creepy. The aforementioned story deals with nothing less than nuclear warfare, which okay, is pretty standard, but it’s the way that Infinity Ward gets us there that’s off-putting. One of the earliest sequences in the game is only minimally interactive: You can move the camera around to look around, but that’s about it. The content of what you’re looking at, though, is where the drama is: You’re seeing events through the eyes of a deposed Middle Eastern ruler. You’re crammed in the back of a junky old sedan, hit with a rifle butt, and sent on your way as the two men in the front seat—the driver wearing a ski mask, the passenger holding some piece of impressively lethal automatic weaponry—drive you through a tumultuous city. Garbage clogs the gutters; fires burn; a man with spray paint flees in front of the car, abandoning his unfinished graffiti. Another man falls over a chain-link fence, running from a dog; scraps of paper flutter through the air; over it all, a harsh sun beats down on cracked, sandy pavement and dangerous-looking houses. And then there are the firefights, ranging from small shootouts to executions against a wall: There’s not much else besides chaos, here, and brutality, and you’re the one who’s being overthrown, the target of whatever coup is taking place. On the ride through town, you see squalor and death and spurts of blood, and it’s soundtracked by an angry-sounding speech--presumably by your successor--blaming the state of things on Western corruption and meddling. And once you’ve seen your fill of the chaos, it ends, pretty finally: Strapped to post, you catch a glimpse of a video camera on a tripod before a handgun’s barrel, inches from your forehead, fires.

It’s hard to describe how viscerally affecting all of this is (in part because allowing someone to participate in a simulation is something that great videogames do effortlessly, while most descriptive writing has to be satisfied with a passive audience). But trust me, here: Those opening moments of COD4 raise some fairly serious concerns in terms of how they use, manipulate, and cash-in on current world events, mostly due to how excellently the game transports you to its chosen point-of-view, which just so happens to feel incredibly real.

This isn’t to say that COD4 is a realistic game, per se, only that it exploits real situations, events, and fears. Sure, the game's visuals and settings are eerily realistic and unquestionably based on current events--but it is, in the end, still a glorified shooting gallery, where crouching for a few moments heals all of your wounds, more ammo is always close at hand, and checkpoints save your progress. It’s not even that intellectually engaging: For all of its technical expertise, the game still pretty much puts you on rails, with your character moving from Point A to Point B and shooting whatever bad guys pop out from behind cars or trees on the way there. You never forget you’re playing a videogame.

But maybe that’s where the hitch comes in--the thing that keeps me from wholeheartedly enjoying this otherwise impressive game. Unlike the super-popular Halo series, which is set in space and a far-future Earth where plasma grenades and extraterrestrial enemies are commonplace, COD4 deals with real places and real-enough events; while more fantastic games offer cartoony diversions, alternate worlds, and cartoony bad guys to shoot, COD4 offers cartoony diversions in an actual world filled with real-enough bad guys to shoot.

I realize that this is nothing new, this setting of war-based games in actual conflicts (hell, the WWII shooter has become a genre). But I think it’s taken a game as accomplished as COD4 to make me really think about it, and question how I feel about such an immersive virtual experience being based so clearly on an actual events that're happening far away from my comfy futon and my TV and Xbox. I’m still not sure where I come down on this, or how I feel--but I do know COD4 is a good enough game that the temptation to play keeps trumping the occasional bad taste in my mouth, and I’m not sure what that says about either the game or its players, including me.

Also, apologies to anyone who read this post based on the headline alone, desperately hoping there’d be some Matthew Broderick in here somewhere. I know it’s not much, but here you go.