MP5 – A good sub machine gun for normal and hardcore matches. It’s recoil pattern bounces around in a circular shape, as opposed to the other SMG’s which whose recoil knocks the weapon around only on the vertical axis. The recoil makes it strong not only close range encounters, but at fairly significant ranges. It’s closest competitor is the AK74u, in fact the weapons are almost identical. Both have the exact same damage values of 40-20, the same range 750-1000, the same rate of fire of 800 RPM and the same magazine capacity. The difference in recoil makes the MP5 a superior weapon to the Ak74u however.

AK74u – For reasons stated above the AK74u is generally slightly worse than the MP5. The only advantage the AK74u has is a slightly faster reload time and better bullet penetration. The difference between the weapons is small however. People that prefer a more vertically aligned recoil pattern should stick with the AK74u as opposed to the MP5.

Skorpion – A good SMG for Hardcore matches. The Skorpion has strong initial damage values of 50-20 but has a terrible range of 200-400. This means that your great initial damage of 50, which would two shot kill an enemy, drops down to a measly 20 damage after only 400 units of distance. To give you an idea of just how short 400 units is, the knife has a maximum range of 196. The terrible range and consequently terrible damage values makes the Skorpion totally unplayable for normal matches. It’s small clip size of 20 is made up for by it’s virtually non existent recoil. In hardcore games however where all you need is 30 damage for a kill the Skorpion becomes much more attractive.

P90 – The defining weapon of the SMG class. The P90 is known for it’s obscene rate of fire of 925 RPM and huge capacity of 50 rounds per magazine. It actually does less damage than the MP5, 30-20 but easily makes up for that in other areas. It has a fair amount of kick but the recoil is confined to a fairly small area so you can spray and pray to your hearts content. As a bonus for PC players it has a bug increasing your sprint distance x1.75 times their normal value. All of these characteristics make it the optimal rush weapon for both normal and Hardcore scrimmages.

Uzi – Perfectly identical to the P90 in almost every way. It has a slightly higher rate of fire, 950 RPM, actually the highest of any automatic weapon in Call of Duty 4. In exchange for this extra 25 RPM when compared to the P90 you have to lower your magazine capacity to 32 and acquire some higher recoil for the weapon. This means in general the Uzi is worse than the P90.

The bottom line: The P90 and MP5 are generally the best SMGs for normal and hardcore matches. The Skorpion is also playable for only Hardcore games.