Written by Jeff Buckland, 9/27/2004
Played on:
Windows
Infinity Ward and Activision basically came out of nowhere with last year's smash hit Call of Duty. Its intense World War 2 action and solid production values scored big with both gamers and reviewers, and the multiplayer mode that was thrown in turned out to be not half-bad. Activision commissioned developers Gray Matter (creators of Return to Castle Wolfenstein) for the inevitable expansion pack to Call of Duty, and they've delivered a very solid experience that's true to the name.
United Offensive offers basically nothing new over Call of Duty from an engine standpoint, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. Infinity Ward wound up revamping so much of the Quake 3 engine that there's hardly anything left of the original technology left. The best I can say here is simply that Gray Matter's expansion pushes the boundaries of the technology almost to the breaking point. And this is a good thing; the game ran great at 1280x1024 with 4xAA and 8xAF on my computer, although the final couple of levels slowed down enough that I had to forego the AA and AF. Even then, this game doesn't look near as good as other, more recent FPS titles - with some luck, Infinity Ward and Gray Matter will have fully moved over to a brand new engine for their next games.
Plenty of gamers who buy United Offensive will be taking the multiplayer mode for a spin, and it might be the first time that these players even bother to try the Call of Duty multiplayer mode in any form. The netcode is very solid here, and while I can't say with any certainty that it's still the original (and excellent) Quake 3 netcode under the hood, the gameplay was smooth nevertheless.
Finally, I want to say that Activision's been doing a great job as a publisher recently. They have delivered quite a few games right on time recently, and they've helped the developers squash tons and tons of bugs; I found basically no bugs in United Offensive's single player mode, and only a couple of minor ones in the multiplayer. It's refreshing to see a game - especially one with both single- and multiplayer modes - that doesn't need a patch right out of the box. I think we'll probably see a patch or two anyway, but I wouldn't really complain if we didn't.
The solid FPS controls and excellent menus seen in Call of Duty are back in United Offensive. You'll be manning guns on a doomed bomber, storming through buildings, fields, and war-torn cities on foot, shooting Axis troops from the sidecar of a motorcycle, and taking control of a tank in one of the largest tank battles in all of history. Through all of this, the controls are smooth, simple, and rarely ever get in the way of the action.
United Offensive's multiplayer interface seems relatively unchanged from the original game, and that's a good thing, as it works beautifully. The server browser is perfect and the new vehicles added to multiplayer drive just right.
United Offensive does an excellent job pulling you in with accurate landscapes, great troop models (and animations), beautiful explosions, and an overall atmosphere that is top amongst World War 2 action games period. All of this can be said about Call of Duty as well, but these elements are not necessarily a given in an expansion pack. Suffice it to say that UO gives gamers more of the same great stuff with new scenarios and different battles to take place in.
This time around, Gray Matter has done their best to make each campaign as unique as possible, and also to differentiate the expansion from the original game. The British missions in Sicily are a perfect example of this, while the American and Russian campaigns less so. The Battle of the Bulge looks beautiful during the American campaign though, and while we've seen this setting in previous WW2 shooters, it's never look this good or been this fun to participate in.
United Offensive seems to use some sort of approximation of pixel shadwed water (it's the same effect as in CoD) so it doesn't quite look as good as what we've seen before, and with a chunk of the British campaign taking place on the gunner seat of a boat, the rather dated-looking water is much more obvious. Does this really take away from the gameplay? Not really, but WW2 shooters as a whole really could use a bump up as far as graphics and special effects go - while Call of Duty looked pretty good for last year, many graphically spectacular FPS titles have been released in the last year and United Offensive falls behind just from the competition's advancements.
If you've played Call of Duty, then you know how this one plays. You and your squadmates (you're pretty much never alone in this game) must take on the Germans all over Europe across three campaigns: the Americans, British, and Soviets. The game mostly skips the usual suspects when it comes to WW2 game settings, although the Battle of the Bulge has been seen before. This time, though, you're spending less time getting randomly killed by artillery you can't even see coming (I'm looking at you, Medal of Honor: Spearhead) - and more time actually killing the enemy. Your squad generally displays pretty decent AI considering the norm for FPS games, and enemy AI is only a bump above mentally retarded. Sadly, that's also pretty good for modern action games. Still, United Offensive certainly excels beyond most of its peers, so Gray Matter winds up winning points from me there anyway.
