Played on:
Windows
We've seen plenty of World War 2 games recently, and the rush of them seems to only be getting more intense. One of the first WW2 games that really caught people's attention was Medal of Honor: Allied Assault - this was mainly because of its highly cinematic style, intense action, and (mostly) realistic wartime atmosphere.
A bunch of the guys from 2015, developer for the Medal of Honor games, have since left to create their own company: Infinity Ward. Call of Duty is their first game, but these guys are no novices, and they know the material. CoD is a WW2 first person shooter done in a mostly similar style to their previous work, but this game includes more of the good and less of the bad. We get separate campaigns from American, British, and Russian perspectives, a larger focus on squad-oriented action, and a ton of explosions everywhere. It's been almost two years since MOH:AA was released, though, and a ton of other games with the same theme have come and gone; does Call of Duty contain enough to be worth your time and cash?
Infinity Ward took the Quake 3 engine and basically gutted it - they've rewritten the AI, graphics code, scripting system, and lots of other bits and pieces in order to make Call of Duty. The most obvious visual enhancement is the pixel shaded water, but otherwise it still does seem to look a lot like the Q3 engine. At least the frame rates and visuals here are much better than what we saw in the last Q3 engine game, Star Wars: Jedi Academy.
Call of Duty didn't crash a single time while I was playing it, but then again, I really didn't play it for that long (more on that later). The multiplayer setup was technically sound, and the frame rates on those maps were really good. The system requirements are overall surprisingly lenient, and while the game looks downright ugly at the lowest possible settings, it's nice to see support for systems that are three years old or more.
Of course, if you have a newer computer, low system requirements are not exactly a priority. You can get a very nice game by jacking up the detail on a more powerful video card, as the game supplies some nice, high quality textures for the world and the characters. FSAA looks great here, as well as anisotropic filtering - if your video card can handle these features at an acceptable speed, then I suggest you give them a shot.
IW has made some efforts to simplify the shooter experience a bit - like Halo, you can only carry two main weapons at any time. You can always have a pistol and some grenades as well, but you'll find yourself sticking with primary weapons quite a bit. The game includes plenty of help on how to do some of the things that FPS veterans have probably known for years now, but I still like full interactive tutorials and tips that pop up. Both of them show up here, and they're pretty effective in helping you understand the game mechanics. The game also changes its tips based on what keys you assign to certain things - this may seem rather unimportant, but it's one of those small things I like to see. It's disappointing how many games nowadays still tell me to "Press Space to Jump" when I had already rebound the spacebar to something completely different.
The actual feel of the mouse in Call of Duty is spot on; it feels like a shooter in the Q3 engine, which feels just right in my opinion. Unlike the recent Halo issue with mouse acceleration being forced on, the mouse controls are sharp and accurate here.
Infinity Ward has done a great job fitting modern visuals into an aging engine without crippling the frame rate or stability. The textures look great, and the larger open spaces are nice even compared to the best game engines out there. The pixel shaded water is beautiful to see, and the explosions are well done.
The character models generally look very nice, and a full range of animations are here - including lots of animations for characters ducking behind cover. There's no fancy ragdoll physics here, though, as all animations are made by hand. The weapons feel very authentic and are fun to use, and it's a bit scary being on the receiving side of this stuff. When you see a German MG42 machine gun open up, you will run for cover.
The wartime atmosphere is intense in Call of Duty, especially on the morning of D-Day. Once the planes start flying over and the flak guns start firing, it seems much more like what we saw in Saving Private Ryan or other WW2 movies than a game. It's an accomplishment that might not directly affect gameplay, but the story does tie in somewhat and the atmosphere is one of the better selling points of a good WW2 game.
The action and pacing in Call of Duty is done just right, with plenty of big shootouts, a few sneaky missions, a very satisfying stint in a tank crew, and some on-rails-style shooting levels. The story follows right along, with you playing as three different soldiers, one from each of the US, British, and Russian sides. The fourth campaign is all about the taking of Berlin, and you get to reprise your role as all three soldiers where each does their own thing during the fighting.
Most people seem to find two major problems with MOH:AA - the game ended very abruptly in basically the middle of the war, and the sniper level was a huge tedium of save, die, load, and repeat. Both of these issues have been addressed in Call of Duty, although there is one annoying sniper sequence here. It's in the Russian campaign and it has you trying to take out seven snipers in a single building (which was a bit strange right there) while one of the guys in your squad runs around as bait. The problem is that the snipers never seemed to shoot at him anyway; if I popped my head up for a second, I'd get hit, and it would only take a couple of hits to kill me. That was almost as annoying as the sniper level in MOH:AA, but at least this one is quite a bit shorter.
Call of Duty is not a very long game, sadly - I beat it in about six and a half hours on Normal difficulty. I wasn't trying to rush, and I did have to reload my game quite a few times. At the very least, this game is very satisfying by the time you get to the end. It definitely serves up a better picture of how the war went than MOH:AA, and actually ends with the taking of Berlin.
It turns out that Call of Duty has quite a bit more in the multiplayer area than I expected, so that could be a possible explanation for the somewhat short single player game. And to compare, even though Max Payne 2 was also a short game, I was much more motivated to go back through through that one another couple of times.
All that said, Call of Duty does deliver an exhilarating experience. Several of the missions degrade into utter chaos where you are literally surrounded by enemies, constantly shooting, running, grabbing ammo, and just trying to simply survive. Even FPS veterans are going to feel totally overrun in a few instances in this game, and that's actually a really cool feeling once you figure out how to get through these situations.
