The quality of the first-person shooter genre outside of the PC platform has been debated by countless fanboys in numerous forums on infinite parallel Internets. However, it is safe to say that yes, there have been some good shooters on consoles. It is my belief that since the Goldeneye/Perfect Dark era of the Nintendo64, the Xbox has had the most success in delivering quality first person shooters to console owners. Also available for the PC, Call of Duty 2 does its best to fill the Halo-shaped hole in the 360 lineup and performs admirably although it is hardly revolutionary.
Call of Duty 2 mostly emulates the successful mold of its predecessor. Two years later, though, is more of the same enough to make a good game? To keep things fresh, Call of Duty 2 changes and adds key features while still bringing to life the experience of playing a small part in the larger, staggering conflict of World War II. It is a great game because it has taken every thing about its predecessor—graphics, AI, level design, etc.—and made them all a little better, but its ultimate impact is reduced because it has been done before.
As before, the game divides its single player campaign among three soldiers of different nationalities—Russian, British, and American—which allows it to tackle different fronts of the global conflict. You don’t strongly identify with the characters you play, but Call of Duty 2 isn’t worried about plot—the important thing is that World War II is on and there are Nazis that need slaying.
And oh, what slaying there is. Action is fast-paced and frenetic, but still has tactical elements. You can only carry two weapons at a time along with two types of grenades—similar to Halo. Generally, this means one rifle-type weapon and one sub-machine gun.
You can stand, crouch, or go prone with each successive position increasing your accuracy while slowing your movement. Also, the crosshair only appears when you stop moving, which forces you to use cover and line up your shots. One way around this is to aim down the sight of the gun, which lets you keep moving and experience the best accuracy possible.
The two grenade types fulfill different purposes. You can hold four frag grenades, which go boom, and four smoke grenades, which are used strategically and actually work like they should. You throw them, a thick cloud of smoke is created, and the enemy and you cannot see each other. These grenades are essential tools for assaulting fortified positions and when moving through one of these dark, gritty storms, enemies may not be visible until you’re right on top of them, making charges exhilarating and unpredictable.
At no point in the game will you be fighting alone or against any kind of boss. In fact, you are often surrounded by countless non-player characters to fight with and against, and they display impressive shooting skills and intelligence.
Your squadmates are not impotent tag-alongs who shoot blanks, and they know how to flank and find their way through complicated terrain. The Nazi troops do their best to fight for the Fuhrer and will even try and shoot you with a pistol after they go down, which is when the butt of your rifle comes in handy.
While that is a nice bit of scripted action, healthier Germans show individual cunning and rely less on the heavy scripting of the first Call of Duty. They know how to charge your position, use cover, and they won’t hesitate to fire if you put yourself out in the open. Perhaps most devastatingly, they know how to use grenades.
Thankfully, one of Call of Duty 2’s new features is a grenade indicator that casually points out the relative location of live grenades. Sadly, unlike the NPCs, you cannot throw an enemy’s grenade back. If I could, I don’t think I’d try very often, but it’s stupid to give other soldiers abilities you don’t have.
PC System Requirements
- Pentium(R) 4 1.4GHz or AMD Athlon(tm) XP 1700+
- 256 MB RAM (512 MB RAM recommended)
- DirectX(R) 9.0c compatible 64MB Video Card with DirectX(R) 9.0c
- DirectX(R) 9.0c compatible 16-bit sound card and latest drivers.
- Microsoft(R) Windows(R) 2000/XP
- 4 GB of uncompressed free hard disk space (plus 600MB for Windows(R) 2000/XP swap file)
- 8x Speed CD-ROM or 2x Speed DVD-ROM drive.
One ability that you do share with your teammates, who press on unless the game needs them to die, is a regenerative health system. Call of Duty 2 does away with the health pack hunts found in the first game. Instead, taking another cue from Halo, your health always regenerates fully—assuming you haven’t died.
A red indicator shows what direction the damage came from, and bloody hues creep around the edges of the screen the closer you are to death. Find cover, avoid further damage, and you’ll be ready to reenter the fray. This system serves the gameplay well, even though it is grossly unrealistic in the historical context. Then again, how realistic is healing your bullet wounds by running over a green box with a red cross on it?
Overall, this health system makes the action much more intense and faster paced. For instance, rather than looking at a hill and balancing how many health packs you remember seeing and how many you expect to find, you can focus solely on desperately scrambling for that next piece of cover.
If you’ve played the first Call of Duty and its expansion pack, you’ve seen almost every mission type the sequel uses. Every level involves running around an area on foot or in a vehicle, and the environments are more open-ended than in the previous games.
Your next objective may be to take control of a townhouse, but the path there is not cordoned off by conveniently placed dead-ends and rubble. Some highlights of the British campaign include the nocturnal capture of an Egyptian town and then withstanding the ensuing counterattack.
German soldiers come at you in waves across the dunes like starving rats and before repelling that attack, you must be a spotter for British artillery strikes. Usually, you control one soldier per campaign, but in another British mission you get to shift personas and drive a tank across the open desert while chasing Rommel’s forces.
During the brutal and urban Russian campaign, you get to crawl through pipes, repair communication lines, and of course, take part in savage charges where the majority of your comrades are slaughtered. The excellent American campaign features something I thought I may never see again—a new and fresh take on a D-Day landing.
Yes, this time it is at Pointe du Hoc. There you must scale a 30 meter cliff, engage in trench warfare at the top, and then defend a seaside village from Nazi counterattacks. This kind of variety both within a mission and among the different ones keeps the fighting from becoming stale.
The missions also have versatile scenery, provided by a superb graphics engine. The different environments, namely tundra, desert, and temperate, are all nicely detailed, as are the burned-out buildings that fill the landscape. Much of your squadmates’ believability is carried by their appearance, which features quality textures and commendable facial expressions.
I particularly enjoyed the shell shock effect that can occur anytime an explosive detonates but is used especially well in the D-Day mission. In battle, smoke forms gorgeous, thick clouds, bloods splatters from friend and foe alike, and the bottom line is that game immerses you with graphics that match contemporary titles available for the PC and Xbox 360.
Sound is the final element locking you into the game. Whether it is dialogue or the ringing left behind by an artillery bombardment, the soundscape is full and vibrant. Listening to your fellow soldiers is a treat, and they become surprisingly identifiable over the course of a campaign.
Of course, their desperate cries for covering fire only add to the thrilling chaos of battle, as do the harsh screams from angry German troops. One of my favorite parts in any World War II game is that entertaining accent and Call of Duty 2 did not disappoint me, although I believe Germans should speak in German.
The sound effects of the weaponry from reloading to unloading are spot-on, but how could they be otherwise? Six years after Medal of Honor, I would be shocked if there isn’t some institution funded by the industry whose only job is to perfect the sounds of 1940s warfare.
The game has some shortcomings, although they do not detract too much from the enjoyable gameplay. The environments may look pretty, but they are highly static, unless scripted otherwise. No matter how many times a grenade lands right in front of those wooden crates, you can keep on using them for cover.
Also, you can just forget about all those doors you see—if the game calls for them to be opened, it will let you know. That heavy scripting can occasionally be foiled by pesky human players like me, and I did have to reload a few times to correct it, although those bugs are less common than they were in the game’s predecessor.
Assuming these complaints are not deal-breakers, a larger problem with the game still lingers. Despite its high polish, there is a strong feeling of déjà vu. I have stated that the game holds interest while playing and is fun, but in between sessions I often thought, “Is there really anything there that I haven’t seen before?” The answer is of course yes, but that certainly does not apply to everything.
By now I’ve heard the delightful ping of the M1 Garand clip hundreds of times as I’ve killed thousands of Nazis and the truth is this game sometimes feels like an expansion pack to the continuing saga that is WWII Foot Soldier Simulator. If it somehow reinvented the genre—how, I don’t know—things would be different, but Call of Duty 2 is content to take a working formula and incrementally up the resolution, variety, and intensity. This phenomenon keeps the game from being a must-play, because chances are you’ve played much of it before.
Because of the familiarity, a story would have helped Call of Duty 2 hold your attention across its separate campaigns. Even within campaigns the burden of character development is mostly carried by journal entries that try their best not to look like they were written with a font. How many of these did I read completely? Well, it’s not a negative number, but it’s also not a lot.
The other bits of context are contained within black and white newsreel-style reports of the results of your victories that use actual footage from the era. These are kind of cool, but I wouldn’t sit through them during replays and they aren’t an incentive for getting to the next level. Besides, it’s not like you need to finish the game to find out how the war ended.
If you do feel like taking a break from the game, there’s no need to save your progress. Call of Duty 2 adopts a checkpoint system (again, similar to the Halo model) that is likely necessitated by the new health system.
Regeneration and quick-saving would make things much too easy, so closely spaced save points have taken the place of traditional saving. For the most part, they work very well, but in case frustration happens too often—or not at all—the game sports four difficulty levels (Halo, anyone?) for you to experiment with (The sweet spot being around the middle two).
After battling through the campaigns, you should be up to the challenge of human opponents over the internet and Xbox Live. Call of Duty 2’s single-player mode, which focused on squad combat and arcade action, translates well into a multi-player frenzy.
You can kill and be killed very quickly with any of the weapons, so games are full of fast-paced gunning, and when you die you should get another chance in no time. Call of Duty 2’s own special brands of deathmatch and capture the flag are here, along with two more unique modes.
Headquarters is a King of the Hill variant that starts out with two possible places for the Headquarters (hill), but only one side can establish it and once they do, that team must defend it from the enemy without the ability to respawn. Search and Destroy also starts out with two markers on the map, but once a team plants an explosive at one of them, the opposing force has a limited amount of time to defuse it.
These two modes demand more strategy and planning, while every mode requires that you be quick on the draw. Unfortunately, no amount of speed may save you from spawning right where you just died, which happens with disappointing frequency.
Call of Duty was the best example of its historical genre when it debuted. Its sequel takes a winning formula and updates it to meet today’s standards. Revolutionary? Not at all. Innovative? Somewhat. The most well-polished and executed WWII FPS? Yes.
While developers may be running out of ways to make the second Great War new again, this game shows that what has been done before can still be a whole lot of fun. While it’s not the killer-app that Halo was, Call of Duty 2 is a high-quality game that helps cement the Xbox 360 as the first-person shooter’s second home.
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