Jason goes to war on PC in first person.
Publisher: Activision
Sat, 24 December 2005
by: Jason
I did have the opportunity to play quite a bit of the first Call of Duty and enjoyed its efforts to stand out from the almost overwhelming horde of World War 2 first person shooters. The passable attempt to make you feel like part of a squad, and its efforts in the direction of a plot made it stand out from others in the genre.
So it was with something passing for enthusiasm that I shoved disk one of Call Of Duty 2 Collectors Edition (As I later discovered from experimentation disk one is the game, disk two is an extras disk- see below) into the DVD drive on my humble box and proceeded to install it. Time passed, quite a bit of time actually, about twenty minutes but eventually the game was installed and away to the Second World War I went.
 | | You've been "Punked"! |
I was very pleased to discover everything the original had the sequel has in spades, your fellow soldiers react as you would expect them to, taking cover, moving and firing, yelling orders to each other all really enhancing the squad feel ( a nice change from the usual one man against the Nazi horde style of most other FPS games). There are occasional lapses, probably because your squad mates don't know what you're going to do next and have an annoying habit of standing directly in your line of fire or cowering right next to an unexploded grenade.
A new addition to the series is the smoke grenade useful for confusing enemies, covering deployment or a good old fashioned tactical withdrawal (more commonly known as runnin' away). As before you are limited to carrying only 2 weapons, should you run out of ammo for an obscure gun you will have to dump it and replace it with one of the many lying about the place, formerly belonging to your enemies and continue to push on.
Its probably time to mention that most of you that are even considering this game will most likely be going to have a crack online, all the requisite game modes are present and after a quick check it appears that bigpond have 8 servers up and running so finding a map full of opponents with witch to exchange a friendly hail of gunfire shouldn't be a problem.(to properly review this game I probably should have played it online myself, sadly my skills at FPS games fluctuates wildly between being able to snipe somebody from across a map to not being able to hit the broad side of a barn, from the inside. So to avoid embarrassment and shame I didn't bother).
 | | There was a mad rush to get Tom Hanks' autograph |
I am a bit of a PC nerd; except when it comes to game graphics, I vaguely understand anti-aliasing but antistrophic filtering eludes me completely. As long as I can tell what things are and the game doesn't look like a bad strobe light experiment I'm happy. However I will say the graphics are more than adequate, explosions look explosive, the sun looks bright, blood spurts quite convincingly from wounds and the smoke is bloody hard to see through.
A special mention must be made of the sound, not so much the effects (although they are certainly up to standard) but more the music, it really seems to add to the epic "war" feel.
As this was the DVD Collectors Edition it came with an extras disk (what doesn't these days). On the disk are: A making of the game (well what else were you expecting), an interview with a gentleman who was present for some of the real story and a walkthrough of a couple of levels of the game (complete with commentary).
by: Jason
More articles by Jason
Adds strongly to the series without taking away from the original, if you're short on ww2 shooters give this one a go. | |
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