Call of Duty 2

It seems as though we have been at war in WWII games for longer than the real war. When the first Call of Duty came on the market, it was one of the best WWII FPS games in a category that was already overflowing with games. It had a great single player campaign, gritty and hectic combat, amazing sound effects and a very enjoyable multiplayer. If you were a fan of the original game, you will be pleased to know that Acitvision has brought all of those aspects to COD2. Any Call of Duty addict will easily become very addicted to COD2, and hopefully the new girlfriend will be more understanding of that addiction.

The game is set in the world during World War II, just like the first game. And just like the original, you will be placed in the combat boots of different individual soldiers fighting for the various allied armies, those being the British, American and Soviet armies. You will play through various missions for each of the armies following the path of the war as it swept across Europe. You get to start off as a lowly private in the Soviet army, fighting off the Germans in Stalingrad and Moscow. After completing the first mission, you will unlock the first British mission where you get to fight in the harsh North African Dessert. After fighting your way through the countryside of Caen, France you will get to move onto the American campaign. You will become a corporal in the US Army climbing up the cliff faces of the Pointe du Hoc as bullets stream by. That gave me such a rush that I had to take a break from the game in order to calm down a bit.

The game allows you to select the difficulty level for each of the 10 missions if you get to a part where you can not beat at the difficulty level you are at. For me, playing at regular difficulty, I found it quite easy to breeze through most of the missions. It could easily be finish in less than 10 hours at the regular setting and probably 6 or less if you want to wuss out on easy. As you up the difficulty passed regular you will find that the game gets significantly harder. You will really have to slow your pace down by peaking around every corner instead of just running in. This makes the game much more enjoyable if you want a challenge and to extend your purchase well passed the 10 hours.

After you have jumped into your first mission, you will quickly notice that the game plays very similar to the original. You will normally have a squad leader giving you instructions as to what you are supposed to do during different point in a particular mission. You will also be joined by a squad of NPCs. In the original, I found that they were only good for helping you find out where enemy positions were by getting killed beside you. In COD2, I noticed that they would actually help me kill the Germans quite a bit. As long as I was actively fighting my way through the mission, they would take out quite a few enemies along side of me instead of just being bullet magnets. This added a lot to the realism of the game for me, since most games do not script their NPCs very well in those situations. Another thing you will notice from the original is that you can only have 2 weapons at a time, which was a great idea in my opinion. Having an endless arsenal on your back is just unrealistic. While the COD series only allows you the 2 weapons, you can still drop and pick up any new or different weapon that was on one of your squad mates or enemies. Which allows you to equip your self for a good number of situations? My favorite combination is the PPS machine gun for the up close fighting in the Soviet missions with a KAR98 German rifle to pick off the pesky enemies from a distance if needed.

The programmers were able to fix one problem that has always bothered me in games similar to this one. That is the endless streaming of enemies unlit you pass a specific point on the map. In COD2, the enemies will eventually stop spawning after you have killed enough of them. This makes the game way more fun to play, because you can concentrate on killing instead of just advancing far enough to stop the spawning.

Ahhh yes, the gameplay. How can I put this? Extremely intense! No matter what mission or campaign you are in, you will have your heart pounding and your eyes glued to the screen. The enemies have quite deadly accuracy if you give them a target to shoot at and if you are in the open, even if it behind an enemy, they will turn directly at you and open fire. With no health packs in the game, you can find yourself in some pretty hairy situations that get the adrenaline flowing. In one of the Soviet missions you are crawling through a pipe (like in the movie Enemy at the Gates) with a few comrades when all of a sudden the pipe is rattled with bullets and your comrades are no more. Scared the living hell out of me so bad that I screamed out loud. The enormous amount of “potato-mashers” that are thrown at your, the streams of MG-42 bullets and the yelling of orders from both sides will keep you glued to the edge of your seat just like any good WWII movie fire fight scene.

I mentioned that there is no health packs in COD2, just like the original did not have any. Instead, if you get behind cover you will regenerate health even if you were just shot point blank in the chest a few times. This has its good and bad about it. It keeps the game moving along instead of always looking for health packs when you are low on health, which is a real good thing. The bad thing is that, you are almost invincible. As long as you employ the tactic of being near something that you can hide behind, you will almost never die in the game. Which to me did not give me the same sense of impending death by the next bullet that hits me, instead it just made it feel like I could never die. But with being invincible, it allows you to do things in the game that you would normally not do, like rush a group of 3-4 Germans. As long as you can kill them, it did not matter how many times you were shot, you could just rest a second and you get to rush another room full of Germans. Even at the higher difficulty setting, as long as you figure out how much damage you can take before dying, you can always fully recover from any firefight as long as you rest.

The only thing you can not do is sit your butt on a grenade; they will kill you if you are too close. I think the Germans actually know that about the game since they chuck tons of grenades at you. You do get a little indicator that pops up on your screen showing you that a grenade is near you and it has a little arrow telling you where the grenade is relative to you, allowing you to run the other way. Your squad mates do not seem to have this little indicator as they die a lot by way of grenade explosions, but not to worry a new squad mate will show up to replace the newly dead one in no time.

The graphics and sound in Call of Duty were impressive for it’s time but with COD2 the graphics blow the original out of the water. I found myself with a wide open jaw many times as I played through the missions. Even with all the settings turned down, the textures and sounds were so good it felt like I was in a movie theater instead of playing a game. The designer’s attention to detail is amazing and the little things that they add to keep you in character just makes you feel like you are really there. Having bombers flying over head, fighter planes having dog fights above you, the sound of the wheels turning on a tank, the metallic clinks as bullets bounce off metal, and the think black smoke from a smoke grenade. All of this just sucks you into the feeling of being that soldier that you are playing. They even allow you a few brief moments of calm in order to actually take in some of these extras to the game, which is very nice since most games you barely get to enjoy the scenery during the course of battle.

The single player game will fill any needs that a WWII fps fan has, that is where we move into multiplayer mode. The multiplayer component is very similar to the original in all aspects, except the pace of the game. In the original there was a steady pace to all maps and type of multiplayer games. In the new COD2, the pace of the game seems to be ramped up a few notches. This makes for a more visceral multiplayer game with more carnage and fast paced action

The game comes with 13 maps, including 3 remakes from the original COD. Up to 32 players can play on a server at one time as well as having VOIP chat and 2 weapons that are not available in single player mode. You can play deathmatch, team deathmatch, Capture the flag, search and destroy (where one team has to plant a bomb at one of the other teams two objectives in order to blow it up) and mode called headquarters. In this mode there are two different points on the map designated as capture points for each team. In order to score points a team must control and “setup” headquarters at one of these capture points. Once they have done that, they must defend that headquarters. The longer they can keep the headquarters from being taken, the more points they get. The interesting twist is that if you die while on the defending team, you are not allowed to respawn until your headquarters is taken over by the other team, while the attacking team still gets to respawn. This means that as you defend your headquarters, you have less team mates to help you as they slowly get killed. Always a pain being the last defender alive. Once taken over, the capture points are changed to new locations and it starts all over again. This is a very fun mode to play and is always changing.

The weapons are still very balanced in the normal fashion of WWII fps games. You have your sub-machine guns, your bolt action rifles, semiautomatic rifles, shotgun, assault rifles and your sniper rifles. The grenades are the same as in single player and depending on the weapon you choose, you will get a different amount of grenades. The smoke grenades are very effective in multiplayer and sometimes a little effective with some maps turning into a giant forest fire of smoke. The weapons and damage model is a little higher in multiplayer so you will find that you will die from a lot less bullets than you did when playing single player. All the level seem very balanced for all the weapons but with the slightly faster pace, I found it hard to try and camp any where. The action is always happening and finding a good spot to plop myself was very difficult. That is something that I find refreshing, no more yelling at a team mate because they are just hiding and not helping their team.

Top game moment: Crawling through pipes as a soviet soldier with bullets turning the pipe into swiss cheese.

I would have to say that Call of Duty 2 continues the great game play that the original Call of Duty started. The graphics and sounds are intense, the single player campaign is extremely compelling, the multiplayer is fast paced fun and the overall game play is down right awesome. The only bad feature would be the health regeneration feature in the single player campaign. For any gamer that wants to spend the next few months in World War II, I suggest you get this game. Just make sure you have the machine to run this game in all its glory.

One aspect of gameplay that has changed since the first Call of Duty is that you no longer have a health bar. As you get shot, you'll see the screen growing more and more red along the borders and your character will start to grunt and pant. If you continue to take damage in a short span of time, you die. So as you get shot that first or second time, you need to get yourself back to cover and hide for a couple of seconds to recover. Once your vision clears, you're good to go again. Some people may be put off by this Halo-like gameplay conceit, but it actually works very well here, and it really is no more contrived than hunting down and hoarding health packs. In the context of Call of Duty 2, we'd go so far as to say that it's an improvement over the traditional health system, as you never find yourself at a tough checkpoint (the game autosaves quite a lot) without enough health or medikits. Ammo's never an issue either, as there's never a shortage of dead bodies to loot for guns, bullets, and grenades. The focus stays squarely on the fight.

Speaking of grenades, the other major new gameplay conceit is the use of smoke grenades. You can pop these in front of machine-gun nests or to obscure the view of enemy snipers, making infantry charges a more viable option. The smoke effect looks outstanding and comes in handy in both the single- and multiplayer aspects to neutralize the effectiveness of fixed machine-gun nests and snipers. There's also nothing quite as exciting as running through a dense smoke cloud and finding yourself face-to-face with the enemy (the view from the opposite side is pretty cool as well).

Multiplayer Call of Duty 2 picks up right where the original left off, offering standard deathmatch, team deathmatch, and capture-the-flag modes, along with the search-and-destroy mode from the original game, where one team has to plant a bomb and destroy one of two objectives while the other team defends. A mode called "headquarters" is also available, and it's probably the most enjoyable mode of the five available in COD2. In this mode, two different areas on a map are designated as capture points for either of the two teams. To score points, a team must control and set up a headquarters on one of the two areas. Once that's set up, points begin increasing for the controlling team. The other team must attempt to overrun the position to try to stop the points from ticking up. During the time a headquarters is set up, the defending team members can't respawn (if they're killed) until their headquarters is overrun or the HQ expires. Once one of those two things happens, capture points are changed to different locations and the teams begin anew to try to set up a base. The nature of capturing, defending, and a constantly shifting HQ location makes this mode fun, because teams must adapt to different roles quickly and on the fly. As far as weapon balance goes, there's a predictable relationship between bolt-action rifles, semiautomatic rifles, assault rifles, and submachine guns. The smoke grenades can also change battlefield dynamics greatly, as snipers can sometimes find their favorite killing fields obscured. The shotguns are also extremely powerful in close-quarters situations, and they're fun to use.

The presentation in Call of Duty 2 is also topflight. Each mission is introduced with video footage from the Military Channel, as well as documentary-style narration that helps set the historical setting for what you're about to do. The game's graphics are also great, particularly the smoke effects from smoke grenades and explosions, as well as the fantastic amount of detail put into both the indoor and outdoor environments across a wide variety of landscapes. Textures can sometimes be a little less sharp when looking at vehicles or character models up close. But since most of the game is so fast and chaotic anyway, you don't notice much. The unfortunate thing is that the game can chug very badly in some key spots, reducing frame rate to 15 or less. For the most part, it ran well on our primary test system, a Pentium 4 2.4GHz with 1GB of RAM and a GeForce 6800 OC with 128MB. But in certain spots, like some massed infantry charges, or the armored-car getaway sequence, our rig really struggled to keep up, even using the game's chosen "optimal" graphics setup, which seemed somewhat modest. Sound is where Call of Duty 2 excels like no other. Between the stirring score that kicks up during key moments, to the top-notch gun and explosion effects, the game sounds fantastic. The speech is also pretty good, particularly the yelling that your squadmates and enemies do during battle, which plays right into your excitement and tension as you fight.

Call of Duty 2 is just about everything you would hope for and expect from the sequel to one of the most successful World War II shooters of all time. Its varied campaign, excellent sound and gameplay design, and generally good AI make it a worthy successor to the original. At the same time, though, it's still a World War II shooter, and if you've grown weary of them, then Call of Duty 2's lack of new material might turn you away. It can also be murderous on your computer if you have modest hardware. What Call of Duty 2 does do well is nail down just about all aspects that define an ideal first-person shooter. If you liked the original and have been thirsting for more, Call of Duty 2 will definitely deliver that.

Not One Step Back

Health: is found all over
Ammunition: none until you pick your first weapon
Difficulty: (1/10)

When you have control, go over to Sgt. Puskov. Follow him up the
hill. Once you have reached the middle of the refinery there will
a guy that is shot and killed. Puskov will tell you to pick up
the rifle. Now kill all the Germans in the building, and go into it.
Go towards the window, and kill the retreating Germans. Soon after
Puskov will clear some rubble behind you. Follow him through the
new path until he stops. Puskov will go again when the man across
from you finishes his speech. Follow him until he gets to a building.
Go inside and clear it out. At the end of the building there is a hole
in the wall. Head through it.

The Flag Must Fall

Health: everywhere but can be hard to find at times
Ammunition: everywhere
Difficulty: (2/10)

Head to the door, and order your men to open it. Clear out the room,
and open the door to the next one. Kill the men in that room and head
through the hole in the wall. Work your way down the stairs to the
window. Wait for the machine gun to be set up. One of your men will man
it, but will be gunned down shortly after. Now man it, and shoot the
Germans coming at you from the wall below. After the cut-scene go down 
the stairs and outside. Go through one of the holes in the wall. Go
up the hill and there will be a trench on your left. Go through it,
and take the only right. As you get out take a right, and you can see
a hole in the trench above you. Head through it, and take a right. Kill
the gunner. Now you have cleared the left pillbox. Exit the pillbox, and
follow the trench until it ends. There will be another trench across from
you. Enter it, and follow it into the pillbox. Kill the gunner. Now the
center pillbox is cleared. Exit the trench, and turn a right. Follow the
trench right until it ends. You can now see the trench that will lead you
to the final pillbox. Head through the trench, and enter the pillbox. Kill
the gunner. All pillboxes have now been cleared. Exit the trench and enter
one across from you. Take the first right, and work your way around the
hill. When you get to the trench, enter it, and follow it through. Go
around the corner, and open the door to your left. Clear out the room,
and tear down the Nazi flag.