Call Of Duty Review

Freeform war Jazz

Rather than be restricted to a parallel timeline, the player swings backwards and forwards in time (slightly confusingly) over a period of two and a half years between August 1942 and April 1945, taking in US attempts to aid the D-Day beach landings of Normandy, aiding the British Dambuster bombings on the Eder Dam, and helping the Russians retake Red Square before the campaign climaxes with three individual 'mopping up' missions, which set the seal on the defeat of the Nazi aggressors.

As the two single-player demos more than amply demonstrated, Call Of Duty is an immensely cinematic game, using a huge number of scripted events to deliver an almost bewildering array of memorable moments. Medal Of Honor was as cinematic as they come, but Infinity Ward has raised the stakes considerably in creating a seat of the pants thrill ride that rarely allows you to pause for breath. Almost all the way through the game you're accompanied by an unending succession of buddies, who not only provide a useful degree of support, but do so in as convincing a fashion as anyone's managed to date.

Although their movements are utterly scripted, i.e. dependent on the removal of key enemies, it's hard not to be impressed by the dynamic way each soldier seeks cover, finding a suitable place to return fire while simultaneously shouting exclamations and instructions. Their path finding, too, is generally excellent, and unlike so many games you won't find them running like headless chicken into walls or stubbornly getting in your way. In fact, it's a joy to at last witness a game that has enemy and buddy AI capable of doing the basic things with ease.

Get over it

Obstacles and low walls are no problem and they mount them with ease. Enter a room with an abandoned gun emplacement and one of them will use it (and they'll also leave it if you want a go). What's more, they'll peep around cracks and return fire, helping you to take out a whole posse of enemies in the process - in general they just look like they know what they're doing, and do so without ever becoming a hindrance. Expressing that with ageing Quake III Arena tech at the game's core is a feat worthy of serious applause.

As an all round spectacle, the game doesn't come anywhere near the heights of the various forthcoming FPSs it's brushing shoulders with on Most Wanted lists, namely the likes of Far Cry, Doom III, Half-Life 2 and STALKER, but its more humble technical origins mean that just about anyone will be able to run it at full detail with minimal frame rate loss. For example, with everything turned up to max, our P4 2.2GHz, GeForce 4 Ti4600 system with 512 MB RAM only came unstuck during the more insane sequences in Red Square [and my 1.8GHz system with a Radeon 9700 Pro and less memory did fine to boot -Tom]. Elsewhere it was as smooth as you could wish for, and the team has made the most of now ageing tech, managing to render some fairly hectic maps with dozens of soldiers on screen at once, although don't believe the hype about 'up to 300 soldiers at once', because it simply doesn't happen. 'More than 20 odd' would be a more accurate proclamation, but we guess that doesn't quite hit the mark for bold statements.

The character models are generally pretty decent; each with their own unique (but fairly similar) facial models, a great level of detail, tons of incidental animation and a slightly concerning running posture to boot. The environments all look fantastic from a distance, and even close up benefit from some decent texturing. Inevitably some areas are better than others, and while some rubble-strewn environments are excellent, things can start to feel samey quite quickly. Then again, given that some levels can be completed in 10 or 20 minutes, it feels a shame that you almost blink and miss entire areas - some of which are lavishly decorated.

Another game to blitz through

In fact, played on even the third difficulty level (out of four), you'll probably rip through most of Call Of Duty in no time - certainly less than eight hours, and only a couple more than that at the most demanding level with careful use of quicksave. We'd certainly recommend you steer well clear of the first or second difficulty levels, as they're almost ridiculously easy, scattering the play area with medipacks, ruining the challenge. If you like games which can be polished off in a couple of evenings' play, then Call Of Duty will fit the bill, but having just achieved exactly that we're not convinced it harbours a great deal of reply value for single players. In fact, rather shockingly, once we'd settled into the pattern of play, we were stuck with the stark realisation that Call Of Duty is nothing more than a very polished Medal Of Honor.

For all its pyrotechnics, cinematics and impressive touches, it's actually a by-the-numbers shooter with practically zero innovation. All the bits you've seen before are present and correct; the blow up X number of Anti Aircraft guns missions, the sniper missions, a handful of Omaha-beach style against-the-odds nightmares, some on-rails shooting from the back of a jeep, retrieve the Top Secret docs, rescue so-and-so from the POW camp, tanks missions, and so on. Within the limiting context of World War II it's hardly surprising, but what is perhaps surprising is that Infinity Ward does virtually nothing to stray outside of the boundaries of conventional FPSs.

Although your heart might be pounding at the excitement of aircraft roaring overhead as your boat slowly enters the a Russian dock, and you might well be amazed as yet another bomb blast goes off feet away from you while the relentless rattle of gunfire also deafens the life out of you, it's no more than a passive backdrop to create an atmosphere. It most certainly creates a rich atmosphere of terror, but ultimately it's just a passive means of filling in the blanks. This rigid adherence to scripted events makes it very entertaining to watch, and helps drives the narrative effectively, but the game never once presents the player with an alternative. Nothing ever moves on until you play the game exactly by the developer's rules and should you ever decide to try and break those rules, it's a fairly comical sight.

Those pesky cheating Allies

Allies magically respawn, even when your crew has been wiped out (allegedly they're 'reinforcements', but it just looks like the game's cheating in order to keep the illusion going), making any attempt to keep your buddies alive fairly pointless, and as a result of their fleeting appearances, it's tough to relate to any of them in any sense other than being the current level's cannon fodder. Even more curious is the fact that key members are basically indestructible, taking any amount of enemy fire in their stride, while enemies similarly spring back to life, never showing any ill effect from being raked with machine gun fire. If they were to show any visible sign of damage that would help, but the squeaky clean nature of Call Of Duty demands that there's no blood at any stage, no limbs blown off, and no injuries. All you get for your hail of lead is a slumped, beautifully preserved body - or one that should have been dead rising back up like a Terminator to continue firing deadly accurate shots like nothing ever happened.

As we've touched upon, the on-rails nature is both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, it's great to never find yourself cluelessly wandering around not knowing what to do. Being able to just seamlessly wander between one action sequence after another is something we'd be foolish to criticise - it makes for a heady experience and means there's very little fat in the game; no wasted time pottering about clicking on everything in the vague hope you might find something of use. In fact, right from the word go the game makes it explicitly clear that you never need to open a door. But sometimes CoD takes this hand-holding to a patronising extreme. For example, the 'magic compass' tells you exactly where to go to for your next objective, and leaves absolutely nothing for the player to do other than just shoot and survive.

This whole 'switch off and shoot' approach might appeal to gamers of a certain mindset, or maybe it'll just suit your mood when you're up for some dirty-vest shooting action, but it's disturbingly easy to feel more than a little bored by a game that demands precious little brain engagement. I've used this analogy before when talking about Medal Of Honor titles, but it's just as relevant here; CoD is the gaming equivalent of a fairground thrill ride or a dumb action movie. Its place is to be 'intense' and 'awesome' and all those throwaway statements that get sprinkled over games such as these, and to those ends it most certainly delivers, offering up one seat of the pant sequence after another.

Rob's Second Opinion

When the original demo for Call of Duty was released, a friend of mine downloaded it and summed it up perfectly with a single phrase; "It's Allied Assault with bigger explosions". With the entire single-player game and a fair crack at the multiplayer behind me, I've not found much yet that contradicts what he said - but I'd like to add a quick addendum to it. Not only are the explosions bigger, but they're also in all the right places.

There's no mistaking the pedigree of this game - it's Medal of Honor with knobs on, and it makes little attempt to disguise itself as anything else. Even the interface is remarkably similar, and the graphics are so similar that in places you'll experience severe déjà vu (albeit somewhat higher polygon, more nicely textured déjà vu). It would be a mistake, however, to write this off as a Medal of Honor mission pack under a new name - because this builds on the original game to offer improvements in almost every aspect.

Dulce et Decorum

The trick, really - and the difference between my attitude to the game and Kristan's, I suspect - is not to approach Call of Duty as a first-person shooter, but as a cinematic experience. The analogy of a fairground thrill ride is an entirely fair one - the game drags you by the nose from one experience to the next, completely unrelenting in its pace and its action, and at times you feel like nothing more than an observer or a pawn rather than a central character.

The thing is, that's the whole point. You're not the hero that single-handedly wins World War II - you're one grunt among thousands, most of whom are going to die in the ditches and villages of Europe on the road to Berlin. More than anything else, this game conveys that perfectly; each encounter is finely tuned such that it is an incredible spectacle without ever glorifying the suffering it portrays, and such that it is stirring and entertaining without ever letting you forget the deathly seriousness of the historic events that unfold before you.

That's the genius of Call of Duty; a degree of art, direction and clever gameplay decision making which has made this into an homage to the conflicts represented within and the men who fought and died in them as much as a videogame. Medal of Honor started down this path, and Call of Duty continues much further, with scenarios and events that completely overshadow the portrayal of the D-Day landings in Allied Assault, a level which is widely considered to have achieved classic status.

No Substitute for Victory

For this reason, I personally think it's churlish to berate Call of Duty for failing to move the first-person shooter genre forward. Yes, it's point and shoot for the most part, but it's extremely well executed point and shoot, with a wide array of weapons, superb enemy and friendly AI, vehicles and gun emplacements to play with. Nothing to write home about, but solid, enjoyable FPS gameplay which offers up plenty of variety and does have a few nice quirks - such as the ability to look down the sights of any weapon properly, a minor tweak which adds a surprisingly large dash of realism to the proceedings.

However, Call of Duty doesn't set out to redefine the FPS genre - it sets out to tell a story and provide a spectacle, and it succeeds with flying colours at these things. I've never before played an FPS game which provoked such an emotive response - but watching the terrified conscripts at the troop landings at Stalingrad, with each second man being handed a clip of bullets and told to pick up a rifle from his squadmate's corpse when he's shot, put a lump in my throat - and the sight of battalions of shivering boys hurl themselves across Red Square with the rifles of their own officers awaiting any man who retreated, and the machine gun emplacements of the Germans awaiting at the other side of the square, made my blood boil.

In places, the direction treads a fine line and threatens to become a little too pretentious, but yet somehow the deft touch of the development team keeps it from ever becoming excessively clichéd - even the scene where the battle to hold a bridge in France becomes intense and men start to fall all around you while slow, sad music plays in the background somehow escapes from being puke-inducingly pretentious, and comes across as being genuinely moving and tragic.

On the Beaches

Although the Quake III engine is certainly starting to creak around the edges, and can't really hold its own against more modern engines like the latest builds of the Unreal technology or the Source engine, the Call of Duty team have absolutely made the most of the tech available to them. The game is full of movement and action, with dozens of soldiers on-screen at once, artillery barrages lighting up the night, aircraft overhead being shot down by AA batteries, buildings burning and mortar shells kicking up dirt high into the sky. Using an older engine has allowed the team to put tons of stuff on screen at once rather than focusing on a few individual detailed elements, which was the right decision for a game like this - and where they have added detail, it's obvious that a lot of thought has gone into it. The facial detail of your fellow soldiers, for example, has been increased massively - giving each one a unique identity, and allowing you to see just how young and how scared the majority of the participants in the war were.

One major criticism of Allied Assault was that the game didn't really hold its own as a multiplayer experience, mostly because the multiplayer felt as though it had been tacked on as an afterthought - with weapons that weren't balanced shockingly well for that type of gameplay. Although only extended play will settle the argument either way, first impressions of Call of Duty's multiplayer modes are good - the game's weapons are better suited to multiplayer, and a selection of interesting game modes and maps is available out of the box, including a Counter-Strike style bomb planting/defusing mode which is sure to prove popular online.

It's also great to see a modern FPS game that runs on aging hardware - again something which you have the Quake III engine to thank for. On my test system, a 1.5GHz Athlon with a Geforce 4 Ti4600, the game ran in 1600x1200 with every graphical enhancement enabled and maintained an extremely respectable, smooth frame-rate - good news particularly for anyone with an older PC, or anyone who likes playing online (where a few frames per second can mean the difference between a bullet in your head, or the other chap's).