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One of the most impressive games of the year becomes one of the Xbox 360’s shining stars. The original Call of Duty managed to succeed in a saturated market due to its outright brilliance. The combination of stellar gameplay and a remarkable presentation proved to be a winning grouping since both critics and gamers showed their support. Call of Duty 2 improves on these aspects providing an even more thorough gameplay experience. It doesn’t revolutionize the genre but it is a damn fine first person shooter.
Call of Duty’s campaign is comprised of 10 missions that let you play as various soldiers in the war. You’ll start off fighting the Germans in Stalingrad and Moscow as Russians before moving on to joining the British as they partake in battle in North Africa and France, among other locales. You’ll finally be taken back to Europe where you play as an American soldier. Instead of taking you to the familiar D-Day locations, the game throws you into some mountains, making it even more visceral. All of the missions do a good job of placing you in new, interesting situations that always keep you on your feet. A number of the missions require some intelligent solutions like taking a smoke grenade and placing it in front of a machine gun to distort its shooting or hiding from snipers. You won’t accomplish all of these in 10 straight missions since each of them is divided in a few stages, but you’ll need about 10 hours to get through the game.
Like before, the game encourages you to play well with your team. You are always accompanied by many soldiers though you’ll be confronted by an equally large number of opposing soldiers. The AI is pretty intelligent, taking cover and helping each other take out the opposition. They’re also quite aggressive, often taking the initiative if you don’t do anything. The game does an amazing job of making you feel like you’re part of a massive war. Countless soldiers of both sides will die as you go through the missions but there will always be more arriving and you’ll see planes flying above you or ships engaging in war from the docks. These soldiers come in very calculated numbers so you never feel that the game is simply throwing these at you from a random respawn point.
The core gameplay of Call of Duty 2 should be very familiar to fans of the previous game. That said, Infinity Ward did make some improvements to the core gameplay engine. The game no longer exclusively uses health kits. Instead, there is a dynamic, regenerative health system in place. As you get hit, the screen starts to turn red, indicating that you’ve been hit and need to get some cover and take it easy. If you don’t follow the visual cues, you’ll eventually die. Dying, however, is more of a matter of stubbornness than the game’s fault since you’ll have ample opportunity to hide behind your cover while your health gets better. That said, dying isn’t really penalized since the game autosaves quite a bit and you’ll go back to that autosave quickly when you die.
Call of Duty 2 features a robust Xbox Live mode. The game includes the expected deathmatch, team deatchmatch, capture the flag, and search and destroy from the previous game. The game also includes headquarter, in which players earn points by setting up headquarters in one of two selected areas on the map. The opposing team needs to destroy this headquarter and they’re assisted by the fact that the defending team cannot respawn while they defend a headquarter. When the team loses the headquarter, the game switches it up and makes another area of the map the possible headquarter area. All in all, it’s one of the more frantic and fun multiplayer modes that Call of Duty 2 offers. Aside from the Xbox Live play, the game includes support for offline multiplayer for up to four players.
Call of Duty 2’s visuals deserved to be called next-generation. The game moves at a very good pace and makes you really feel you’re part of a bigger war. The textures aren’t as sharp as one would hope for, but thankfully, they’re placed on excellently modeled vehicles and characters. The characters look great and animate authentically, furthering the sense of the realism that the game has. The different environments are incredibly detailed which only serves to help the authenticity of the game. The particle and smoke effects are amazing, particularly the smoke effect that the smoke grenades leave. All of the missions are introduced with footage from the Military Channel. The documentary-esque recounting helps set the historical setting that the game works to achieve. The visuals of the Xbox 360 easily match those of a high-end PC, especially in 720p or 1080i, though the game also looks great in 480p. Those on an old tube will lose a lot of the crisp details and sharp textures but the game is still good, compared to other games running in the same resolution.
The game’s audio outrivals nearly everything else available. The background music is extremely powerful and authoritative, commanding your attention and making you believe that your actions have a greater motive. The sound effects are also incredible. All of the different effects from explosions to gunshots are simply amazing. The dialogue is very well written, and heard with emotion that only helps make the game even more exciting than it already is.
Call of Duty 2 had very lofty aspirations to meet as the second game in the acclaimed series. The game certainly hits all of the bullet points and goes above and beyond each one. Infinity Ward took the bar, threw it up, and jumped over it when it was still in the air. The game, developed at the same time as the PC version, matches that version in nearly every department for those with high-end PCs and excels it for everyone else. Call of Duty 2 is definitely one of the most impressive – visually and otherwise – Xbox 360 launch titles.
Adam Nunez & -- Jose Liz, PGNx Media
---- Nov 25, 2005
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