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The Call of Duty franchise invades consoles. Already a hit on the PC, Call of Duty and its United Offensive expansion pack have earned much critical acclaim for their intense single-player mode and more than adequate multiplayer modes. Finest Hour isn’t a port of the PC game, but rather a whole new game developed by newcomer developer Spark Unlimited. The end result is that while the game is a proficient shooter, it falls a few notches short of [original Call of Duty developer] Infinity Ward’s brilliance.
As is the case with the Call of Duty games, Finest Hour is made up of three campaigns – one for the Americans, British and Russians – and each of these takes you to different locations, as part of the campaign that you are currently participating in. You’ll visit Western Germany as the Americans try to invade, or perhaps you’ll be more interested in recuperating Stalingrad from the Germans as the Russians. The game includes a number of mission types, some which throw you in control of tank, or a sniper rifle sequence but largely you’ll be taking down enemy forces as a soldier using a variety of authentic, era-specific weaponry. The Call of Duty series has succeeded because of its scripted events and their ability to truly throw you into the war; Finest Hour accurately recreates this feeling thanks to all of the scripted events which propel the missions forward. As expected, war isn’t fought by a super soldier, so you’ll find alongside many AI-controlled characters along the way.
Unfortunately, some strange design choices at Spark Unlimited complicated the game a bit more than was necessary. The game’s complex animation system sometimes hurts you. When enemies are hit, they react to the fire (often in an exaggerated and accidentally humorous) manner but they have similar animations when they begin to die. This makes it a touch difficult to know when they are actually dead or simply reacting, causing you to waste more ammo than is necessary. Furthermore, the quick-save system found in the PC version was obviously removed, but the developers don’t compensate this with more checkpoints. You’ll often only find one per level, causing much retracting should you make a game-ending error. Thankfully, the single-player is otherwise developed well enough to withstand these annoyances.
Unfortunately, the Gamecube version of the game does not include any online multiplayer support. Spark Unlimited did not balance this exclusion with any multiplayer split-screen modes or even a multiplayer co-op campaign.
Visually, the Call of Duty engine is evenhanded. The character models are reasonable and animate well, although a bit exaggerated at times. The environments are large and look great for the most part, although a few textures lack the detail that the series is otherwise known for. The particle effects present when something blows up are quite gratifying, as well. The game does keep many scripted actions going at once to give the true atmosphere of war, although this causes slowdown here and there.
The audio performs pretty well, also. The orchestrated soundtrack adds appropriate amounts of drama to the game. The sound effects are practical, although the weapons sound a bit subdued at times. There are a few voice overs heard in the game, but they don’t make up a significant portion of the game.
Call of Duty: Finest Hour is a proficient shooter that will surely please fans of the PC-based Call of Duty games. The game’s single-player campaign is enjoyable despite some questionable design choices. That said, while Finest Hour is always good and often times great, it never quite reaches excellence. -- Jose Liz, PGNx Media
---- Nov 22, 2004
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