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Uniformly fun... strange

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 8 / 8
Date: December 11, 2003
Author: Amazon User

I am not sure if you can ever get enough of good games, but the first person shooter market seems to be perilously close to becoming oversaturated. With so many excellent titles in so short a time, it could be easy to become desensitized to a certain genre of game. Fortunately, Call of Duty (hereafter COD) is a superb World War II shooter which falls short of being a classic only because of its extreme brevity. When most of the team that created the original Medal of Honor bolted 2015 to form Infinity Studios, most gamers could be sure of two things: the Medal of Honor series would suffer, and Infinity Ward would probably be creating a first person shooter very soon. In many ways, COD bears a striking resemblance to Medal of Honor but manages to improve on an already wildly successful formula in almost every way.

COD features three campaigns: one American, one British, and one Russian. Most missions consist of two or three smaller levels, none of which take more than about a half hour to play through. The American campaign begins with Pathfinder units of the 101st Airborne parachuting behind enemy lines to place beacons for the massive airborne landing of June 3, 1942, and ends with a frantic battle through the snow draped vista of the Ardennes. The British campaign starts with a daring raid on a prisoner of war complex and works its way through the capture and defense of Pegasus Bridge. The Russian campaign begins with the Siege of Stalingrad and ends with the Siege of Berlin. COD does an excellent job of providing new locations and different, interesting missions to play through, but unfortunately the campaigns are not really linked together in any discernable way. Finish with the US campaign and you will be abruptly thrust into the British campaign. While the overall story is fairly self explanatory considering the subject matter, the mission briefings are sparse and uninteresting, and fail to give the player the feeling that he is truly an important piece, no matter how small, in a far grander plan.

Most levels in COD are fairly standard for war-based shooters. You will attack enemy outposts and buildings, defend positions, rescue and escort prisoners, destroy tanks and artillery, defend locations with fixed weapons, and even go through the obligatory vehicular chase mission. The levels are almost all fun and well designed, but they are extremely limited in scope. Most of the levels are fairly small, and there is really only one way to make your way through the level. The fact that there is a compass in the upper left hand side of the screen that gives the direction of your next objective makes the game feel even more restricted, and even when the level design feels inspired, COD feels like it plays on rails. Still, many of the levels are so well constructed that you will ignore the fact that you are being funneled through them while you admire your surroundings. Small towns in France ravaged by bombs and constant combat look like surreal ghost towns. Fires rage through bombed-out buildings, airplanes roar by overhead as artillery thumps through the sky, and the drab grays and browns of the town form a stark contrast with the rolling hills and grass, windmills and dead cows that surround the village.

In other levels you will trudge through the strangely silent snow-covered forest of the Ardennes, where Germans in winter camouflage will suddenly emerge to shatter the illusion of peace that the snow seems to create. You will run through enemy prisoner of war camps and even the devastated city of Stalingrad, a brilliantly recreated set of levels that is so hopeless, desolate, and damaged that you wonder just how the Russians made it though the war, much less managed to rebuild.

Gameplay itself is mostly fast, visceral, and violent. One of the most hyped features of COD is that you will fight with a squad for almost the entire game. The squad based gameplay is a good addition and the logical extension of the one-man-wins-the-war ideal of the Medal of Honor series. Unfortunately, unlike Hidden and Dangerous 2, another WWII shooter that got squad based combat just about right, COD fails to make your squad feel like an important part of the game. Members of your unit will die; in fact they will die at a fairly high rate. In the Russian campaign you should not expect to have many comrades that survive with you for more than a few minutes, and in the early missions of the American campaign assaulting Normandy your unit will suffer enormous attrition. While this stays true to the historical reality, it doesn't make for the most engaging gameplay. Almost none of your squadmates have any personality at all (with one notable exception in each of the campaigns), and they have no background and personal information that might make the player relate or grow attached to them. You also have no real control of your squad, an unfortunate omission that effectively prevents the player from using the squad based gameplay to actually affect your mission plan or tactics.

Thankfully the squad AI is uniformly good. I was rarely blocked or shot by my men, who followed me blindly even into the most harrowing of situations. My men managed to fire their guns, and every once in a while actually managed to hit something. While there is an enormous amount of room for improvement available in the inevitable sequel, having squadmates does make the game feel more real and creates a different atmosphere. When your men are dropping all around you as German MG42's, grenades, and small arms fire blanket the small field you are trying to make your way across, you begin to feel like you are apart of the most violent and bloody war mankind has ever waged.

The missions are also uniformly fun. There is a tremendous feeling of danger when you are assaulting fixed gun positions, capturing a village building by building-and then defending every square yard of that ground you just paid so dearly for. The levels are so well-crafted that despite their linearity you will feel more like you are playing through an interactive war movie than any shooter yet released. One of the most amazing features of COD is the effect when a grenade or artillery round explodes near you. The sound immediately changes to a high-pitched whine, the screen grows blurry, and your player stumbles forward as he recovers. After several seconds of this effect you suddenly return to reality with a loud whoosh, the muffled sounds of the battlefield immediately becoming frighteningly loud and your vision returning to normal. It is one of the single most atmospheric effects I have ever had the pleasure of experiencing in a game.

Not a bad game, not a great FPS

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 16 / 24
Date: December 07, 2003
Author: Amazon User

The first thing I noticed about Call of Duty when I played the demo was the stunning graphics and effects. This game has some of the best andmost realistic graphics out there. And the sound quality is amazing. With surround sound, it really sounds like you're in the middle of WWII. And the graphics are amazing, especially during the latter part ofthe game when you're playing as a Russian officer. Some of the scenes that you're involved in seem more cinematic and like something you'd expect from a cut scene than actual gameplay. By the final mission, the music and effects got me so pumped up that I was ready to go out and enlist.

That being said, actual gameplay isn't that great. If you're expecting a good First Person Shooter, I was a little dissapointed. The game pretty much amounts to the same thing over and over: finding enemies and shooting them. I noticed that there's a srategy guide available for this game. For the life of me, I don't know why, seeing as how there's no real strategy involved. The AI also isn't very well done. Every enemy can be shot easily if you simply use a sniper rifle and stay a little bit out of site. The aiming system and HUD isn't that great either. I haven't tried multiplayer, but wouldn't be too interested in it given the gameplay.

For the most part, this is a great game to see how advanced graphics and computer games have come, and one I'd definately show off to my non gameplaying friends. But once the game was done, I had no real interest of re-visiting it.

Multiplayer review

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 15 / 22
Date: January 10, 2004
Author: Amazon User

What hasn't been said about Call of Duty's single player? It is undoubtedly one of the greatest PC gaming experiences I have ever had, but this review deals solely with the multiplayer, which I have found to be one of the most frustrating, aggravating, and assinine experiences. It's obvious that very little thought or consideration went into the design of the multiplayer.

First of all, it doesn't matter what style of play you prefer, if you want to do well in CoD multiplayer, then you must be a sniper. All weapons, except possibly the submachinegun, crumble beneath the awesome might of The Sniper Rifle. The Sniper Rifle that is perfectly accurate with no bullet drop. The Sniper Rifle that has slow, almost imperceptible scope drift, even when standing up, and has a scope as steady as a rock when crouched or prone. The Sniper Rifle whose bullets are magically more powerful than other guns that fire the same round. The Sniper Rifle that makes sniping as easy as clicking on stuff in Windows. If you can point and click, then you too can be The Sniper.

Every map, save for the indoor ones or Carentan, quickly dissolves in a pixel-hunting Sniper Fest. You will experience many hours of sheer bliss hiding behind a rock, waiting for the enemy snipers to move a few pixels of their bodies out from behind their rock so you can dispatch them with a click of the mouse, or take great delight in picking off the foolish morons who did not choose The Sniper Rifle. Forget about such things as "going prone" or "managing breathing," in Call of Duty multiplayer, Sniper Rifles are like deathrays. No matter how much you bunny-hop or try to sidestep, you will get picked off from a distance by an unseen foe with frustrating regularity. In fact, there's no real reason to use the unscoped rifles or even the light machine guns, as you can just can run into the open, zoom in, pick off the enemy with childish ease, and then retreat behind cover and snipe some more. In this game, you'll get sniped with such frequency that you'll wonder if everyone is secretly using an aimbot.

On maps where snipers are less common, if you wish to do well, then you must choose The Submachinegun. It too, like The Sniper Rifle, is magic, as it can easily be fired while both running and hopping. Don't bother using the sights, just spray and pray and you'll probably get a random headshot that kills your oppponent instantly. Particularly offensive is the Russian PPSh, which possesses and extremely high rate of fire and a huge magazine, yet those who carry it move faster than those with any other weapon! There are other irritations as well, from grenades that are so weak as to make them utterly useless, to the fact that ammo is measured by rounds remaining instead of magazines remaing, which combined with the ridiculously fast reload times makes it extremely easy to simply spew rounds at your enemy with no regard to ammo conservation or accuracy. This isn't World War II, this is Quake with slightly less advanced weapons. When a player can get a kill/death score of 62/2 by simply sniping all day long, something's wrong. If you're thinking of buying CoD for multiplayer alone, then forget about it.

The Definitive WW2 FPS

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 7 / 7
Date: November 07, 2003
Author: Amazon User

If you're looking for a far more rewarding and enjoyable experience than that "other single player WWII game", Medal of Honor, has to offer, Call of Duty is for you.

Three different "campaigns" await you, plus a bonus campaign which ties in the three different story lines. The first American campaign follows the popular Band of Brothers HBO miniseries, and includes parachuting into France on D-Day, being lost, and eventually assembling a makeshift crew to take down German AA guns. You'll also be a passenger in a roller coaster-like car ride, leaning out the window while the driver barrels around the countryside. The British campaign has you as a member of the special forces, sabotaging installations and escaping through car chases, rampaging on a german Battleship, and devastating an airfield.

My favorite, the Soviet campaign, lets you live through those harrowing and gruesome first 20 minutes of the "Enemy of the Gates" movie (newly recruited Soviet soldiers forced at gunpoint to become machinegun fodder during the battle of Stalingrad, trying to retake the city by numbers instead of any sort of strategy). Best experience was watching helplessly as your fellow soliders charged through the city ruins, only to be cut down by fortified German machinegunners... and gives you a thrill to find that perfect sniper spot and plug those gunners in the head. Eventually it lets you become an expert sniper and even a tank driver.

The single player experience is breathtaking, especially in EAX 3.0 and headphones. Graphics are gorgeous, sound effects are amazing, gameplay is a bit linear, but far less linear than the MOH series. Gone are those infuritating and pointlessly time consuming maze puzzles, the mine-maze puzzles, and sniper-maze puzzles. You have squad mates which you don't control, but help out and give you incentive to keep them alive. There are many weapons, different submachine guns, different rifles, etc. However, some of the more interesting weapons in the game are under utilized and only show up in a handful of scenarios, such as the BAR, MP44, M1, and Sten gun. More often than not you'll find yourself only needing a scoped rifle and German-captured MP40. There is no stealth option in any of the scenarios and I never once needed the provided melee attack.

My only complaint is the length of the game. At the medium difficulty level, it should only take an average FPS veteran five or six hours to complete it all. It was an awesome experience but left me wanting more.

The Best Shooter Yet

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 7 / 7
Date: February 20, 2004
Author: Amazon User

First, I'd like to say that I never liked Medal of Honor. I never felt engaged in it, as neither did my friends. So, do not feel like if you have not played or liked MOH, then you will not like Call of Duty.

There are two very different sides of this game: Single Player and Multiplayer. Single player is truly incredible. It does not feel like your in a movie; it feels like your in a battle that will soon be a movie. It takes you through missions that make your blood filled with adrenaline. It makes you turn your volume up to full blast to hear the gunshots in the distance, and to be scared as hell when someone shoots at you. It is completely mind blowing.

Now, the Multiplayer is different. I can guarentee you that you will love Single Player, but Multiplayer is a different ball-game. You have to be good to enjoy Multiplayer... and I mean really good. And you cannot aquire the skills through Single Player. Therefore, you must go through a stage of being terrible and getting your butt kicked by 10-year-olds. And I'm not joking. I beat Easy fairly easily in SP, but I got killed in MP.

However, once you get good, a whole bunch of things start to happen. Clans come into the picture. You start owning everything. I went back to play Single player on the hardest level possible, and I went through it without dying once. No loading, no anything.

The game has provied countless hours of fun for my friends and I. I just thought that I wouldn't be doing the game liberty without writing this review.

Easily one of the best video games ever....

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 7 / 7
Date: December 21, 2004
Author: Amazon User

I've been an avid gamer since back in the mid '80's when I would play at the arcade or my old NES. While I don't do console anymore, I'm a military/CT/Covert Ops game enthusiast. I've played the Clancy games (Ghost Recon, R6, etc.) and everything from Medal of Honor to flight simulators.
Playing Call of Duty (hereafter, "CoD") was an amazing experience. The graphics are outstanding, the combat is highly realistic, and completing the game gives you a tremendous sense of accomplishment. If you're looking for brainless gorefests, try Doom. If you want a realistic, somewhat historically accurate, thinking man's action game, CoD is for you. The combat is brutally real - Germans are shooting at you, machineguns are tearing up your buddies, mortar and artillery rounds are exploding to your right and left, your squad leader is yelling commands - a Panzer bursts out of a nearby wall and takes aim at you. You come to care for and respect your buddies, and you find yourself not wanting to let them down.
You also get to participate in historical campaigns. If you ever wanted to know what it was like to be a Russian soldier fighting in the suicidal battle for Stalingrad (as in the movie "Enemy at the Gates"), you can experience it first hand. You also play as an American 101st Airborne Pathfinder at D-Day, and a British 6th Airborne at the battle for Pegasus bridge.
Give this game a try. You won't be sorry.

I played a demo and I know this is the best war game ever!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 23 / 42
Date: October 19, 2003
Author: Amazon User

I only played a demo and I got blown out of my seat!Great graphics, great sound, great A.I., and it's just going to get better with the full game.This is going to make people forget about Halo, Splinter Cell, Medal of Honor, and all those other shooting games. PC Gamer said that Call of Duty had "Movie-quality intensity; thrilling mix of action and scripted sequences." However PC Gamer also said taht COD had "Occasional shooting and clipping glitches; A.I. name bugs; tedious commando missions." However, a few problems don't really hurt this otherwise solid game. This is the best shooter that the PC has ever got. But don't just read this review.I can't put how awesome this game is in this space. Download the demo off the Call of Duty website or December 2003 issue of PC Gamer (which is the latest issue as of this review.) When you play the demo, clean up your drool and pre-order this game that PC Gamer gave a 93%(out of 100 of course) and an editors' choice. You will be doing yourself a BIG favor. You will thank yourself for buying it.The game hasn't came out yet, but it already looks good, and you can trust what I'm saying about this.

Absolutely UNBELIEVABLE - Welcome to D-DAY!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 6 / 6
Date: December 07, 2003
Author: Amazon User

If you like war games - this is it! Compared to games like Medal of Honor, Battlefield 1942, etc., this game takes it. It is as photo-realistic as Medal of Honor with the added realism of "squad tactics" that are fantastic. I was literally freaked out by the realism of the D-Day invasion! Blood and guts everywhere... planes crashing into buildings... flak flying up into the clouds, mortars, body-parts flying everywhere... it was OVERLOAD! But that is what war is...

The Single-Player mode is the best... the game is worth it for that alone. If you don't like SP mode - then don't buy this game.. it's not a "quake" run and gun - you have to work with your squad and pay attention... or die...

The Multi-player mode I nickname "Call to Quake." It is basicaly like a huge doom server - with about as much fun... it becomes too chaotic with guys running all over like maniacs on steroids "running and gunning" everyone down... still, the MP is pretty exciting....

This game is worth the 50 bucks if you like War II games and are tired of MOH or BF1942...

Be a Hero!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 6 / 6
Date: January 30, 2005
Author: Amazon User

...But wait until you can buy this and the new United Offensive Expansion together. To be honest though if you really want to play the next best 1st person shooter to Half-Life 2 then get the expansion pack and this, but they should be out together soon enough.

This game can run on a 32mb graphics card meaning if you have a high-end 64mb module or a 128mb you are going to be in for a good time. I ran it on a 256mb and it was very good with the UO expansion was astonishing. Nearly anyone with a somewhat recent PC can play this 1st person shooter and I am sure it will leave most happy that they did. Was it better than Medal of Honour: Allied Assault, as we have heard? Yeah, it is, but not by much, a margin maybe, but still anything that can live up to MOHAA surely can't be missed and COD lives up to the hype.

The concept is the same as MOHAA except that there is more action, more high-octane moments, a different type of enemy AI. UO has a lot more going on in terms of what you can pilot and drive in the story, although not freely but as part of the story. The Both COD and UO game play certainly have the Cinematic intensity that it claims including various set pieces like the storming of the Reichstag. UO has more thrilling missions but this one has the original Enemy at the Gates opening. UO has an Enemy at the Gates finishing, a train bombing run, a lighthouse demolition, the Soviet offensive, all stunning to boot.

COD or OU iare not however HL2 graphics quality or anything close, but does offer a vast improvement over MOHAA, so in that respect is quite good, just nowhere near cutting edge. However COD:UO does have very convincing camera jitters and spectacular smoky explosions. So does COD but not as good quality. The textures let both games down a small bit but the environments and maps are genuinely war like all the way through and can not be faulted. The enemy AI and your own team AI can vary between very helpful and not so helpful but this depends on if you do your job or not. It is actually quite reliable. More so in UO - when your team take on an enemy the AI allows each to take multiple hits so that they eventually come into close combat and start hitting each other. This AI must be taken as is, even though slightly unrealistic, the game is not a war simulation but a 1st person war adventure and to be honest, does exactly what it says on the tin. So apart from the staged element, which actually ads to the game, it is more of an experience than a game you will turn to time and time again, however it is worth it for the experience of the single player mission alone.

I can not fault it much except to say that it is shorter than UO, a bit easier than UO, and UO is shorter than MOHAA. Weapons realism is not fantastic and the game was a little shorter than UO (this is a 1.5 day game span while UO had 3) but to be honest I am only cribbing. The pandemonium of war is all here in a spectacular fashion because the story is a winner as you play a mini version of BAND OF BROTHERS as part 1 and then a mini version of ENEMY AT GATES in part 2. So WOW! You even feel loss at the end.

However when a new war simulation like OPERATION FLASHPOINT comes out for high-end cards I know we will have the true war winner. Please bring on the real war simulator!

Pros:
- Play the two films mentioned above.
- Best new war game and 2nd best 1st person shooter.
- Awesome war atmosphere.
- Smoky explosions.
- Can run on a 32mb card!
- COD + UO makes for a great experience.

Cons:
- 1.5 day lifespan for COD and a 3 day lifespan for UO.
- Weapons are not so realistic.
- Graphics are not 128mb worthy.
- We really need a new Operation Flashpoint with map editor!

Great Idea but only Fair Execution

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 9 / 12
Date: December 04, 2003
Author: Amazon User

I loved MOHAA and I played the Spearhead expansion. Both of these games were excellent and I had fun. At times they were frustratingly difficult and I would yell and scream and turn the game off for a while because some levels were so hard. COD is an impressive game. The graphics and sound are ear and eye-popping. But I do not recommend going out and plunking down $45+ for this game. Here's why. The game is too heavily scripted. The levels I have played force you to travel along a preset path with pre-determined enemies and obsticals. This is like MOHAA but more restrictive. There are no doors to open, no alternate approaches and nothing like the open forest levels in MOHAA. I also can't stand how your buddys never die until they are scripted to die. I was conditioned by MOHAA to protect my squad because they made it easier for me to accomplish my mission and because in some missions their death would end the mission. You could keep an eye on them and tell how bad they were hurting by how they walked or if they had their helmet on. Sometimes they would beat you to the first aid and take it themselves to improve their health. In COD I watched in awe as my entire squad passed in front of a Mark IV tank as they passed in front the machinegun opened up and shot all of them. They grunted with the hits and kept walking 10 feet from the tank. That's pretty stupid. I soon learned to ignore my squad in COD. If they helped great if they died it was there time to go and nothing I did or didn't do made any difference. So all this talk about "teamwork" and being "part of a platoon" is only true in that other guys are fighting around you and shooting at the same things you are. Not very dynamic. It is still a good and fun game. It's just too easy and two narrowly constructed.

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