Call of Duty 2
review by Head Cheeze

Call of Duty was universally hailed as one of the best games of 2004, and one of the greatest war games of all time. When you played the COD, it was like finding yourself in a sweeping epic war film, with massive battles, heaps of atmosphere, and a very genuine sense of astonishment that all of this could be packed into a simple video game. It’s a hard act to follow, let alone improve upon, which is what Infinity Ward hopes to do with the highly anticipated sequel, Call of Duty 2.

Just as in the original, Call of Duty 2 offers up three different campaigns, offering players a chance to see the war from three different perspectives. The first several missions are played as a Russian soldier, against the frigid background of the Russian front. It’s with these levels that COD 2 really shines, as it really conveys a sense of the desperate nature of this particular theater of war. The level of detail here is amazing, with one level in particular- a blown-out section of downtown Stalingrad-giving me a case of the “holy shits!”. Here, we find ourselves scurrying through alleyways and basements, over rubble and debris, and engaging the enemy in familiar places (like a looted department store) that seem totally alien in context.

In the British campaign, we are taken to the African desert to foil the plans of Rommell. As a member of the armoured division, we alternate between battles on foot, and some uninspired tank battles that seemed far too easy (even at the hardest setting) and went on for far too long. This campaign also lacks the visual punch of the Russian and American levels, but, then again, there’s only so much you can do with sand. There are still a couple of gems in this campaign, however, including a great moment where you and your squad mates must use tanks for cover as you make your way along a German entrenchment. There’s also a very exciting raid on a shipping port that sends us down the claustrophobic streets and alleyways of a North African town where Germans seem to be hiding in every nook and cranny.

The American missions offer up yet another take on D-Day, with a truly epic (and infuriatingly difficult) landing at Normandy. This level offers up the game’s biggest “gee-whiz” moment as rush the shore with literally thousands of troops around you, as the earth explodes around your feet. Water splashes, dust clouds abound, and rocking explosions have your ears ringing like church bells by the time you reach the cliffs at Pointe du Hoc. After that, it’s a fairly standard round of village-to-village take and hold missions that, after a fashion, get a little old.

While Call of Duty 2 is certainly one of the best first person shooters of the year, it lacks the sheer sense of scope and originality of the first game. Many missions seemed to be of the run and gun variety, loosely held together by flimsy plot points and annoying objectives (fix the telephone wire/take out the flak guns/play whack-a-mole with the snipers in the building across the way). However, it should be noted that there are more missions here than in the original, even if they are pretty much the same thing over and over. When COD 2 does take us outside of the run and gun box, we find ourselves driving around the aforementioned British tanks, or manning a gun and picking off German planes with laughable results. This is stuff that feels recycled and redundant, especially in light of all of the multiplayer games out there that offer the complete freedom to use vehicles for more than just glorified target practice.

Oh, and speaking of multiplayer, COD 2 suffers in that respect, too, with crappy “deathmatch” and “capture the flag” modes that are more suited to Quake than a WW2 game. I found myself in and out of a few servers within minutes, and quickly going back to Battlefield 2 and America’s Army; two games that do multiplayer war right. Another thing that I found really odd was the fact that COD 2 shipped with the exact same multiplayer maps as the original game. Sure, there’s a bit of a graphical improvement, but why Infinity Ward opted to do this is beyond me, and makes me think that this game was either rushed out to street alongside of its X-Box 360 counterpart, or that they are content to leaving the multiplayer quotient up to the modding community.

While COD 2 looks fantastic, it comes at a price, and that price is hefty system specs. If you are running anything less than an AMD 2800 or P4 2.4 , with at least a gig of ram and a truly kick ass video card (think GeForce 6600/Radeon X800 and above), then forget about getting this thing to even run on your machine. I’m running with nearly double the “minimum system requirements” and I found myself having to run the game at low-ish “default” settings. A patch is en-route, so I hear, and will supposedly address some issues that make this game such a resource hog, but, until then, steer clear unless you’ve got the most cutting edge of equipment in your box.

It may sound like I’m being hard on Call of Duty 2, but it’s only because the first game set the benchmark so high that it’s almost impossible not to be at least mildly disappointed in this sequel. This is still a fantastic single player experience (the jury is out on multiplayer until the mod community gets to work), and one that will reward gamers with hours of white knuckle warfare.