Call of Duty 2

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If you play enough WW2 theme shooters, you might just become a WW2 weaponary master. And that, partially, is why i am pretty addicted to WW2 shooters. Carbine, that 15 bullets ting ting ting all purpose rifile used as assault rifle and sniper rifle and machine gun rifle. "Ting ting ting" referring to its distinct mechincal sound while firing, as oppose to other explosive-like sound from other guns.

So why play Call of Duty 2?

This game is rather short comparing with Medal of Honor, Call of Duty 1 and Brothers in Arms. It takes about 15 hrs to finish, some disappointment here.

Shooter doesn't differ much from each other, you take a gun and shoot. In terms of playing the game, what Call of Duty 2 differ itself from CoD1 and MoH is its level designing. You don't deal with linear moving forward. You have the choice of flanking enemies and your enemies will do the same too. A particular North Africa mission did this to its fullest. First i was on board of a armoured vehicle, running away from and shooting at enemies. It took me touring the town. Then i need to crawl the town with my teammates taking down enemies one by one. The streets, the buildings, the multiple floors, the crates, everything makes this urban fight intense. i see few enemies holding a line behind crates, i run around buildings to their flank, i thought i had them nice and easy, i was killed by another group of enemies that flanked me. And this happened a few times. Of course, the game mechanics of flanking is not a new element to shooters, especially WW2. Brothers in Arms did that, extensively. CoD 2 is a ... watered down version of it. You cannot readily control your teammates unlike Brother in Arms.

Another added feature is smoke grenade. In previous WW2 shooters, when facing German fixed machine guns you can either snipe it, nade it or charge it. Now with the help of smoke grenade, another strategy is introduced. Not only with machine guns, you can use smoke grenade to help you advancing on a well defended line.

Sad to say its ending is disappointing too, anti climatic to some extend. CoD1 (or Medal of Honor, i forget which) ended with the Russion storming the city hall of Berlin and planning a Soviet flag on the top. With the appropiate background music, that is climatic. Last mission of CoD2 is just a routine secure the town run. You don't have your waves of attack or run aganist time or even flag stabbing on top of building intensity.

Since Half life 2, movable barrels and crates seems .... default to me. But that is not the case in CoD2. You can through a grenade at a bunch of crates and barrels and they will stand still there immobile as mountain after explosive. That means you can hide behind a wooden crate from an grenade, no problem, no damage.

Speaking of damage. The game uses another kind of mecahnism to deal with health points. You don't have any health points displayed. You don't get any medical supply at all throughout the game. Everytime you have taken serious damage, your heart will start pounding louder and see vision blurred. You need to run away from the bullets to a safe place until these syndromes cooled down. And you are fresh new after that. However, grenade will kill you instantly. There will be a nade inicator in the middle of the screen when you are close to a explosing nade. Run like hell when you see it.

The game takes you to North Africa and there is a part where you need to charge your Sherman aganist German panzers. Yes, charge. Hold and from the formation with your mates, run straight across the desert to those panzers. What to do when your tanks do not have range of your enemies tanks? As of the biggest problem with CoD2, it is short. The whole going to the place and charging thing takes more time than the actual fighting itself.

You do need a better graphic card to run the game. i had Radeon 9800 before, 680x480 with everything off or low still runs at one frame to one frame speed. Its human texture is pretty impressive. First, Germans now comes in all sizes, fat and small. You can also see all the misc. equipments a soldier has all over its body. Pay attention to "crouching shoe", the bended foot/shoe of a soldier when he is crouching to see the games detailness towards human texture.

Overall it is a good game for WW2 shooters addicts like me. Since WW2 shooters is gradually phasing out, this might just be the last one you wouldn't want to miss.

My system specs.
Operating System: Windows XP Home Edition (5.1, Build 2600) Service Pack 2
Processor: AMD Athlon(tm) 64 Processor 3800+ , ~2.5GHz
Memory: 1024MB RAM
DirectX Version: DirectX 9.0c
Display chip type: ATI RADEON X850 PRO AGP 256mb
Sound Devices: Realtek AC97 Audio


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[ February 19, 2006, 01:58: Message edited by: Taluntain ]

 

Very good game. The El Alamein level is particularly intense. I just wish they'd included a German campaign for once.

 

I'm pretty confident it took me less time to beat Call of Duty. In fact, I believe it took about as much time as Max Payne did (i.e. ~8 hours). So that's a doubling in length, if accurate.

 

Pretty nice game although the lack of health status is very strange.