Call of Duty 2

So, try to imagine this situation. The year is 1944. You’re 20 years old and have been training for the invasion of Fortress Europe for almost two years. And the duty your battalion gets assigned? Storming the beaches of Normandy at a small section of cliffs known as Pointe du Hoc, where your mission is to climb up those cliffs and take out the coastal batteries that could wreak havoc on Allied forces landing on Omaha and Utah beach. Oh, did we mention that the cliffs are heavily defended and you’ll be completely exposed to enemy fire? And that there stands a good chance that about eighty percent of your team are going to be wounded or killed? Sounds great! By the way, you’ll have to hold that position from expected massive German counterattack as well until other Allied troops can link up to you. Are you up to the task?

Activision and game developer Infinity Ward are back with Call of Duty 2, a follow-up to their critically acclaimed World War II epic. Staying with their formula of playing as a different soldier in three different Allied campaigns, CoD 2 takes you back to some earlier battles as well as to some lesser known but pivotal battles during the conflict.

You start off the game playing as the Soviets. The first mission is a training mission designed to get you familiar with the controls and gameplay, with instructions coming from your crusty ole Commissar. You’ll then face off against the Nazi invasion of The Motherland during the Winter of 1942 at Stalingrad, where the fighting is vicious, house to house/room to room, urban combat. This epic struggle was important as it showed Hitler’s flawed strategy of waging a war on two fronts in Europe, costing Germany hundreds of thousands of lives and millions of dead Russian civilians. Some of the missions that you’ll play will require you to repair broken communication wires, place sticky bombs on German tanks, and defend Stalingrad’s City Hall with a sniper rifle. Just keep this in mind — Stalin always said it was more dangerous to retreat then advance in the Soviet Army, because your friendly neighborhood Commissar would be more than happy to put a bullet in you for giving any ground to the enemy.

As the British, you’ll play as part of General Montgomery’s Desert Rats, pitted against Field Marshall Rommel’s vaunted Afrika Korps. These battles will take you through sweeping desert battles, frantic urban shoot outs in small North African towns, and going toe-to-toe against the Nazi’s feared Panzers in your own Crusader tank at the Battle of El Alamein (El Alamein, for those of you that don’t know, is a pivotal battle at the beginning of World War II that, with the Americans coming from the West and the British from the East, allowed the Allies to force the Nazis out of North Africa, secure the Mediterranean, and launch the campaign against the Axis in the Invasion of Sicily. -PK). Finally, you’ll slug it out in the hedgerows of Normandy for The Battle of Caen.

In the American campaign you’ll get a chance to relive the aforementioned D-Day landing at Pointe du Hoc as part of the 2nd Ranger Battalion. As if scripted straight out of a Spielberg movie, you’ll witness the horror as dozens of GIs are gunned down from the cliff tops as they make their way up to destroy the coastal batteries shelling the Allies on the other beaches. Once there, you’ll have to defend Pointe du Hoc from the counterattack, then move inland to secure and hold a French village. Later, you’ll take on Hill 400 near the town of Bergstein, Germany, then hold it. With all of the movies made recently, Hill 400 is probably one of the least known but equally important battles historically during World War II. Hill 400, called that because it was 400 meters high, was a key strategic point for the Germans, who could observe Allied troop movements throughout the region and call down deadly artillery fire upon them. The region, called the Huertgen Forest, was a heavily fortified network of bunkers, pillboxes, and machine gun nests, and part of Germany’s defensive Siegfried Line. On the early morning of December 7, 1944, three companies from the 2nd Ranger Battalion charged across an open field against and up the heavily defended hill and took it. They then had to withstand a massive counterattack, in which some accounts said that the Rangers were outnumbered almost ten to one. And when you have to defend the hill, CoD 2 captures that desperate moment perfectly. You’ll then finally cross the Rhine into the heart of Germany.

Now that I’ve caught you up on your world history, let’s talk about what’s changed in CoD 2. First, there’s no health meter on the screen. When you get hit you’ll see red damage indicates on your screen, but don’t think you can take a lot of hits. You’ll have to really listen during gameplay to know when you’re low on health. First, you’ll begin breathing heavily, then you’ll hear heart palpitations, then your vision will start to blur. If you don’t take cover and rest for a moment, the next hit you take will finish you off. This is an interesting take on the health system and helps you focus on playing the game and surviving rather than hunting for medical kits and getting killed in the process. Don’t worry, there’s plenty of progress points that automatically save during the game. Also, they’ve added a grenade threat indicator which shows you the general direction of where the grenade has landed. I have only two words of advice for you when you see this – take cover! If you are within the vicinity of the explosion, chances are it will kill you. Also new to the game is the use of smoke grenades. These will play a very vital part in many of your missions to conceal your movements, especially against those nasty MG-42 machine gun nests. Finally, you can now hold your breath when peering through the scope of your sniper rifle for greater stability.

Another feature added to the CoD 2 is called Battle Chatter. This is tied heavily into the AI of the NPCs in the game. During the intense gun battles you’ll be in, your allies will call out and indicate where enemies are dynamically, like “Jerry’s behind the barrels!” or “Krauts up on the rooftops!” or “Throw a smoke grenade!” This is an excellent new feature that helps you with your situation awareness and still allows you to concentrate on the firefight. The Nazis will also do the same, and the enemy AI is decent enough that they will attempt to flank you if you’re pinned down. At the harder levels, I can’t count how many times I took a bullet in the back from a wily German soldier.

Graphically there are some marked improvements from the previous title. The character models feature better animation and the facial expressions are superb. When you watch the NPC talk, their lips move like a real human being and sync properly with their speech. The textures on everything from the uniforms to the walls of buildings are very detailed and well done. But the biggest surprise is the use of smoke in the game. It looks genuinely real, especially when there are explosions or when you let off a smoke grenade. Having to run through a plume of smoke can become a disorienting experiencing in the middle of a gun battle and you could find yourself running straight into an enemy machine gun nest and a squad full of Nazis. Also, one of Infinity Ward’s great technical achievements from the previous CoD title was carried over, for CoD 2; the sound. From thunderous explosions from artillery shells to the crack of a rifle shot flying past your head, you’ll be ducking for cover if you have the benefit of 5.1 surround. The voice acting is also top notch. On my modestly powered machine, I didn’t experience any slowdowns, lost frames, or issues with my sound. I had just about every feature turned up to the maximum (A Pentium 4 3.0 GHz, 1 GB RAM, 6800 GT w/256MB, and Sound Blaster X-Fi if you were curious. -PK).

You can expect about 10 hours of gameplay on the single player campaign on the Normal difficulty setting. Crank it up to the harder ones and add a few hours to that number. But once you’ve completed the single player campaign, you can head into the entertaining multiplayer mode. The multiplayer modes boast your standard mix of mayhem, with Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, and Capture the Flag. Also in the mix is Search and Destroy, an objective based mode where you’ll have to complete or thwart each other’s mission, like blowing up a group of tanks or defusing the bombs, similar to Counterstrike. The other mode is Headquarters, where each side tries to establish a central base on the map. Once a side has established a foothold, the opposing team cannot respawn its players until the Headquarters has been neutralized. Kind of an online King of the Hill scenario.

I know many of you may be starting to get a little bored of the World War II genre, but if you’re a fan of the Call of Duty series you definitely need to pick this game up today. If you’ve never played the series before, you’ll be in for a real treat with the improvements over the previous title. And if you’re really a fan of World War II FPS games, you should pick up Call of Duty 2: Collector’s Edition. You’ll get the game install disc on a single DVD as opposed to several CD-ROMs, plus a Bonus DVD that features a historical account of the Pointe Du Hoc assault, behind the scenes features during game development, mission walkthroughs with the developers, and gallery art. If you spent all night camping out for an XBox 360, I heard that Call of Duty 2 on that system is also an excellent title. In any case, this title is worthy addition to your game library.