Straight Jacket Type Fun
Call of Duty Review
Let’s be sure we’re on the same page here. Do you like shooting Nazis? Of course, who doesn’t? If they took Pac-Man and made the ghosts Nazis and Pac-Man was George Patton you better believe I’d be going to the bank and getting as many rolls of quarters as possible. Nazis are the best bad guys to shoot. Ever. Forget aliens or robots or cacodemons. Nazis is where it’s at when it comes to bad guys. And to feed my blood lust (there is no better way to put it), Infinity Ward has released Call of Duty.
The first thing I’ve had to tell myself about Call of Duty is that it’s not Return to Castle Wolfenstein which is, to me, the epitome of what a multiplayer game should be. In Call of Duty there’s several things to get used to after having played RtCW for so long online. No classes? No stopwatch mode? No calling in of air strikes or venom cannons? Bah!
But hold on a second here. Don’t be throwing out the Nazis with the bath water just yet. Dig a little further into Infinity Ward’s entry in the crowded field of World War II shooters and you quickly see a highly polished single player shooter whose HUD interface and scenarios dealing with all the Allied forces in the war make it a fast paced single player fragfest which deftly toes the line between boring sniper frenzy and over the top Serious Sam hijinks.
Europe has no doors
There’s an oddity in the single player of Call of Duty that I haven’t seen in a shooter in quite some time. Either because the bombing of Europe was so intense or the Nazis just are trying to be helpful to get through these maps, there are either doorways with no doors or there are doors but they are jammed shut. I had read a while back about a story from World War II how the US was trying to train bats to drop small incendiary bombs over Japan. Maybe they were actually used in Europe. In which case they simply ignited doors which no one thought to replace.
I am personally not a big fan of such a system where you’re forced to go a certain path laid out by the programmers. Either let me go through the doors or don’t put them there.
Also, color me spoiled, but no secret areas? Every clichéd fiber in my being demands secret areas when dealing Nazis. Those slimy bastards are hiding something. Somewhere. We all know it.
But, like I said, these are minor inconveniences and can’t possibly overshadow the rest of this single player experience.
Single Player
The single player in Call of Duty gives you three parts: American, British, and Russian. The maps are played chronologically with you starting as a Pathfinder for the United States on the night before D-Day. You then switch over to the British where you take over a bridge in a similar fashion to what occurred in the movie “The Longest Day.” Finally there’s the Russian campaign which starts in Stalingrad and ends with you raising the flag above the German Reichstach.
The American and British campaigns consists of elements and scenarios that we’ve seen before in recent first person shooters. Capture bunkers, destroy fixed objectives, car chases, and sniper alleys. That’s not to say these are bad things however. Again the shooting Nazi element adds a certain satisfaction to it.
Now, what’s really the true grit of this single player is the Russian campaign. It far overshadows anything else in this game. It’s rarely done in shooters and there’s probably endless possibilities regarding the story and history of the Eastern Front.
True to history, you start as a peasant recruit and land at the banks of Stalingrad. After getting off the boat you start off with no weapon and are forced to be a runner drawing fire for snipers. If you’re lucky you finally find a weapon and proceed to team up with other elements who are doing human wave attacks against dug in Germans.
From there it’s building to building fighting which leads into the sewers of the city. As if that wasn’t enough for you, you eventually get into a T-34 tank to fill out the crew complement and you get to shoot enemy Tiger Tanks and run over infantry. Need I say more? Yes. One other thing. There’s one portion of the game where as the Russian you need to overrun an old apartment building. Getting to the building isn’t that bad but once you get next to it, it’s pretty much you and your group against the entire German Army. This is the most characters I’ve ever seen in a Quake 3 engine game at any one time. And all of them have a Viagra induced hard on for killing you. I can’t make this stuff up. If you kill the Germans, there’s four more coming after you. It’s like the developers were really angry with the game testers and so made this map as if to say, “We hate you! Oh and here’s some tanks to really make your day!” I’m really hoping that if an expansion is made they do more with the Russian front.
The campaigns are rather short as I was able to finish it in one weekend. Oddly enough, the mission groupings almost always end abruptly too. Is war like that? Probably so. You finish a mission and just sorta move on to the next one with little or no fanfare. As if the developers were uncertain what to do after finishing the five or six missions for each group. Again, to me at least, not a major issue.
Multiplayer
Multiplayer for Call of Duty is technically proficient but needs some polishing to be a truly enjoyable experience. First, there’s the issue of no Punkbuster support. Personally, I’m a big proponent of Punkbuster and what it brings to the table. Cheating sucks bag. If you need wallhacks and other garbage to try to play then go back to Counter-strike. Punkbuster doesn’t stop all of it but it does get a large percentage of them.
For Call of Duty you have standard modes such as team deathmatch, and every man for himself deathmatch. Also unique to this game is several new modes such as seek and destroy and objective, retrieval mode, and behind enemy lines which is quite different in that one team automatically stars out outnumbered and by killing Axis you gain points and if you’re Axis and kill an Allied you become Allied to get more points.
One game play issue I have with Call of Duty in multiplayer is how ineffective the grenades can be. Unlike in the Wolfenstein series, you can not hold the grenades till the last second meaning a smart player gets all the time in the world to move away from a grenade before it explodes.
Finally, there’s some server side administration issues that need to be addressed. Unique to this game from other Q3 based engines is a new sv_rotation variable which handles map rotation. However, the length of the string you give this variable is limited and so setting up a full rotation to try out all the maps is difficult.
Also on the server side, being able to control voting is important and there is only one variable for voting: off or on. It’d be much better to be able to turn off and on certain kinds of voting. For instance, turn off the voting for a certain map or game type but leave it on for kicking players. Perhaps this will be modded by the community once the kits are released but for now all of these things are a real downer for an admin such as myself (server is 65.247.172.55 - |R| CoD Server).
Now, I will say this for the multiplayer. This is the smoothest net code I’ve ever seen in action on a game. Lag is a non issue and everyone who gets onto my server is averaging less than 100 ping. I have never seen that in a Quake 3 based game and I for one am greatly pleased to see such efficiency.
Technical Issues
There are no significant technical issues with this game. In fact, I just want to espouse about the nifty graphics. Do this one thing for me. In the British campaign get on that big gun you’re ordered to fire. When you get a free moment, start shooting at troops. At close range. Watch the particle effects and how the character animation reacts to the nearby explosion.
Summary
I've been hoping for a bad game to review but this isn't it. Call of Duty is an excellent single player game.