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Friday, May 14, 2004
Call of DutyRelated categories • Reviews • Game Reviews
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- Genre: First-Person Shooter
- Format: DVD
- Developer: Infinity Ward
- Original Publisher: Activision
- Mac Publisher: Aspyr Media
- Minimum System Requirements: 867MHz G4, Mac OS X v10.2.8, 256MB RAM, 1.4GB hard disk space, 32MB VRAM (ATI RADEON 7500 or nVidia GeForce 2), DVD drive, 56 Kbps modem for internet play
- Review Computer: 1GHz G4, 512MB RAM, Mac OS X v10.3.3
- Network Feature: Yes
- Price: $49.99
- ESRB Rating: Teen (blood and violence)
- Availability: Now
- Official Website: [url=http://www.callofduty.com]http://www.callofduty.com[/url]
Mercy.
Remember when you first installed Medal of Honor: Allied Assault and played through a few levels? You thought it was pretty good: great graphics, heavy action and decent level design. And then you reached Omaha Beach, which brought a new level of intensity to the first-person shooter. It was nuts, everything going on in that level. It was so wild and so challenging that not even the Medal of Honor developers have been able to top it in their Spearhead and Breakthrough expansion packs.
Call of Duty doesn't quite top that level of intensity either, but it comes close to matching it...in nearly every friggin' level! This game is shooting and bombing and shouting and mass confusion throughout the entire game, providing one of the wildest rides ever in a first-person shooter.
In appearance, Call of Duty (CoD) is really not much different from Medal of Honor: Allied Assault (MoHAA). It shouldn't be, as it was developed by much of the same crew. The main difference is that CoD focuses on squad combat, for the most part, while MoHAA stuck to the tried and true "single warrior against the world" format. The friendly non-player characters (NPCs) in this game will lay down covering fire for you, and expect you to do the same for them. They'll clear your path in an enemy bunker, then hide behind barrels as you clear out the next room. If a soldier gets injured, others will drag him to safety. They'll hand you ammunition so you can take out a truck, then warn you that other enemies are attacking from the rear. Mind you, this doesn't happen during the cut scenes, but during the actual gameplay.
It's a weird dynamic, as it'll affect the decisions you make throughout the game. Yes, you could run back a bit to pick up that health pack or ammunition you left behind, but do you want to abandon your squad members at their post? They could be ambushed, and losing their help later in the level could cost you more than that health pack is worth. CoD even gives all of the NPCs a name and a specialty, which you can see by placing your crosshair over them (also helpful in knowing who to kill and who not to). Their health is indicated, too, by the color of their name (green = healthy, red = dying) and by the ease with which they move. As a result, I started to develop a loyalty with these guys. Quite often, I'd reload a saved game not because I'd died or had blown the mission, but because one of my buddies was killed. Of course, though, you can't save everyone. Some are impossible to keep alive, and others, it seems, can't be killed.
The artificial intelligence (AI) of the NPCs is good, but your brothers in arms still make many bonehead decisions. Soldiers would run straight across my line of fire at point blank range, they'd hover over grenades (I doubt they were throwing themselves on the grenade for my benefit, as their legs would keep moving but they wouldn't go anywhere), and they'd sometimes rush madly into enemy nests that could've more easily been cleared by the grenade I was about ready to throw. You don't know insane until you're trying to shove soldiers out of the way on the stairs of an apartment building so you can get to the anti-tank gun in time. It's frustrating, but those same soldiers will be watching your back as you use that gun.
Even with these problems, it was an odd feeling, not facing the pressure to do everything myself. My comrades would often kill a guy shooting at me before I even knew where he was, and seeing them drop to a knee and start firing would help me know when danger was present before the danger put a few slugs in me.
Of course, there are still a few levels where you have to go it alone. I called these the "breather levels." Not having to worry about keeping up with your commanding officer or having him change your orders for you—let alone trying to keep your comrades alive—provided a much more slowly paced experience. The solo missions were always more about stealth than speed, and stealth is much more calm.
Call of Duty takes another interesting approach to breaking up the game, although I don't think this one was very effective. Instead of playing as one character throughout the game, you play as three. You're an American soldier in the first third, a British solider in the middle, and a Russian at the end. There are different weapons and locations in each, of course, but the gameplay is basically the same throughout. Only the Russian levels stand out, really, because of the wildly different strategy. You play at a point where Russia had retreated back as far as it was willing to do, and launches a desperate effort to reclaim the Motherland from the Germans. Deserters and retreaters are shot on the spot (you'll see this happen), so it really is a do or die situation. The opening level of this section, in which you're charging up from the docks to reclaim Red Square without a weapon (you're even used as a decoy in one part) is the closest CoD comes to replicating the power and intensity of the Omaha Beach level in MoHAA. Even the intro movie is a copy, with a group of terrified soldiers riding a boat towards a shore full of enemies who are basically shelling the "spirit" out of them. Of course, don't blame the developers if this looks familiar. Blame history.
The levels in Russia also provide tank battles, and they're very well done. The tanks are fairly simple to control, and the terrain on which you're fighting provides for some interesting battles. Again, as with the foot missions, you're just one tank in a squadron. I've never played anything like it in a computer war game, and I had a lot of fun doing so. Now, if they could just do the same with air battles. (In the United Offensive expansion pack, not yet announced for the Macintosh, you do get to play as a gunner on a B-17. That would be my nirvana.)
If ever a game didn't need multiplayer capabilities, it's this one. The whole point, after all, is that the single player game plays like a multiplayer game. But multiplayer there is, so here we go. First of all, Mac users can play PC users. Always a bonus. You've got your standard game variations, of course, like King of the Hill and Deathmatch. Nothing special there beyond what you get in MoHAA and Return to Castle Wolfenstein. There's a new type, however, in which it's one guy against everyone. Basically, you're a soldier trying to escape from behind enemy lines to friendly territory. How ironic, really. In Call of Duty, the single player missions play like multiplayer and the multiplayer missions play like single player.
There's another cool feature in which, after you die, you can watch a movie of your death. It sounds morbid, yeah, but it's helpful in that you can see who killed you, where he was, and how he did it. It's a great tool for planning fine-tuning your battle strategy. You can also ban sniper rifles, but I found this to be a bit—for lack of a better term—wussy. This is war, after all. It's not like the Germans and French agreed to a "no sniper rifles" rule before they fought their battles. If you can't hide from sniper rifles, go play something else.
The graphics in CoD aren't as impressive as some of the others we've seen as of late (they're based on a suped-up version of the Quake III engine), but they're still very cool looking. The benefit here is that you'll get good frame rates during the intense action on computers at the low end of the system requirements (I'd like to see MoHAA make that claim). Also, I still dug some of the effects, like that the flame and smoke from machine guns would obscure your view of your target, and the sequences like in Saving Private Ryan where the action would drop to slow motion, the graphics would become blurry, and the sound would fade to the distance after you'd been hit. This would only last for a few seconds, but it seemed longer than that because you could still move and attack, and so could your enemies.
The audio is very good as well, although I wasn't a fan of the soundtrack like I am of the MoHAA games. It's not that it's bad, but that it's not nearly as stirring.
If I had one real complaint to make about Call of Duty it's that the game ended too soon. A lot of the levels were very quick, and I found myself switching from American to British to Russian soldiers before I really wanted to. On the other hand, this does contribute to the frantic pace of the game, so it's not all bad.
And so, if you're shying away from Call of Duty because you've had enough of WWII first-person shooters, don't dismiss it so quickly. Although not 100% original, there is enough here to distinguish it from the competition. It's also wildly entertaining, which doesn't hurt. I guess it's a sign of our times that there are so many war games coming out right now, and an even more troubling sign that so many revert to WWII and Nazis to give us an enemy we don't mind fighting. However, as long as the games are as great as Call of Duty, I won't question it. As a gamer, I'll just accept my call of duty and try to remember that, in games, no one plays alone.
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