**Warning, there will be spoilers in this review.**
The game (after a short base-camp style tutorial) begins with the American campaign. You play as a member of the 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, who has been dropped in front of the main attack force during the night to act as a pathfinder. The game starts fairly slowly, tasking you with killing a few enemies on your own.
However, once you plant the radio beacon, a huge squad of friendlies drops from the sky to aid you in assaulting the town of Sainte-Mère-Église. The first contact made with a sizeable enemy force is when you assault the fringes of the town, and this sudden exposure to a massed German force, backed up with machine-guns, is one of the most intense experiences I have ever experienced at the beginning of the game.
The next mission (still at night) involves you and your squad capturing Sainte-Mère-Église and destroying several Flakpanzers (mobile anti-aircraft weapons). Whilst by todays standards it is a fairly generic encounter, the game doesn't make explicit decisions in how to attack each position, merely suggestions, which is one of the reasons why the game is so fun to play.
The next mission is incredible. You're tasked to hold off the German counter-attack from multiple directions, and it has you sprint, dodging bullets, across open ground in hope of finding anti-tank weapons and spare ammo. The adrenaline rush from staying out of sight of a Panzer IV just long enough to fire off one Panzerfaust is intense. The part where you believe your safe, and then a tank bursts straight the wall next to you, is one of the most shocking and genuinely scary moments I've ever experienced in a game. The mission winds down after this encounter, and you are simply tasked with assaulting and clearing out several mortar teams, but even this task, which would seem fairly mundane in other games, holds a strangely emotional attachment as you've seen these mortars hit members of your squad.
And that is what Call of Duty (the first two at least) does so well. It gives you a real sense of the horrific situation that these soldiers were forced to survive in. And, even though it's obviously an extreme action game, Infinity Wards' reverance for the soldiers is clear.
The following mission has you and two major squad mates taking orders along a main road to your commanders. Who could suspect that such a simple task would have you fight so many Germans. Whilst most of the mission is essentially a turret sequence, (albeit without a turret), it is broken up well by a small on-foot and defence sequence.
Having read through these documents, you're squad (now made up of several different divisions) is ordered to assault a battery of artillery guns at Brecourt Manor, which have been firing on Juno beach. This is the first real taste of the open structure of missions which Call of Duty 2 uses a lot. It tasks you with destroying the guns, but doesn't set a certain order in which to do it or a predescribed path which you are forced to follow. This allows the player to feel much more as if they are taking the initiative and figuring things out for themselves, which still isn't done in enough games today.
After successfully completing this mission, your squad is detached from the 506th in order to carry out special missions, often behind enemy lines. The first of these missions is a rescue of two British officers in a chateau in the Alps. This is a high-intensity mission, which tasks you with navigating your way through the labyrinthine interior of the chateau. This is one of the parts of the game where the action does get a little bit less realistic. There are several moments where you walk into a room and mow down 10 Germans at once. This brings me to another thing that Call of Duty did well. Its' enemies don't respawn. It sounds like an odd thing to bring up, and probably only occured because technology or computers at the time wouldn't have been able to handle it. However, it makes each encounter feel much more realistic, as the enemies don't stop coming just because you crossed a certain point, which is how it works in the newer games.
Having rescued Captain Price, you are informed that the other officer, Major Ingram, was moved to a POW camp in Austria. Guess where the next mission takes place. However, instead of being a standard mission, there's a twist. As soon as you begin your attack on the POW camp you have only 10 minutes to find and bring the Major to the escape vehicle, lest you be overwhelmed by German forces. This gives the mission an intensity which isn't present in many of the other missions, as you can no longer take things at a leisurely pace, by isolating and destroying groups of enemies.
That concludes the main American campaign, however there is a final mission which is played at the very end of all of the campaiigns, but that will be reviewed in another entry.
All in all, the American campaign provides you with a great sense of the teamwork and comradery which the Americans fought with. It is worth mentioning, that at no point are you entirely alone (unless you're bad at the game) as, while all but one of your allies can die, there will always be reinforcements, which is not true in either of the other campaigns. It''s a fantastic introduction to the game, and is of a quality not often seen anymore.
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