Call of Duty Week: Day Two

The second part of Call of Duty Week, covering one of my favourite and most-played games ever, Call of Duty 2.

Bias-alert, but I completely adore this game. Obviously, I’ll go into more detail down below, but this honestly a fantastic game and you should all immediately play it. In fact, the demo they released features my favourite level of the entire series. Go. Play.

Positives

• The mission structure is unlike anything else. Instead of a linear progression, you unlock different chapters based on the number of chapters you've played as other countries. WHY DON’T MORE GAMES DO THIS? Let me skip the parts I don’t like and just play the good stuff (See: Dirt 2).
• The first three ‘chapters’ (each chapter contains several missions) of the British campaign are brilliant. Set in the oft-ignored North Africa front, the British campaign varies between desperate escapes, cramped fighting in alleys and massed tank-charges.
• Both American chapters are fantastic, Pointe-du-Hoc especially. It’s like the American Stalingrad (sort of) as you assault a cliff in landing boats. But the mission doesn't end there, eventually you get hit by a massive counter-attack, and have to withdraw across the ground you’d already captured, before making a final desperate stand until reinforcements show up.
• Some of the Russian missions are quite fun.
• Captain Price reappears, starring alongside hilariously-Scottish Private McGregor.
• It looks darned pretty, even now.
• It had non-linear objectives. Each campaign had at least one mission where you could choose which order to attack different positions in. I believe it is the American campaign which did it best, where you had to capture a German-held town but could take whichever buildings in whatever order you wanted.

Negatives

• The Russian campaign is thoroughly underwhelming. Not bad, but nowhere near up to the rest of the game, which is a shame because it comes first and you have to power your way through it before you get to the good stuff.
• There are at least 4 turret sequences in the game.
• The Caen mission is a bit of a weak-point in the British campaign.
• The last American chapter is really freaking difficult at some points.

Well, that’s it for negatives which I can think of. I’m sure many people have many grievances with the game but I’m honestly just nit-picking to the extreme here. So get playing it. (Plus the multiplayer is pretty great but single-player is the most important part of any game.)