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Call Of Duty 2 Game Review |
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Gameplay, Graphics and Sound, Conclusions.
Grenades are never in short supply, as the player is able to collect grenades from dead enemy soldiers. A grenade indicator displays the location of grenades which are close enough to do damage, however in heavy battles you’ll often be killed by both friendly and enemy grenades. After throwing grenades you’ll often hear the German soldiers warning their comrades about them, but they clearly can’t always get out of the way.
The final campaign in the game is the American one. At first you may be disappointed because it begins with the all too familiar Normandy scenario. This map is short though, and the heavily scripted sequence at the beginning means the player is soon in French towns fighting Germans. At this stage I was feeling let down, hoping that the American campaign would not be based solely in France, where every other WW2 game seems to concentrate American campaigns.
Luckily only about one third of the American campaign is based here. Again some great scenes are scripted into the game, apparently from the Band of Brothers series. A confused squad leader lets down his troops who then rush into an artillery attack at the bottom of "Hill 400".
The battle for "Hill 400" and the constant attempts by German forces to recapture the bunker and artillery stations on top were my favourite parts of the game. The American air force coming to the rescue with a bombardment against Germans about to kill off your heavily outnumbered squad holding out on top of the hill tops it off spectacularly.
The game finishes with a crossing over the river Rhein and capture of a German town, which is apparently where the war ended for the Americans.
Graphics and Sound:
While the engine upon which this game is based makes explosions and other effects look nice, compared to other recently released FPS games such as FEAR and Quake 4 this game does not look spectacular. This does not detract from the game though, because the textures are of a high quality, and the models and animations are better than what is seen in many new games.
The other advantage of the older engine is that the game will most likely run better on slower hardware. The game can be played in DirectX7 or DirectX9 mode, and the performance increase when in DX7 mode is very noticeable.
As mentioned earlier on, the sounds and audio additions the developers have put into this game make the gaming experience top notch. You can enable environmental audio effects which make certain areas of the game (such as crawling through pipes in the Russian campaign) sound truly awesome.
Conclusion:
I haven’t been able to test this game in multiplayer mode, but from a quick look at the maps available it appears that many of the maps from the original game have been recreated with higher quality textures and expanded areas.
Overall I’d highly recommend COD2. The game is short, but it is "sharp and shiny" as they say. The story line and scenarios are excellent. The missions are broken up by historical videos and cut scenes which make add authenticity to the campaigns. Overall I’d rate the game 9 out of 10 stars.
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