Call of Duty 2 (2005)

If you've never played a Call of Duty game at this point, it's probably best to skip Call of Duty 2 (and probably 3 for that matter) if you were going to start. I have a hard time judging CoD games since they all essentially exist as carbon copies of each other, with a few minor things tweaked here and there. It can be tricky to tell in this day and age if CoD2 was innovative in any capacity. (I honestly have no idea! All I know is that it plays just like every CoD game I've played.)

The single player campaign is pretty generic. There's some cheesy, cliche dialogue from those ol' badass soldiers, who seem to enjoy fighting wars more than people who fought wars could even imagine. There are a ton of one liners that really undermines any possible depth to any story. If they were trying to show that war is hell, they sure did a great job making everyone enjoy themselves. I get it, it's a game and you want the player to have fun, but it's another thing altogether to have all of the characters seem so enthusiastic about possible bloodshed. In this way, Call of Duty has always fallen far short of what Band of Brothers did. It's impossible to really compare the two for a multitude of reasons, but you can see Band of Brothers' fingerprints all over those World War II era shooter games.  They just don't do much to promote an idea that war isn't supposed to be fun.

The game is broken up into various campaigns - British, American, and Russian. I'm always surprised at how much we love to play as Russians given that they were pretty brutal during the war (a war which they also helped Germany start). The most interesting campaign is by far the British, largely because it takes place in the African theater - a rather neglected part of the war. The Russian campaign is pretty much what you expect of a Russian story. They are short on supplies, greatly outnumbered, and the nasty Germans are on the march. So you must defend your homeland in the snowy winter with minimal supplies. And of course, you get the nasty Russian commanders who threaten to shoot them if they disobey orders. The American campaign is also rather typical. It pretty much only revolves around the invasion of Normandy. You just narrowly get off your raft before it gets shelled, a la Saving Private Ryan. The shock knocks you down and someone helps you up slowly as you look around to see people getting slaughtered. You are guaranteed at least two of these scenes in every Call of Duty that comes out.

The gameplay is pretty generic by today's standards. You've got your reload button, your shooting trigger, your grenade button, your weapon swap button, you're crouch, and you're jump. There really isn't anything else to it. It's rather bland, but I suppose one does play Call of Duty for its simplistic gameplay. "Easy to pick up, difficult to master" is a key part of its successful formula. The most annoying thing about CoD2, however, is the inability to run. I's pretty annoying to have to trudge around everywhere without being able to sprint.

One element that I really enjoyed was how the missions occasionally forced you to hole up and repel an oncoming attack. Probably the most entertaining of these involved having to climb an old tower so you could take up a sniping position. Meanwhile, Germans were coming from all around. It wasn't so important that you shoot them all; you just needed to take out the mortar crews. It was kind of fun to slow down the forward momentum of the rather linear levels (something that is again common in all the games). Of course, it was a little annoying to have to destroy tanks by running up to them with explosives. It really seems like you should be able to destroy them with a few well placed rounds from a picked up Panzerschreck. Only seems fair since when you're in a tank, they can destroy you! The tank mission, by the way, was more cumbersome and tedious than it was fun and awesome. If they were going to do it so that you had a view from inside the tank, it almost seems like a better idea to have the AI drive and you just control the turret. Having to control both was clunky, at best.

Overall, it's a simplistic and vaguely fun shooter. It's not the most entertaining nor the best of the Call of Duty games, but the nice thing about these games is that they all are pretty much the same. So if you enjoyed one, you'll probably enjoy them all. Still, there is nothing particularly stunning about 2, and it might even hurt the more recent games to go back and replay it. You realize how little the game has actually changed over the course of its life time. Shoot, from copying scenes to missions to level layouts, you literally have the same character designs. Yes, Modern Warfare's Captain Price is strongly featured in this game. And yes, he looks pretty much exactly the same.

REDUCTIVE RATING:  It's Fine