Call of Duty 2

Charge! Worth: $15
based on 360 retail game, October 2007

I know, I know, this game is however many years old already. I hated the demos for COD1, 2, and 3, but one of my video store guys recently talked me into giving the game a try. What the hell, it was only $12 and I was jonesing for Halo 3 when I bought it back in early September. Plus I'm reading Richard Evans' history of the Third Reich, so I was in the mood to shoot at Nazis.

There's only one way to play this game: full-speed ahead. If you hang around in one place, you'll just waste your ammo on the eternally-spawning Germans up ahead. The only way to turn off the Nazi faucet is to move up and occupy that (house / hill / bunker / field). This was a revelation to me because I tend to hang back and soften up that (house / hill / bunker / field) with some well-aimed headshots before moving in to mop up. When I played the demos, I didn't realize that COD punishes you for playing this way since all those guys you smoked just respawn forever. So shooting that guy off the MG42 does you no good unless you immediately go busting into his (h/h/b/f) to make the game stop respawning baddies.

It took me a long time to get used to this. For a game that aspires to some level of realism, it feels incredibly arcadey. But once I got used to playing like my buddy Arth (think Rambo-style gamer) I had a lot of fun playing this game.

The best thing about Call of Duty 2 are the missions. There's a fantastic variety of tasks and objectives that are well-yelled at you by your in-game compadres. The large missions are nicely chunked into smaller chapters and most checkpoints are well placed.

The sense of dramatic action is the best I've ever played. By "dramatic" I also mean "loud." This is one loud-ass game. Shouting, shooting, and exploding are all happening pretty much all the time. My pulse was up over 100 and my teeth were gritted in righteous determination to do my part to stop the Nazi war machine. What this mostly boiled down to was me finding a flank on the enemy positions to trigger my AI buddies to come up and cover me while I frag the shit out of every Nazi I could find. This is the basic tactic for the entire game. Pop a smoke grenade, find the flank, wait for your guys to move up, then jump into the (house / hill / bunker / field) and start kicking ass. Like all WW2 games, the MP40 is the weapon of choice, especially because you've got to fight up-close to clear the (h/h/b/f) anyway. 99% of my kills that mattered happened at ten feet or less.

Since you're the player character, you're given all the crazy shit to do, like sticking a bomb to the back of a moving Tiger tank. "Sure, no problem." I died a lot getting the hang of this, but that makes sense since Tigers are natural video game bosses. You also get to storm MG42 nests, snipe at mortar crews, drive a tank (once), use an AA gun (once), and lug a Panzerfaust around. Very dangerous, those Panzerfausts. As likely to kill you as your enemy until you get the hang of it.

So, all in all, an excellent but severely limited game. Since there's only one way to play it (at full-speed ahead), there's not much point in playing it twice. It'll be an exciting Nazi ass-kicking good time, but it'll be exactly the same exciting Nazi ass-kicking good time you just had.