Call of Duty 2: Hands-on
Activision's intense WWII shooter comes alive on Microsoft's next-gen system. Widescreen Direct-feed Xbox 360 movies and screens.
by Douglass C. Perry
September 30, 2005 - The Call of Duty series, which debuted on the PC two years ago, exploded on the World War II scene at an opportune time. EA's Medal of Honor series began its slump while Call of Duty answered some of its missing or much needed elements. Whether you remember the ferocious on-screen chaos, the intense level of challenging AI, the phenomenal sound production, or the different territories previously unexplored in previous WWII games, Call of Duty was, in every way, a call to arms in the exploding World War II category of first-person shooters.
Infinity Ward's Activision's Call of Duty 2 has raised a few eyebrows as it nears its November release on Xbox 360 and PC. After debuting at E3 this year with the Battle of Pointe Du Hoc in-game footage from the D-Day campaign and impressing everyone with at least one good eye in their head, Activision has stormed Europe with press events, including a special week-long event in Poland (read those impressions here). Early this week, we spent even more time with the game on both the Xbox 360 and the PC, digging into new missions and playing sustained sessions with the Xbox 360 version. And with that additional gameplay, we've come to a firm conclusion. There is little room for argument here: both the PC and the Xbox 360 versions look, sound, and play spectacularly in nearly every regard.
The Xbox 360 version shares several similarities with the PC version. Both are filled with well-animated soldiers, ornamented with highly detailed environments, and they all moved at crisp framerates. The 360 game held at a constant 60 fps, and the PC, at least right now, runs at 30 FPS. The Xbox 360 appeared to show a slight advantage over the PC with a little more detail and slightly longer draw-distances, but the differences weren't drastic or that easy to see. Like we did, you'd have to stare at them side-by-side and critically compare.
The amount of detail displayed in the environments was, in all truth, totally exciting. It brought out the graphic tart in me. You'd run into a blown up building and look around: The crumbling walls showed granular detail. Your feet kicked up dust. Scrapes, scratches, and holes weren't repeated from building to building. Every new area you entered looked different, showed new textures and atypical constructs. And the fidelity of each object, whether it was a broken desk, a destroyed tank, or a torn apart building, was crisp, clean, and sharp.
With Call of Duty 2, like its predecessor, you're wowed by the amount of chaos that's whirring wildly about you, but when the cloud of smoke settles and you have a look around, the impeccable work that has gone into these backgrounds, environments, structures, and textures is remarkable. Call of Duty 2 is easily one of the best looking Xbox 360 games we've seen, and it will stand out from the crowd come this November.
The fact is, there is very little time when Call if Duty 2 isn't moving at 100 MPH. We've played a bunch of missions before, and I'd seen the Battle of Pointe Du Hoc section at least twice. It's one hell of a ride. As part of the Russian campaign (there are four campaigns, one Russian, one American and two British), I got to play "Repairing the Wire in Stalingrad." You must follow a communication cable through a large portion of the blown up city to its end, while fighting off swarms of German soldiers, and later on a regiment of tanks that only intensify the level.
In this single-player campaign level, you're given a rifle and an automatic machine gun, but you can at any time, after killing an enemy, switch one of your two weapons out for another. You're able to carry two two-handed weapons and a pistol, plus two sets of grenades, frag and smoke. On the Xbox 360, firing is the right trigger, and pulling the weapon up to aim is left trigger. The right bumper (Microsoft wants to call them "bumpers" not shoulder buttons) throws frags and the left smoke grenades. With the face buttons you can crouch, reload, switch weapons, and melee attack.
The enemy is so aggressive and so constant that you're pushed into the fray. Unlike other FPS titles, you're compelled to move, find cover, shoot, and move again because the enemy either outnumbers you and your squad, has better positioning, or it's simply throwing grenades into your spot. For instance, I always play games on normal mode, checking out easy and hard to compare. Normal mode is the general default level of difficulty for 99% of the games on the market. The mission I picked to play was farther into the game, and it was the first time I played it, but on Normal, it was kicking my, and everyone else's, ***. An Infinity Ward producer switched the level to Easy for me and most other people, which normally would be pretty embarrassing. Not so here. In fact, an Infinite Ward producer even reached a part of a mission on Normal where he died a few times because it had changed and was so tough. It's challenging, and that's good. The situation was even a little funny. I handed the controller to a few guys, who refused to pick it up. So, I plugged on.
The whipping I got made me a better player pretty quickly. The enemy charges forth, tactically moves toward and around you, using cover, and employing teamwork to take you and your squad out quickly. If you stick to one spot, they'll throw grenades. Or crowd you. The enemy forces you leave your spot, shoot, move, and find cover again. You cannot take too much time to wait and carefully aim. There isn't enough time for that. You then have to shoot, drop more enemies, creating a hole in their defense, and charge forth. Using grenades is always a great idea because it's easy, but also because it usually wipes out a few guys at a time. The intuitive learning arc is quick with grenades. The animation is smooth and quick, and their death animations are realistic and fun to watch, but they're kept in check.
Throwing smoke grenades works the same as throwing frag grenades, but their result is obviously much different. Smoke grenades in Call of Duty 2 are like no other game you've ever seen or played before. None. The tactic is simple. If you reach an area you can't pass, throw a smoke grenade out to cloud the area. In most games, the smoke is thick enough to create a bit of confusion, but you can almost always find your marker. In Call of Duty 2, the smoke grenades are crazy, crazy, crazy thick. The smoke is slow to diffuse, but once engaged, they literally create the thickest, most realistic smoke cloud you've ever seen.
If you haven't checked your radar (shown at the bottom half of your screen) you instantly will get lost. Case in point, an Infinity Ward developer actually did just that in the demo in front of a huge crowd, and it was funny and telling. Those damn things work, but you have to know how to use them. For instance, use them outside. Use them in a room and you're just toast. Someone will see you first and blow your face off. Use them, and use them well. Keep your face.
In this particular mission, the cable is used steer you in the right direction. You'll also constantly have to keep it in view and follow it because it requires repair, forcing you to stop in the middle of an open area, making yourself vulnerable. Amongst the rubble that is Stalingrad, you'll climb into buildings, second and third stories, and you'll have to flush out enemies regularly. I know I mentioned the enemy AI's smarts, but they're also tough too. Each enemy soldier takes a few shots to kill, unless it's a head shot. But a few shots to the chest ain't enough. Sometimes a quick inspection after you drop an enemy becomes a surprise shot from his pistol in your gut as he crawls off to die. They're resilient bastards, and they all require a few shots in the head while they're lying there. I admit I even unloaded a few extraneous shells into the bodies of dead soldiers just for safe keeping.
The health system follows the trend of making things more visually realistic. You'll always see the circular compass in the lower corner, which indicates with a gold star your directive, and with colored markers your enemies and allies. You'll also see the text of your allies when they text is important, or when a new directive has been given. Other than that, you'll see red arcs that indicate the direction from which the shot was taken. For instance, you get shot at from the right, a little arched red line appears on the right. Visual and audio clues indicate your level of health. If you're taking heavy fire, the screen's edges grow redder. When you're close to dying the red thickens and your heartbeat increases in sound and tempo. You'll never see a health meter. But if you find cover or in some way manage to stay away from fire, you'll regenerate health back to 100% within seconds. It's an invisible Halo health system, and from what I can tell, it works pretty darn well. This system also does away with health packs, so you'll never have to find or collect one again.
This one single level we played, in which you can die multiple times using a series of well-placed check points, is huge. I walked, ran, stumbled, and limped through what seemed like three levels combined into one. The square footage you cover seems like miles, and the density of enemy soldiers you'll face extends short distances three-fold.
The last section of the mission brought in tanks. Enemy tanks are always surrounded by enemy soldiers, and you're almost certainly going to die by either a heavy cannon shot or rapid-fire machine gun. At the end of this level, Infinite Ward sought to ramp up the level of already heady intensity and this squad of tanks moves fast. These tanks' cannon shots will blast down entire walls, crush your team mates in front of your eyes, and either instantly kill you or bring you to the brink of death.
You must skillfully whittle down the enemies surrounding them, and keep your grenades and machine gun fire for another day. They do not affect the tanks. But where there is a tank, there is a sticky bomb around. Throw the tank off guard with a grenade in one spot and then run over to the small glowing yellow spot on the tank's side, and then find cover fast. One well-placed sticky bomb takes out the entire tank and the squad inside. In one instance, we saw the Germans trying to escape the hatch as the bomb blew up. Boom.
The game featued a hefty multiplayer component on both PC and Xbox 360. On PC, up to 32 players can vie in combat in as many as 12 maps, about three of which have returned from Call of Duty 1 (same on X360). The X360 version's multiplayer is still being tweaked, and about eight can fight online, but Activision believes it might be able to reach 16 with more fine-tuning. A total of 16 X360 users can also hook up using SysLink, or they can vie in four-player split-screen, which runs smoothly at 30 FPS, and looks incredibly sweet.
Along with the constant roar of gunfire, enemies and allies yelling and screaming at all times, and the sharp, unending bang of explosions, Call of Duty 2 creates one of the most intense settings I've ever experienced in a videogame. Activision's FPS delivers a constant raw shock to your nervous system. When I was finished with the single level -- the single level, mind you -- my whole body felt jangled, my brain frazzled, and I needed to just sit and relax for 15 minutes before I did anything else. (I then drove across San Francisco, which didn't help a bit.) It's just like the first game, but somehow Call of Duty 2 is even more intense. If you're looking for a real Xbox 360 experience this fall, do yourself a favor and put this on your top five list.
30-09-2005, 06:58 PM
CoD2 Hands-On! 
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