At the minute, I’m going through a bit of a WWII thing. When I was ill a while ago, I started watching my Band of Brothers box set again. I hadn’t watched it in years, and this time I really got into it. Since then, I have been sucking up anything WWII that has crossed my path. I watched “Saving Private Ryan” again, brought and started reading “Stalingrad”, and also decided to play through Call of Duty 2 again.
When I played it through the first time, I was a little unimpressed. I saw it pretty much as any old shooter, and blasted through it. I think it was because it was so hyped at the time, I was expecting massive things. When I started playing it I was disappointed, and on this play through, I was disappointed again…until around the second half.
Now, I have to say, that I can’t quite take COD2 seriously. Without getting too heavy, lets just say that war is a horrible, terrible thing, where soldiers live in constant fear and death can come in an instant. Not only that, but if you live a while, no doubt some of your friends wont, and you may well see a few of them explode or bleed to death. I don’t say this lightly, and I don’t want to pretend that I can comprehend the horror and scale of anything that happened in WWII, but I’m sure its a dam sight more emotional than COD2 makes you feel.
Of course, COD2 is a game. Whether making a game of something so terrible is an argument I’m not going to discuss here, but in my personal opinion, its better to have a rough idea rather than no idea what went on (i.e. if COD2 educated the un-educated, even very roughly, thats better than nothing)
Playing Call of Duty as a game is great fun, especially in the American campaign. The clink of your clip running dry over the booming of grenades and shouts of your friends and foes is something to be loved. The look of shock on a Nazi’s face when his helmet flies off from a bullet but he’s still kickin’ never gets tired. The set pieces are fantastic, and some of the scripted sequences really drag you into the COD2 world. One for example makes you lay down helpless, as you see a boat full of your comrades get massacred, before you are pulled to safety by a medic. It’s chilling, and should make any gamer take a step back and realize the severity of whats happening.
COD2, on the whole, does the ‘chaos of war’ extremely well. You look around as mortars pound into the floor with a tank rolling up on your left flank and infantry coming straight at you. You will duck for cover, popping off shots, and just try to survive. It will be just before you are over run that a friendly troop of planes will fly in and save your ass, in a spectacle of explosions. What infinity ward have managed here is a game which constantly feels relentless. It grabs you, pulls you into the action, and doesn’t let go.
The problem I have with the whole affair, is that whatever happens, I don’t really care. While the action is fantastic, I have no emotional attachment to what’s going on. If a fellow soldier dies, he gets replaced. Everyone except Captain Price is a faceless, personalityless(?) Private Generic. I don’t feel the horror of war really getting through, and when I am an unstoppable killing machine, it seems to undermine the whole WWII soldier..thing.
It must be a difficult thing to make a game of something so dreadful as WWII, but on that line of thinking, no games with guns would ever get made, and that would be a terrible, terrible thing. COD2, I think, handles the War with a level of respect not often found in games. While it lacks a personal attachment, I think it does a decent job of getting across a rough story of what happened, without getting overly serious and dull. I wouldn’t want to play something where you could die from one shot, with no auto-saves or checkpoints.
Overall, there are some narrative problems, some immersion problems, and a few bugs. The first half is a little bland, and the characters are devoid of, well, everything par guns and ammo. I can forgive Infinity Ward for all of these though, because when it was released COD2 looked fantastic and it was only the second game the developers had made. They did a brilliant job (I think) of making a game that plays beautifully, but carries some of the message of “war is bad”.
As the credits rolled, I realized COD2 was far better than I originally remembered it. The final ‘cutscene’ though, which the credits roll over, left something to be desired.
