Previewed: October 3, 2005
Previewed by: Mark Smith

Publisher
Activision

Developer
Infinity Ward

Release Date: November, 2005
Genre: FPS
Players: 1-4
ESRB: Teen

Screenshots (Click Image for Gallery)

Infinity Ward is preparing to follow-up on their “Game of the Year” title with Call of Duty 2, and if what I played at a recent preview press event is any indication, this sequel will be in prime shape to reign supreme for another two years.

Activision was showing off Call of Duty 2 on both the PC and upcoming Xbox 360 platforms, and I have never been more certain that consoles have finally achieved the same level of gaming quality as a good mid to high-end PC.

The designers have set out to polish what was already a pretty perfect action title, but anyone who has hung out in the forums and has been active in the mod community will attest to, there have been plenty of wish lists and game enhancements to come along over the past two years. Infinity Ward has implemented a lot of these directly into the new title along with numerous realism-enhancing features suggested by their team of military advisors.

Call of Duty 2 now gives soldiers the freedom to play through missions and complete objectives with much more flexibility giving the entire experience a much less linear feel while maintaining that all-important intensity and cinematic experience. You can play the missions in chronological order, thus recreating the events as they transpired, or opt for certain character-specific adventures in the four campaigns.

Your four tours of duty will take you to Stalingrad as a Russian soldier, North Africa as a British infantryman, and Normandy as both a British and a U.S. soldier, but not before you dive into an all-new Russian boot camp for some fresh training.

I now need to vent my frustration over the controls for Call of Duty 2 for the Xbox 360, and it's not so much the designer’s fault (well, yes it is) as the funky 360 gamepad. First and foremost, any and all games, console or PC, need to have a user-definable control set, and I mean assigning any command to any button I want.

My complaint here is with the cursed shoulder buttons, which wrap around the curved upper edge of the controller. Depending on the size of your hands and how you hold the controller, every time you pull the trigger (or at least every time I pulled the triggers) I would also inadvertently hit the top button on either side. In Call of Duty 2 this means you toss a grenade, which, A: is a waste of grenades, and B: tends to kill your men making you a traitor to the motherland and ending your game.

So while the problem is mostly the fault of the controller design, it could have been eliminated entirely by allowing me to re-map my controls. As for the rest of the controls, the analog movement is smooth, albeit much slower in response than the PC, but the designers have tweaked the A.I. to compensate for the reduced reaction time, and the game cleverly snaps to targets without being blatantly obvious about it. The cursor just tends to slow down as you pass over or near an enemy.

The biggest change in A.I. is the “squad awareness” which is communicated through the new “battle chatter” system. More than 25,000 lines of recorded dialogue (taking up as much HD space as the original COD game) will give you continuous and accurate information about your surroundings and the status of your men and that of the enemy. Once the first shot is fired this game turns into total realistic warfare unlike anything you have ever experience, at least in game form.

New to the sequel is the smoke grenade, once a user-created mod, now fully integrated into the game with some of the best visual smoke I have ever seen in a game…EVER! The volumetric properties of this smoke is totally realistic allowing you to get nose to nose with an enemy before you can even see them. Concealment adds a whole new level of strategy to the gameplay.

The graphics just don’t stop at the smoke though. There is fully rendered weather effects along with night and day missions, all with realistic lighting, and dynamic shadows. There was one sequence where you are creeping through a large pipeline and the soldier below start shooting at you. Bullet holes tear through the metal creating laser-like beams of light that crisscross through the pipe. I was speechless.

Textures are rich and realistic and pop off the screen with bump mapping. Call of Duty 2 is as close to photo-realistic as I have seen with any game to date. Character models have been greatly improved, not only their ultra-realistic uniforms and weapons, but also the faces, expressions, and somewhat accurate lip-synching. Vehicles are back and realistically modeled and handle with appropriate physics. Pixel for pixel, I'd stack the Xbox 360 version up against a mid-range PC any day of the week. Even the four-player split-screen looked amazing and managed to deliver solid framerates in all windows.

Call of Duty was one of the first 7.1 surround sound games on the PC and even though the mix is 5.1 on the Xbox 360 it sound awesome. You'll never even miss those two side channels, and the thunderous low-frequency will give your sub-woofer a pounding you and your neighbors won't soon forget.

The acting is all professionally done, featuring several actors from the Band of Brothers movie as well as authentic German and Russian actors to deliver their portions of the battle chatter experience. If it were any more real it would be educational.

The four campaigns combine to provide the typical gamer 20-30 hours of solid gameplay, but we cannot forget the multiplayer component, perhaps the single biggest reason thousands of people are still playing this game today.

Call of Duty 2 features a wealth of multiplayer games modes including all the traditional team and versus modes, CTF, search and destroy, headquarters, and others. While I didn't get any firsthand multiplayer experience on the Xbox 360, I did get to watch some of the designers play it and was very impressed with the clarity and smoothness of the four-way split-screen. I still have a problem with versus games where you can see where the other player is. It takes any chance of stealth out of the game.

With more campaigns and the larger and non-linear missions and objective structure, Call of Duty 2 is easily much more than the original. It is a finely tuned work of art with so much research and attention to detail incorporated into it that action gamers will become totally immersed in the unrelenting experience of brutal combat.

War might be hell but Call of Duty 2 is pure heaven to play. If you loved the first one then get ready to reenlist for another tour of duty when this game ships in November alongside the Xbox 360.

While we anxiously await the release of this amazing new title (and the system to play it on), check out our collection of exciting screenshots in our Preview Gallery.