Previewed: October 18, 2005
Previewed by: Mat Houghton

Publisher
Activision

Developer
Treyarch

Release Date: Fall, 2005
Genre: FPS
Players: 1-16
ESRB: Teen

Screenshots (Click Image for Gallery)
Call of Duty 2: Big Red One, I keep wanting to call this game Band of Brothers, partially because both stories take place during WWII, and both stories follow a single squad of men through the course of the war. In Band of Brothers it was Easy Company, in Call of Duty, as the name would indicate, you are along with the Big Red One, also known as the First Infantry Division.

Call of Duty 2: Big Red One features:

  • Cinematic Intensity – The hallmark cinematic intensity of Call of Duty® returns with a more complete gameplay experience than ever before. Experience a wide variety of missions on land, sea and in the air, with the aid of more than three-dozen authentic American, Italian, French and German weapons. Charge into battle as Allied and Axis planes duel overhead, artillery explosions shake the ground and choke the air, and bullets and shrapnel streak past squadmates. Experience war-torn Europe and Africa, from the blistering desert expanses of Tunisia and Libya to the beautiful yet deadly countrysides of Italy, France, Belgium and Germany.
  • A Soldier’s Story – Players are thrust into the role and story of a member of the U.S. Army’s famed Fighting 1st Infantry, the Big Red One, America’s most heroic and decorated infantry division. Experience the camaraderie of a single tight-knit squad, bound together through the chaos of battle.
  • Know Your Squad – Through all-new A.I. and animation, allies and enemies take battle tactics to new heights. Squads will now make better use of environmental cover and tactical maneuvers, such as flanking, envelopment and fire-and-maneuver behaviors. Hear allies reacting to the events on the battlefield with contextually accurate battle chatter.
  • Online Multiplayer (PlayStation 2 and Xbox) – Go online for Axis vs. Allies team-based multiplayer action.
WWII has been used before, but mostly on the European Front. The Big Red One takes place on the North African and Italian fronts, though you do have some action in Normandy and afterwards. In order to cover as much territory as possible in my limited preview time I jumped around a bit in the story, but from what I saw the men of the Big Red One are given just as much depth as were the men of Easy Company. Men live and die on the battlefield as in all war stories, but that doesn’t make it any less powerful a moment, and this has been made as much an important element of the game as the action.

For the most part an FPS is an FPS, but Call of Duty: Big Red One is unique in that the array of weapons available are not only realistic in graphics and rate of fire, but also in the feel of the weapon. It’s a little hard to describe, but during one mission I managed to get my hands on a bolt-action rifle I just got into a rhythm. Pull the trigger, then click, click, click, of chambering the next round to another trigger pull. Pull, click, click, click, and pull. It was just enough time to line up the next shot between loading rounds.

The weirdest thing about that is that normally I prefer machine guns of some type, and yet here I was sniping away with a single shot rifle. You can go from that to machine guns, tripod mounted guns, scoped rifles, sub-machine guns, and even anti-aircraft guns and bazookas, and each weapon fires, reloads, and just made to feel different in a way that no other FPS I know of has done. Each weapon is truly unique instead of just being a different set of graphics and rate of fire.

Level design in Big Red One is excellent, covering bombed out cities, Normandy beaches, and Italian country sides, all rendered with amazing texture detail. The only really bad thing I would have to say about the graphics is that sometimes navigating the debris is harder than you’d think because some of the clipping on the rubble is larger than the rendered object looks. Otherwise, it’s trading fire like you were there.

Multiplayer is intense, with large levels offering not only corners and hidey holes to snipe from, but also tanks to extract said snipers with. That’s right, for those of you who aren’t satisfied blowing up your opponents (up to 16 in multiplayer) with the odd RPG or bazooka, Big Red One offers you a tank. The level that I was allowed access to was snow covered and beautiful, down to the subtle detail of the snow crunching beneath my feet, not that I got to pay much attention to that before I was unceremoniously fragged by an opponent. I mean, come on, does no one appreciate the details anymore?