Welcome to Stalingrad, remember to duck frequently.
This whole landing sequence is so film-like...

The team emphasis works well with you learning to provide cover for your buddies and relying on them to do the same for you while you make mad dashes across the enemie's field of fire. This is the game's greatest improvement over Medal of Honor and the investment and involvement you place in these fictional buddies shifts the game into a much tenser and tighter experience. You actually do try to do your best to haul their asses out of the fire and are thankful when they do the same for you.

Strangely, the game undermines the building sense of camaradiere by shifting you abruptly between three campaigns of action; in the one game you get to play as an American paratrooper, a British Special Air Services trooper and finally a conscripted regular soldier in the Russian front. These abrupt changes break that bond with your comrades in arms by shifting you to an entirely new set. Most brutally, on the Russian front that new squad is usually gunned down in short order in the desperate and nasty fighting depicted. It is a minor quibble but one of two that pull the game down from becoming a classic.

Sign of a good game: strong Foley work.
*ahem* sorry, couldn't resist.

Gameplay is largely standard FPS fare. Iron sights, not quite as well implemented as Vietcong's, feature as well as various movement stances. Leaning to see round corners without exposing too much to fire features strongly, as does the objective compass familiar to Medal of Honor fans.

Even the now almost routine on-the-rails and tank drive segments have been included. There isn't anything new to the gameplay at all; it is still very much 'maneuvre to put bullets into your enemy and try and avoid return fire'. However, it is all implemented smoothly and without fuss, something many other modern titles fail to do.

The 'Tirpitz' looms into view.

Graphically there is little to complain about. While the ageing Quake 3 engine has been used in Call of Duty, it has been heavily tweaked and revamped. Nicer yet, the hardware developments of the last few years allow it to sing in all-new ways. The levels that best represent this are without a doubt within the Russian campaign where set pieces can involve literally three hundred animated entities fighting it out on a broad area. If you have seen Enemy at the Gates, the Russian campaign is a very close computer recreation of the spectacular battle scenes depicted in that film.

In a lot of ways the experience surpases the visuals of the films by their much more immersive nature. Unlike the film, you can choose when to duck, how to fight, etc., etc., or to just sit back and watch with mild awe as hundreds of tracer rounds illuminate the sky, doomed comrades charge the machinegun nests of the German lines and Stuka diverbombers make repeated attacks.

If you look closely, you can see the rough edges where things are a little too blocky: people don't quite look right or details are done purely via texture work rather than polygon architecture - but if you have the time to do that you most likely are not actually playing but searching for faults. Suffice it to say, the visual efforts more than capably support the gameplay and allow for quite cinematic vistas to unfold.

All you have to do is sneak on board, disable the AA defences,
plant charges to cripple her and esape again - easy.

Even stronger than the graphical work is the audio work. A lush orchestral score underpins affairs, although the noise of combat frequently drowns it out. Overlaid is excellent ambient walla ranging from the creaking of frozen trees to the sound of distant machine gun fire. Right at the forefront are the weapon reports, shouts of the men and a panolpy of bullet hit sounds. This is amazing stuff and sounds just glorious on a 5.1 speaker setup - if your neighbours can take it. Even on headphones, the sense of presence through sound alone is impressive with hardware pretty much sounding exactly right. It is staggering the detail gone to with this, for example mildly different bullet-hitting-water sounds for each type of weapon - something you do have to go slightly out of your way to create. We wouldn't have thought any less of the game for not including that particular detail, but the game makers clearly wanted to ensure even wildly stray fire sounds right.

Glider drops into enemy territory.

This dedication to detail is really the hallmark of the game, with small touches like reinforcements usually arriving via a realistic method all adding up to the computer gaming equivalent of cinema veritae. In fact, the game all over screams cinema in all the right ways. Single player simply is a rollercoaster that, depsite its abrupt leaps between the three campaigns, pulls you in and doesn't let you go till you complete the game.

Which leads us to the game's biggest shortfall (pun intended) - it is far too short. At ten hours for even a leisurely play through, including reload times, on the medium difficultly level the game simply is over far, far too quickly. We would really have rather seen the game held back a futher six months to add more content. If you consider that a movie, averging two hours, works out at $12 giving us $6 per hour of entertainment then the single player at around $90 for ten hours is clearly an inferior deal.

It wasn't so long ago that this metric worked firmly in favour of computer games with single player segments routinely needing forty or more hours to complete. While there is compensation in the form of a decently featured multi-player component it is a slightly disturbing trend that computer games are getting routinely this short.

Be nice to this gun, you will need it to
help defend the bridge once you capture it.

On the other hand, multi-player offers nice compensation and while featuring modes that largely seem to be Counter Strike in WWII garb, there is one unique addition that Gameplanet hopes other games routinely emulate. Namely, the kill-cam - where after dying you get to see your last thirty seconds or so from the perspective of your killer.

This makes a wonderful rapid-learning tool as it quickly teaches you where the good hiding spots are and usually removes any doubt of cheating as you can easily see just how exposed you were to the vantage point your killer had. It also usually makes the cheaters that much more obvious as they manage to track you before you become visible, etc.. Seeing this in action makes dying worth it as you see the sometimes quite amusing ways you managed to get yourself killed.

There are balance issues still to be shaken out with certain gun types dominating on various maps, but Infinity Ward has left enough tools in the hands of mod makers and server admins to tailor the gameplay quite finely. This is great to see and bodes well for the longer term viability of the game with the mod community able to make quite dramatic new gameplay modes, all with a small server side patch that gets downloaded by the game client automatically.

News reel-style briefings fill you in on objectives.
Not to mention warn you of obvious mistakes.