Call of Duty: Finest Hour

          As history repeats itself on home gaming consoles (WWII games cluttered first-person shooters last year, and Vietnam War shooters fill the lineup this year), Activision has decided to do a little time-traveling and release a shooter that takes place in the 40’s while everyone else is releasing games taking place in the 60’s and 70’s.  Call of Duty: Finest Hour takes the popular PC franchise and brings it to the Xbox, PS2, and GameCube this November.  To give our readers a little something to whet their appetites, Activision invited GameZone down to a press junket in downtown San Francisco complete with game demos, replicas of WWII firearms, and a messy session of paintball. 
 

          The simple way to describe Call of Duty: Finest Hour is as a first-person shooter with the backdrop of WWII.  However, it really separates itself from other WWII shooters in its immersion into the ‘war experience’.  There was never a war that one person won.  Several games nowadays feature a super soldier taking out half of Germany one-handed.  Not This one.  Call of Duty: Finest Hour understands the real way war works.  Every war, WWII included, was a combined effort of nations.  Within those nations, armies worked together to defeat heavily entrenched opposing forces, and within those armies, soldiers worked together to accomplish simple objectives that were necessary for the whole.  The developers’ idea was to make Call of Duty: Finest Hour portray the grand scope of the war, and the game does a fantastic job of showing the cooperation and teamwork necessary to successfully accomplish an endeavor as immense as WWII. 
 

Killing Nazis – universally accepted as A-OK

The game is divided into three campaigns.  The first campaign pits gamers in the middle of the Russian Army’s assault on Stalingrad, considered by many to be as tactically important a battle as the D-Day invasion.  The second campaign follows the British Army across North Africa as Field Marshall Bernard Montgomery led troops against Rommel’s squad.  Campaign number three revisits American armies as they descend on Aachen, a city considered by Hitler to be incredibly important because of its historical past (Aachen was once the center of Charlemagne’s empire). 
 

Throughout the game, the playable character will change, allowing the gamer to participate as several different soldiers.  Among the playable characters announced are a Russian grunt, a female Russian sniper, a PPA commando (Popski’s Private Army, named after Major Vladimir Peniakoff’s rag-tag collection of multi-national troops), and an African-American tank commander of the 761^st Black Panther Battalion.  The game will be played on foot in the first-person, and a couple of different perspectives in the vehicular-focused levels, which will account for about 30% of the game. 
 

          The first level we were treated to was titled ‘Flag Must Fall’ and featured a Russian assault on a German stronghold complete with bunkers, pillboxes, and intense trench fighting.  Surrounded by other troops, our hero, a Russian grunt, follows friendlies through buildings, knocking down doors and clearing rooms, and eventually into a full assault against German strongholds. What was most impressive about this level was the seamless action from close-quarter combat in buildings to a wide-open hillside hootenanny, complete with several teammates and enemies running about in frantic war-like action.  Most missions have several objectives, which are shown on the HUD’s radar ala Grand Theft Auto.  There are some scripted events, but they fit well into the action.
 

            The controls take a bit of getting used to, but work themselves out to be a pretty good control system.  Dual thumbstick twirling and primary fire triggers standard to FPS’s are used in the game, so anyone familiar with today’s marquee shooters should have no trouble picking up the controls and pumping a few Nazis full of lead right off the bat.  The left trigger zooms in nearly every weapon I tried, and the black button is the all-purpose action button.  Med-pacs are plentiful and can be stored up in the player’s inventory, used with the D-pad, or even given to wounded soldiers.  While zooming, soldiers can lean with the thumbstick.  Soldiers can also crouch and lay prone with the B button (Xbox) or stand up and jump with the Y button. 
 

The weapons on the level make for a war experience unlike any other WWII game I have played.  Thanks to exhaustive research on the war, the developers loaded the game with the same guns soldiers used back then.  This means there were a lot of accurate single-shot rifles with lengthy reloading times and some automatic assault rifles that sacrifice accuracy for volume.  Choosing your weapon wisely will be essential, as demonstrated to us by one of Activision’s entertaining military advisors.  Carrying a rifle into the trenches ends up re-enacting the scene from Naked Gun where Leslie Nielsen is having a one-shot-at-a-time shootout with a man three feet away from him.  On the other hand, trying to stop an enemy soldier from far away with an automatic yields similar futile results.  Every weapon has its place, and it’ll be up to gamers to decide when and where to use ‘em.  There are mountable machineguns to control if you wish, but using them strays from the mission objectives.
 

Ionic?  Doric?  Corinthian?  How about rubble…

Airfield Ambush was the second campaign we got a crack at and is one of several vehicular levels in the game, this one showcasing a tank.  The objective of the level is to disable an airfield (and run over a few grunts along the way) with a caravan of tanks.  The tank has two variations of firepower, the primary being a turret blast useful for (for lack of a better phrase) ‘blowing s#%t up’ (controlled with the R trigger) and the secondary being a machine gun perfect for putting down bazooka-wielding foot soldiers (controlled by clicking in the left thumbstick on the Xbox).  The tank offers three modes of perspective, one 3^rd-person and two 1^st-person modes.  The 3^rd-person mode shows the tank in its entirety and looks fantastic for idle observers.  Gamers can also view the level from the machine gunner’s POV atop the tank or the turret’s POV in the cockpit.  While I’m used to sticking to one POV throughout a level (even if there are more options) I found myself switching back and forth and forth and back between each of the POVs for functionality’s sake.  Driving the tank is easiest from the 3^rd-person view, aiming the machinegun is easiest from the machine gunner’s view, and firing the turret’s shells is easiest from the turret’s view.  Switching perspectives is simply a matter of  pressing the B or Y button (on the Xbox), but for some reason it’s split up on two different buttons which ends up being not all that bad once your fingers get used to it. 

Tank you very much: a look from inside the cockpit

The last hands-on mission on display was titled A Desert Ride.  Our hero mans the turret on the back of a jeep as the driver hightails it to a set of ruins dominated by the Germans.  In this mission, I truly felt ‘along for the ride’ as I had no control over the jeep or the true pacing of the level, save for some instances in which the jeep will stop until all enemies in a particular section have fallen.  It wasn’t a bad thing though – this level has some of the most gorgeous textures you’ll see in a game, and it was just fine to take in the sights from the back of the jeep.  The desert landscape is almost photorealistic and reminded me of some of the better breathtaking backdrops in games such as Gran Turismo 4 or Ico.  Though this level wasn’t particularly challenging (okay, it was easier than invading France), there’s a lot of satisfaction in turning an airborne plane into a fiery ball of scrap metal. 

Hey!  Put your hands at 10 and 2 o’clock buddy!  Didn’t you learn anything from Driver’s Ed?

The production values of Call of Duty: Finest Hour should impress even the most snobbish gamer.  Spark Studios, the developer, is comprised of many developers who jumped ship from EA and previously worked on the Medal of Honor series.  These guys take their games seriously.  They scouted locations intensely, hired military advisors by the truckload, recorded real WWII-era weapons for the game’s superb audio, and enlisted some Hollywood talent to voice characters, pen the script, and score the mood. 
 

Everything has been put together in a nice package for Call of Duty: Finest Hour, and I expect this title to be a big hit on consoles if it can survive Halo 2’s release.  It will no doubt draw comparisons to the Medal of Honor series and Battlefield: 1942, which will be rightfully deserved.  It draws on several points of both, extracting the better qualities of both.  The game does promise to support 16 players online via Xbox Live or the PS2 network adapter, though no multiplayer demonstration was on display.  Look for Call of Duty: Finest Hour to reach the frontlines on November 16.