Classic Call of Duty PC Games
In the twilight years of old-school first-person shooters prior to the modern military shooter invasion, Call of Duty 1 (2003), Call of Duty: United Offensive (2004) and Call of Duty 2 (2005) emerged as among the finest FPS games and WW2 fiction the world could offer. In the days before as the flagship title of sexual abuse enabler Activision’s Call of Duty was a name praised with freshness and movie-like qualities, when this was still a considered a net positive. We will make a close inspection as to why the games still deserve the praise, and also discuss how the games differ from one another in subtle ways. Just in case, spoilers abound.
Call of Duty 1
When isolated from its dreadfully mundane and mundanely dreadful nature, war can be quite enjoyable. When it involves shooting Nazis, the fun increases by a hundred fold. It’s not surprising then this found its way to games as early as Castle Wolfenstein (1981). But for a long time, video games did not represent war as historical epics, opting for either the abstract representation of strategy games or in the almost entirely history-agnostic context of action games. In addition, the first attempts at 3D, epic WW2 games plainly lack the necessary graphical punch. CoD is a fateful meeting of matured technology, evolved game design and the fresh language of the war movies of the era.
The result is a game that feels great to play. The night sky, the smoke on destroyed machines, apartment block ruins are all chillingly beautiful. The game is clearly made to look realistic, but today its color palette gives it a pastel-like vibe. Even the detail-lacking textures like faces and trees look tolerable, if not charming at times. The sound design is top notch as well. Guns each have their own identity with tiny visual details, the variety in heaviness, the fire spread, reload time, and most importantly, their sound. The footsteps, the random chatter between soldiers, somewhat comical death sounds, even grenades bouncing from the wall are so distinctly recognizable. To top it all off, the orchestral music by Michael Giacchino gracefully guides your mood throughout the game: Sometimes heroic, sometimes sneaky, sometimes intense, sometimes happy, but never too melodramatic.
Much of the good feel of the game comes from the level design. Levels have a nice sense of variety and identity. Even the day/night switches alone on the same map brings a unique feeling. More importantly, they all have a palpable sense of naturalism. War-torn towns don’t bend to my will, the car wreckage does not feel as if it’s there for me to use as a cover, the houses always have a couple more rooms and doors than strictly necessary, there are burning wreckage at seemingly random places that will hurt the player. This is a very linear game, but most of the time the player will be gently directed by natural obstacles, streets, walls, rubble and minefields. Only a few times does the game resort to bluntly placed invisible fences to keep the player inside the game’s bounds.
CoD 1’s breakout gameplay feature is to be able to fight as a team and it deserves every phase it got back in the day. Especially in closed corridors, the fights get chaotic in a way only normally possible in multiplayer games. People shout, hurl grenades, take cover, get injured and –- save for a sparse use of invincible NPCs — die and you are just one of them. The game normally punishes friendly fire with a game over but in heated combat moments, will tolerate it to a small degree. You can kill or get killed by accident. No matter how skilled you might be as a soldier, in the end, you are still just a guy.
The game tries its hardest to hammer this point to home. Many moments in the game feel out of slightly exaggerated war stories: “This one time, me and the sergeant crossed into the German lines on a car but a tank started to follow us, we sneaked into the streets, then found some other car, and escaped from dozens of German soldiers!”, or “Our small squad captured a whole apartment block then defended it against an entire mechanized battalion for minutes!” They still feel entirely plausible though, especially when you know how truly ridiculous WW2 was at times, the battle that inspired the latter scenario in the game happened for an entire month for instance! [1] In the solo levels, I never feel quite like a superhuman FPS hero. Rather, these levels are actually quite terrifying. In particular, the level when you plant bombs to a warship feels cold, meandering and claustrophobic. Even a glaringly gamey mechanics like health bar adds to the naturalism. Being at low health means I have to be super careful and scramble to find any health pickup I can. It’s perfectly clear the player is just a lucky soldier, and that a stray bullet, an unheard grenade, a wrong step in the open field could end their life. Player won’t even get the most of the heroic moments. They won’t carry the injured soldier, they won’t drive cars in frantic escapes, they won’t destroy a tank by climbing on top of it and throwing a bomb inside, and they are not the one who hoists the Soviet flag at the Reichstag. Most importantly however, the player cannot open doors themselves.
Curiously, such moments are not presented in cutscenes. A couple of times, the game will immobilize the player with something like an explosion to focus their attention to a big scene, but the game never quits the first-person view and never completely takes away the player’s control. Most of the time, we are free to look away from the action and even do a little sequence breaking. Like, in a level where you defend a French town, a tank blows up a wall and we are most likely expected to destroy it after it makes a small trip across the street while we escape its gunfire. But if we have an anti-tank weapon ready with us, we can just blow it up the moment it appears! From the same level, anticipating German assault, a soldier is sent to scout the street and gets killed in the first round of fire. But we can prevent his death by running outside and shooting that Nazi first! In the most ironic fashion for a series that gave linear games a bad reputation, the linearity in the original game never feels constricting.
This adds back to the game’s sense of naturalism. With one notable exception, this game lacks any kind of melodramatic excess. There is a moment where the player needs to cover for someone carrying an injured soldier, but despite being unkillable up until that point, the guy might just die. Despite clearly being an important character, there is no slowed-down Sad Moment, whether he lives or dies, the player continues all the same. In the level where we sneak into a ship with Captain Price, he doesn’t make it back. We don’t even see the moment of his death. We just return to our boat and the person waiting is like “Damn, he is dead!” and the level ends just like that. In the American campaign, you save this guy from a prison and for the entirety of the British campaign you go through many, many deadly ordeals together. And yet, he just dies alone in an enemy ship. The game maintains a consistently mundane, down-to-earth atmosphere. These days, most games would not miss the chance to give the player to sneak up and make an epic knife attack or reward them for playing in certain ways with scores, achievements and collectibles. It feels so nice to just play a game that’s a little indifferent to the player, especially when the indifference is actually crucial to the tone.
Call of Duty definitely wants to be a fun WW2 epic that makes the player feel heroic. But it also respects the subject matter a lot. It is not quite “War is hell!” on the whole but it makes sure to show that war is not fun for the people partake in it. The death screen shows player quotes from famous figures of the era, most of which have a clear anti-war streak, perhaps just as a way to remind us that in the real deal, we would have only had one shot. On mission-loading screens we can see diaries of the protagonists. Even maps and typed-out dossiers have pen writings on them, about changed plans, things gone wrong, or a little quip about the situation. Every soldier you fight alongside has a name and visible health status. The game’s earnest recognition of the everyday people who fought in the war is what makes its celebration of heroism meaningful.
This might sound like a minimum level of seriousness that the media needs to approach the topic of wars, and perhaps it is. And yet so many WW2 video games absolutely miss the mark on that. They either have too much sob story about American soldiers, or too much one-man cool espionage, too much cartoonish action, too much self-congratulatory nonsense. CoD itself could not resist the temptation, as apparent with CoD: World at War (2008) and especially, newer Call of Duty WW2 (2017). A level of naturalism is clearly necessary for a graceful approach to WW2, and such a method can lend itself easily to so many more games. There are many theaters of war with little to no media depiction. But it seems like, any WW action game after a certain date was just destined to be a modern military shooter with an old timey skin.
This is also precisely one of the biggest strengths of the classic CoD. The games not only did depict the Eastern Front, the first game chose it as its cover image and devotes much of its cinematic attention onto it. Unfortunately, it is also the only area of the game deserving serious criticism. The developers could not help being Americans, there is at least one loading screen with a fake Cyrillic front, and the battle of Stalingrad in particular is filled with ahistorical tropes [2][3][4][5], but even still, it captures the spirit of how terrible war is very well.
I put the majority of the blame on the movie inspiration, Enemy at the Gates (2001). The game doesn’t seem to go hard on “Soviets bad 1984” attitude, because despite its shortcomings the Soviet campaign is truly the high-mark of the game. Even as a kid with no knowledge of history, it’s the Soviet levels that actually made me think of Nazis as the bad side. The player tries to live unarmed in true hell, has to fight in burned cities and the deepest winter and finally, tastes the glory of taking over Berlin. The game even ends with the Soviet protagonist writing to his mother about how he felt of the American soldiers as his brothers. American and British campaigns are bloody fine shooters, but the Soviet campaign is where the game gains its beating heart, its vulnerable soul, its trembling voice.
It’s a good thing then, the other two games do not repeat weird Americanisms.
Call of Duty: United Offensive
Unlike contemporary DLCs, old expansion packs were made with the assumption that they would be likely bought only by the fans of the original, which gave a lot of flexibility to the developers. For example, they could make the games as difficult as they want, discarding the usual design concerns. United Offensive absolutely relishes being difficult, it’s truly one of the toughest shooters around, even the easiest setting is not a cakewalk. The challenge feels appropriate as it depicts the intense winter fights of Battle of the Bulge and the utmost brutal Battle of Kursk. In addition, the new levels are much longer compared to the originals, the player will find themselves running from one battle position to another. The game can be quite relentless, in a quite fitting way to the spirit of war. It does allow the player to catch a break in the British levels though, as an inversion of the original, they are much calmer compared to the American and the Soviet campaigns, including a level where you just shoot at German fighter planes as a bomber gunner.
Despite having nominally fewer levels, the levels feel much more varied both in style and the substance. There is more attention to the small details, even similar snow levels feel distinct and memorable. The game’s color palette is quite diverse: the bright whites of the French farms and forests, metallic grays and the medieval stones of a fortress in the beautiful sunset of a Sicilian town, the wet green and brown marshes of Ukraine giving way to the cities under the hellish red of ever-burning flames. The action always stays fresh, even with the longer levels, the game never plainly repeat the original’s nor its own scenarios, when the player is asked to conquer a town, they go through the whole deal; the initial approach, clearing enemy positions and then repelling a giant counterattack all in one level. The gameplay feels more meaty as a result. Small refinements add up as well; there are more guns to use, the player can sprint, the autosaves are more frequent and less buggy, and so on.
In particular, it’s truly amazing how much the Soviet campaign improves compared to the original, which is already great despite its shortcomings. In the absence of excess dramatization, the brutality of war comes out much more profoundly, we can even casually encounter flamethrower soldiers, in the classic, plain CoD style. Much more care is given to the dialogue of the Soviet soldiers, there is a real sense that the player character and his comrades care about each other. And the last level, the defense of the train station and eventual rescue can easily rival conquering the Reichstag in its ability to stir my heart.
Call of Duty: United Offense does not contend with being a worthy addition to the first game, it’s one of the best first person shooters period, just by itself.
Call of Duty 2
Everything that makes CoD good continues in full force in the sequel, this time in the streets of Moscow, the valleys of Tunisia and the beaches of Normandy, with crispier graphics. The breath is visible in cold air, the uniforms look busy, the ground is palpably wet in the rain, metals are more metallic, wooden textures shine brighter. There are some gameplay refinements: the player can use smoke bombs which adds tactical depth. Iron sights work slightly better and are more visible. Ally tanks have individual names so I get melancholic when they get blown up. It is filled with so many great moments: Using a pipe to sneak past the enemy lines, chasing Nazis in an epic counterattack and then blowing up the building they hide, calling artillery strikes on whole tank divisions… On the whole it broadly hits the same notes as the first game, so if you enjoy it, you will also enjoy this one.
The departures from the first game are where things get interesting. The most notable one is the change of the health system. The sequel replaces the mundane,static healthy bar with self-regeneration: The modern system where waiting somewhere away from the line of fire for a few seconds heals the player. This fixes the theoretical problem of the player being stuck in an unfavorable position and forced to break the pacing of the game by searching for items. Now they can hop on between one firefight to another seamlessly and the game remains fair in each individual encounter. However, I don’t like this system all that much.
For one, the problem it solves is actually a positive for me most of the time. It’s not really more or less realistic but it does manage to instill a feeling of mortality. Instead of this, self-healing gives me short but semi-frequent spikes of fear, like getting jump-scared repeatedly. Perhaps this wouldn’t be so bad without the accompanying UI design. Gone is the simple health bar and the number, now when the player gets hurt, the whole screen progressively becomes engulfed in red, and eventually, a condescending “YOU ARE HURT, GET TO COVER!” text appears. It’s so annoying how CoD 2 popularized this understanding of “immersion”. Frankly it just gets in the way of playing the game, I literally can’t see the action when it’s most critical.
The health system brings up it’s own theoretical problem: the player might exploit it and render the game too easy. The devs “solved” this problem by having the enemies focus on the player more than AI allies. For example, in a building defense section, they will go past your teammates and straight to the player’s spot. In the first game I could see some encounters end without my involvement at all or even hide in places where the enemies never find me because they are busy fighting others. In the sequel this never happens. It is also followed by making the enemies spam indefinitely unless the player is at a specific place the game wants them to be and, similarly, appear only when they are at a certain place. In a North Africa level, Nazis have a machine gun position fortified with sandbags and barbed wires, supported by people on the balcony of the building near behind it. Try to clear the position from the front? Nope, the house will indefinitely spit new fascists out until I go around the street and hit them on the rear. In the very last level, when I turn around a corner I find a backyard surrounded by walls and then, see several soldiers materialize out of thin air, and rush to their defensive positions without caring about me right behind their backs, oops! I honestly find silly mistakes in games charming as long as they don’t obstruct me from playing the game, but it creates a feeling that the player is at the center of everything, which goes against the spirit of the game. As if I have seen the magician’s trick, it’s hard to unsee once caught: The player starts the fights and they end the fights, it feels as if even the AI partners fight a little less effectively. Not having any solo levels makes this even more obvious. Perhaps the original used similar mechanics as well, but if it did, it was clearly far more delicate about it. Here, it definitely hurts the verisimilitude, it’s pestering rather than challenging and it started a trend where the shooters leaned towards micromanaging the player’s experience more and more. It’s not critically bad here, the game is still filled with many spontaneous, frantic, organic gunfights, it’s just unpleasant sometimes, like biting the bitter seeds when eating a delicious fruit.
The second most notable thing is that the game is a lot more “modern” when it comes to music, i.e. it’s allergic to having music take over scenes. This means, unlike the original, what soundtrack there is is a lot less memorable. Maybe the game wants to prioritize the battle ambiance, which is far noisier and involved compared to the first game. Both your allies and enemies will constantly shout about stuff: Enemies locations, needing reload, demanding support, insulting the other side. For the most part, it makes the fights feel more natural, but it becomes silly when the last remaining guy doesn’t cease to cry at the top of his lungs, like surely during an intense shootout sometimes combatants would get quiet too. The noise in the original is just fine, and I certainly appreciate having a real soundtrack over what we have in CoD 2, even the menu theme doesn’t want to get your attention at all.
The game is also notable for its lack of narrative structure. The levels are just a collection of WW2 theaters, there is little if any story progression: Each couple of levels you just switch years and place without a sense of resolution. In the original, the player survived in Stalingrad and marched to Berlin, the expansion focused on entire battles on operations stretched on a couple of really long levels. The sequel just ends with taking over a German town, it almost feels unfinished. It doesn’t help that, because series of levels take place in very similar places, they have a tendency to blend into one another, and yes the game’s better moments actually strengthen this feeling. It sits in an awkward spot between CoD 1 and UO, it lingers on the same-looking scenery a lot, yet it is too short to conclude near anything it starts in a meaningful way. It is a series of amazing moments in between many fine ones.
It also has a couple of minor annoyances. Pistols don’t have a dedicated slot, making them functionally useless. The ability to switch between semi-automatic and automatic modes in certain gun models is gone. The button for grenades throws them automatically, leaving less window to decide where the grenade should go. When the player is near a loose grenade, the heads-up display informs them with a sign. This is more player friendly but it also conditions the player into following a marker over being aware of their surroundings. The dialog text is smaller, a harbinger of another annoying modern trend. The game auto-saves very frequently but you can’t manually save, view files in-game or start a level from the middle part. While it isn’t this game’s fault, the North Africa levels feels slightly off, years of modern military shooters gives it a bad vibe. Mission briefing slideshows are replaced with official military documentaries, which have less personality. Finally, there are very few night levels. Not just because I like the night view but also it could certainly help to make the levels more memorable.
Overall, Call of Duty 2 is a consistently great experience that occasionally fails below its full potential. The fact that the original is one notch better is not really a point against this game.
Conclusion
Call of Duty 1, United Offense and Call of Duty 2 are excellent WW2 shooters that eschew the pulp for having one foot in reality. Anyone that craves good WW2 media or a simply enjoyable FPS game should try them out.
PSA: Don’t buy them though, not just because Activision-Blizzard is evil and doesn’t need your money, but they are also massive cheapskates and never properly discount their games. Paying above 1–2$ dollars for a 10+ year old game is a scam, regardless of the game’s quality.
— -
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pavlov's_House (They even modeled the house accurately!)
[2] Yes, a reddit post, but this subreddit is actually decent:
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/22t8dg/did_the_soviet_union_really_use_human_wave/
This article is written thanks to my dearest Patrons, namely: Effy, Laura Watson, Makkovar, Morgan, Olympia, Otakundead, Sasha. Also thanks to Alex(@jyhadscientist on Twitter) for his perfect editing work
