Call of Duty 2003

For whatever reason, I have been on a bit of a Call of Duty kick recently and decided to play the original PC release again for the first time since I was in high school. Made in 2003 by Infinity Ward an offshoot of Medal of Honor:Allied Assault creators 2015 game, CoD is in many ways a spiritual sequel to MoH:AA made during the same WW2 gaming boom in the early 2000’s.

CoD consists of three main campaigns: playing as an American paratrooper in D-Day and then doing some commando stuff, playing as a British paratrooper in D-Day and then doing some commando stuff (this was made right after Band of Brothers came which I imagine is the reason they focused so much on the paratrooper aspect), or playing as a Soviet conscript mostly in Stalingrad.

To be blunt the game has not aged particularly well. The main issue is that the core gameplay is kind of mediocre and not particularly memorable, the guns aren’t particularly interesting to shoot, the AI is dumb and most of the level design is repetitive and uninspired. The main innovation is that you are usually playing as part of a squad and while you can’t command the squad in any way, it does help immerse you feel that you are part of an army and not some random super soldier (the tag line for the game is literally “In the war that changed the world, no one fought alone”) “

This immersion aspect is what made the game so memorable for me back when it first came out. This was as realistic a depiction of World War 2 that there had ever been in a game and the atmosphere really made the levels feel bigger than just a series of corridors which is what they were. The high point is the first Stalingrad level which has you initially unarmed trying to survive until you can find a rifle and then fight through several floors of ruined apartment buildings until you reach an ideal sniper perch to assist the main body of troops assault an entrenched German position. But most of the missions are nowhere near as good as this one and graphics that were so impressive nearly 20 years ago are now significantly less so. I don’t mind the early 2000’s level graphics because that’s what I was brought up on, but I can imagine someone playing the game who wasn’t around in that period thinking it to be quite ugly. Either way I think CoD mostly relies upon it’s presentation of battlefield chaos to paper over the mediocre gameplay and level design and if the graphics are no longer impressive that is really not going to work.

In summary CoD is not a bad game, but I can’t recommend this game to anyone who doesn’t either have nostalgia for that era of shooters or is interested in where the CoD series started. If you are looking for a great WW2 era FPS, the one I would still recommend is Brothers in Arms which is also from this era but holds up fantastically and has great squad based combat with a tactical element.