Call of Duty 2  Preview for Xbox 360

- Tim Mellish, " Cloud890 ", Senior Editor

Friday, July 01, 2005

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Title: Call of Duty 2 .............................................. System: Xbox 360 .............................................. Genre: First Person Shooter .............................................. Publisher: Activision .............................................. Developer: Infinity Ward .............................................. Release: 11/22/05 .............................................. Online: Yes .............................................. ESRB: Teen (T) .............................................. The Call of Duty franchise can be described in one simple word: intense. Veterans of the original games, both for the consoles and PC, will attest to how mind-boggling and extreme the experiences can be. I personally never had a game tire me out as Call Of Duty did. After only a few hours with the game I had to stop from pure exhaustion, despite my powerful urge to keep playing. Call of Duty put the players in the shoes of three soldiers from different Allied Forces allowing the war to be experienced from different fronts. The controls were tight, the A.I. is 'above normal' quality, and the sound jaw dropping. Call of Duty for the PC won numerous game of the year awards and spawned a healthy online following. The console versions of the game, while good, were nowhere near the quality of their PC cousin. So how does a developer follow up a game like Call Of Duty? Simply and obviously; make it bigger, better and badder than anything the prequel could dish out. Thanks to the power of the Xbox 360, Call of Duty 2 aims to do just that. Luckily for the gaming community, the developers of Call Of Duty are not trying to drastically change the gaming experience. Merely they are taking what is there and improving it ten-fold. This applies to everything from levels, to A.I., and even to the sound of the game. Like Call of Duty, the sequel will once again let the player experience the war through the eyes of three distinctly different soldiers. The soldiers featured will be American, British and Russian. There have not been any specifics released about each campaign except for what has been shown in trailers. For the Americans there will a beach landing similar to "D-Day". No it won’t be Omaha Beach. Instead players will be thrown into a situation where they must scale a mountainside while German forces lob mortars and rain bullets down onto the helpless Americans. Complimenting the beach is a new desert setting. We can assume the location is Africa. In Africa the Allied forces will find themselves fighting in a city and an open desert. The city is compact with tight streets and the danger of enemy forces popping out of any building or sitting around every corner. This contrasts to the wide-open feel of the desert level. In the desert level players will have to charge enemy bunkers as well as survive during an intense tank battle. Two other settings shown but not featured much were a snowy Russian city and the European countryside at dusk. There is not much that appears different in the gameplay with Call of Duty 2. It is like its prequel, being a first-person shooter (FPS). There will, however, obviously be some A.I. improvements for both the allies and the enemies. Probably the biggest change will be the exceedingly over-the-top scripted events that will make Call of Duty 2 feel truly like a war game. In the trailer, tanks blew through brick walls catching soldiers completely by surprise. In another event, planes flew over the top of the African city and some were on fire while others were firing at troops below. During the beach landing, American boats fired large harpoons into the side of the rocky terrain and soldiers began to scale the mountainside. All these attributes plus the first-person perspective will once again make players get up from the game just to take a breather. If there was any part of Call of Duty that was most impressive it was the sound. Bullets whizzed past the player’s head, grenades exploded with impressive booms, and an orchestral band backed up the entire experience with a moving assortment of musical pieces. Call of Duty 2 plans to top this. First and foremost, the biggest addition to the sound in Call of Duty 2 will be the yelling between the men as they fight. Although it was present in Call of Duty, the phrases were typically repeated and after the third or forth run through, nothing new was offered. It also did not offer any real tactical advantage to the gaming experience. In Call of Duty 2 listening to the soldiers will be a key to winning firefights. Soldiers will now yell out enemy locations, movements and the status of their own men. Players will now be able to keep track of their enemy as they duck under a wall to avoid gunfire. This will especially be helpful on the harder levels. Online options have not been announced for Call of Duty 2 for the Xbox 360, but it’s hard to believe there won’t be any. Call of Duty for the PC had a healthy following online and with the ease of Xbox Live it will likely flourish. Call of Duty 2, the first true sequel to the Call of Duty franchise on the PC, is shaping up nicely. With varied environments, improved A.I., more intense and scripted events and breathtaking sound, it may just be the only WWII game needed on the 360.

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