Call of Duty 2

I think I said at one stage that I would post a review on Call of Duty 2, so here it is.

Ever since gaming has been developing as an industry, there have been gimmicks.

Dictionary.com

tr.v. gim·micked, gim·mick·ing, gim·micks

1. To add gimmicks to; clutter with gadgets or attention-getting details. Often used with up.

The most common in recent years has been graphics. Bill Waterson (Calvin & Hobbes) once said something like this:

Good writing always makes up for bad drawing, but it’s very hard for a good drawing to make up for bad writing.

The same could often be said for games, where developers try to cover a weak concept with nice graphics.

I now think there’s a new gimmick on the block. Sound.

The sound in COD2 was the first thing I noticed (I had to turn the volume down). But what was great about the sound was the detail, you had comrades calling out to you, guns firing, people screaming as they died. There was one word for it, intense.

The whole demo was pretty intense, but I would have to say, pretty enjoyable.

The graphics were good, but quite different from the crisp lines and realism of battlefield 2. It seemed to me like the graphics almost had a cartoonish tinge to them compared to BF2.

Looking Out at the Square

There were a few interesting features. I can’t remember how it was handled in the original, but there appear to be no health levels. When you are being shot at you ‘feel the pain’ in the form of an increasingly red screen. If you keep getting hit, you’ll die, but if you get under cover, the red will disappear and you’re good to go.

I enjoyed this feature, possibly because it’s a bit different to other FPS’s I’ve been playing. It forced you to look for cover when advancing, which is pretty important.

At the Docks

Something I should mention is that currently I don’t play games online. This leaves games like BF2 (which is heavily made for the multiplayer online games) at a huge disadvantage. So the original COD and the new version do appeal to me. I enjoyed the original, and I’m sure I would enjoy this one. I’m just not prepared to pay too much for it.

If I can pick it up for $20 and resell it for $15 then I’ll give this game a go. It just feels that it hasn’t moved on from the original enough. At one stage when BF1942 and COD were competitors, you could see similarities. These days it’s hard to see anything other than the genre in common.

It’s on the wish list, but only just.

7/10