Call of Duty: Finest Hour

Available On: PlayStation 2, Game Cube, and Xbox
Played it on: PlayStation 2
Played it for: Awhile... there's no playtime counter, so I don't really know how long it was, but it was probably more than 30 hours.

RATING: 8/10

The Second World War, the most brutal conflict in world history, comes to life for the first time in Call of Duty. This game was, however, only published on PC, and the console version, Finest Hour, was not released until a year later in 2004. Where Halo: Combat Evolved redefined Sci-Fi, Call of Duty re-vamped realism. These two games set the bar for how consoles would be played in the future, and set standards that lasted for at least the next 5 years.

The game itself takes you through 3 separate campaigns, one in Africa with the British, one in Russia with the Soviets, and one in Germany with the Americans. Every two missions, the main character is switched in order to tell the stories of multiple soldiers across these three fronts. A secondary note is that all battles portrayed in the game are based on real battles, and each of the main characters was based on a real World War II soldier.

Now then, the game. It's an interesting throwback to play this game after playing the newest of the first-person-shooters, the previously reviewed "Medal of Honor Warfighter." So, I'll start with what stands out well with the Finest Hour's gameplay.

The pacing feels a lot more deliberate than most modern shooters. There's not an explosion every three seconds, and you don't play as someone who survives the entire war and saves the known universe from total control by Adolf Hitler. Some may say that by not playing as a single hero, the player can't get as emotionally attached, but this actually works greatly to Finest Hour's advantage. World War II was a very emotional war, and the likability of the Allied Forces comes through right from the get-go. Sure, there will be personal preferences that arise as the game progresses. My personal favorite character is Tanya Pavelovna, the Russian sniper. But the other characters are still great, and I understand their hatred for the war, and why they are fighting. In short, the conveyance is very well done.

Also because of this pacing, the game feels much longer than the newer shooters. Granted, there's far more than the roughly 8-12 missions that you'd get in a modern shooter, as that barely covers the Russian campaign, but because of the aforementioned pacing, the game actually stretches itself out nicely. It's not just a sensory overload. Instead, every mission is memorable in at least one or two ways, which is really nice for replay value. Instead of, "Oh god, what do I do here?" it's more like, "Ok, the next part is... yep, the warehouse." This means better planning, better preparation, and overall a better game because it's not just dropped on the shelf and forgotten. But, unfortunately, this is the point where Finest Hour starts losing points.

The gameplay feels a bit... robotic. It wasn't made for PlayStation 2, it was ported to the console from the Xbox, so many times the game will slow down and start to feel sluggish. Sometimes this is not the case, and the game will feel quick and responsive, but most of the time, there is a slight but noticeable lag while looking around and moving. While it doesn't interrupt or mess with the gameplay, it does provide an easily visible point that it wasn't as well made as its PC predecessor. This continues with the guns and damage in the game. In most modern shooters, the game gives the player a hit marker when bullets connect with a target, and the hit markers stop when the target dies. This is not the case in Finest Hour. The hit markers will persist, even when shooting people during their death animations, giving the illusion that it takes more bullets to kill than it really does. However, once it becomes evident that bolt action rifles kill in one shot, and machine guns in only three or four, the game gets actually very easy. Unless the difficulty is set to hard, the game won't be challenging to finish. The one exception to this is the Aachen mission (easily the most difficult in the game), but once this is complete, the rest of the game plays like the missions before. And finally, the character animations aren't conducive to a war environment. I'll give it slack for that last point, as it was made in 2004, but the animations do look a bit childish and over-exaggerated. For these, the game easily loses some valuable points.

Regardless of the issues, Finest Hour is still fun to play. It doesn't compare in graphical quality to modern shooters, but it's a great example of what can be accomplished in less than a decade. And it's also a game that I think many modern companies can learn from, as its establishment of character, story, and campaign length and longevity place it far above the modern shooter campaign. And, frankly, the game is just fun.