The Fog of War: Duties Failed and Met

Hi, everybody! It’s Fellfrosch filling in for Mustard today, who has come to the sad realization that he just doesn’t play enough games anymore. Rather than fix this problem, however, he’s decided to continue doing whatever “responsible” things are taking him away from games in the first place. I’ve told him that poor decisions like that won’t get him anywhere in life, but what can you do? He’s stubborn.

Fortunately for all of you, I have something war related to talk about: Call of Duty 2. I am not, as a rule, fond of shooters with storylines, Serious Sam being the obligatory exception—I don’t like the conceit that there are a bunch of bad guys in a maze, and I need to shoot them and look for health power-ups. Give me a wide-open space and some clear objectives, a la the Battlefield series or Counter-Strike, and I’m your man, but toss a linear campaign in there and I just lose interest. Lucky for me, then, that I made technical mistake that may cost my father $65.

What happened is this: two weeks before Christmas my Mom called and asked if my Dad’s computer would run Call of Duty 2. I was pretty sure it would, as it’s got passable 3D capability and blah blah blah, so I had her check a few things and read me some hardware specs, and decided that there wouldn’t be any problem. She bought it and gave it to him for Christmas, he installed it, and of course it wouldn’t run because the game is some kind of mythical graphics titan that laughs at mortals and pities fools. I helped him update his graphics driver and DirectX and all of that, and it still wouldn’t work, so I finally went down there personally and assured myself that, yes, the graphics card just wasn’t big and burly enough to handle it. I felt very bad—so bad, in fact, that I decided to try one more thing. I’d take it home, install it on my machine (which has a new, modern graphics card devoid of rodents), and see if it worked. If it didn’t, then we’d know that the problem was a corruption in the disk or game itself, and a simple trade-in would solve the problem. It was long shot, and sadly it didn’t pay off—the game runs fine on mine, which means that my Dad will need to spend at least $65 to play his own Christmas present. Fortunately he has a birthday coming up, so we can get him a card then.

But, you know, between now and then I’m sitting here with Call of Duty 2 installed on my computer, so I may as well see what it’s like, right? Turns out that it’s like awesome, which is similar to outstanding, which is very much in the spirit of amazingly amazing. Now I have to finish it in two weeks, so I can give it back to Dad on his birthday—poor guy.

The first and best part of the whole game? There is no “health”—you take damage, but there’s no artificial meter tracking that damage, and no miraculous super-medicine lying around that can magically kiss you better. Instead, as you take damage your screen begins to redden, and the more damage you take the worse it gets until you can barely see; your guy gasps and grunts in pain, it’s even hard to move. At this point (or, if you’re smart, long before) you retreat to safety and wait while the screen clears up and the pain goes away. This is not, I admit, any more realistic than magic Tylenol, but it feels better because it allows you to ignore health altogether, and focus instead on the story and the action. As long as you don’t take too much damage all at once (which is, I should point out, a very common occurrence—guns are appropriately deadly in this game), you should be fine.

The other cool thing about Call of Duty 2 is that there is no power creep—you’re not finding better and better weapons as you go, because this is a World War 2 game and you’re just using the weapons they had at the time. The rifle you use in the first mission of a campaign is the same rifle you use in the last mission, and the variety comes not in tougher guns or tougher enemies but simply in tougher scenarios. It’s the perfect example of the complaint I always make about tactical RPGs—the late games don’t call for more skill, just for bigger guns, because they don’t bother with clever level design and just make the bad guys harder to beat. Call of Duty 2 is the opposite, which is exactly how it should be: the early scenarios teach you certain skills, and the later ones are carefully devised to make you use those skills the best you can just to survive. It adds a surprising level of tactics to the game—you can’t solve every problem by running out and shooting it, and you have to be careful and sneaky and intelligent enough to analyze a situation before going in. Some of the missions are difficult precisely because they throw you straight into the action and force you to analyze while pinned down and taking heavy fire. It’s the best kind of puzzle solving—you’re not figuring out what order to pull the levers, or whatever contrived thing other games think up, you’re figuring out how to flank a gun emplacement without being ripped apart by a machine gun.

Now that I’ve said all of that, I have to make an admission: my favorite mission so far was, in fact, the one in which you get a bigger gun and throw strategy to the wind. You’re trying to escape from the North African town of Toujane, in the British Campaign, and the enemy is everywhere and your squad has been cut off. Your only hope of survival is to steal an enemy armored car and try to race through the city to rendezvous with the rest of the army. Once you steal the car, your sergeant climbs in one side and Private McGregor climbs in the driver’s seat, leaving you in the gun turret while McGregor tries to steer and the sergeant navigates. The entire thing is scripted, with full voice acting, and is packed with frenetic energy and high-speed surprises. You’ll frequently find yourself roaring down a street to escape one group of enemies only to burst out into an open square full of even more enemies; the sergeant curses and shouts orders, McGregor tries desperately to get the damaged car back into gear and headed the right direction, and the whole time you’re up there firing away at anything that moves, trying to aim while the car goes wild. It’s a truly thrilling stage of the game, and more cinematic than any portion of any video game I’ve ever played.

The rest of the scenarios have been more typical, though still making use of scripted events and voice work, and most of them are pretty good. There are definitely some, however, mostly in the American campaign, that get pretty repetitive: move here, shoot in that window, move here, throw a grenade in that door, move here, shoot those guys, etc., etc., etc. The games biggest flaw, in fact, is that it’s a World War 2 game in the first place—we’ve already played enough World War 2 games to choke an armored cavalry regiment. The fact that a game as technically and artistically masterful as Call of Duty 2 can still wear thin is a sign that the whole genre is pretty dang played out, and it’s time to move on. On this note, however, I was pleased to see that the inevitable D-Day mission was not at Omaha Beach, or even at Utah Beach—it was at Pointe du Hoc, where Army Rangers had to scale a cliff and take out some large guns that were shelling the other beaches. You get a similar experience, charging out of a landing boat into withering fire, but the cliff at least shakes up the formula a little.

That’s all I have to say about wargames at the moment; tune in two weeks from now when we’ll find out who’s writing what, and about which, and for whom.

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Written by Fellfrosch on January 24th, 2006