Call of Duty 2

Infinity Ward

images c/o MobyGames

When Infinity Ward released Call of Duty in 2003, they were stepping into a crowded battlefield. While Return to Castle Wolfenstein had revived the popular alt-history series, Medal of Honor was the dominant franchise on console, Battlefield 1942 was proving a huge success, and Day of Defeat was the little commercial Half-Life mod that could. While Call of Duty certainly had its share of multiplayer fans, its big draw was showing everyone else how to make a fun single-player war shooter. By 2005, Medal of Honor was losing ground fast, the released-for-free Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory commanded enduring popularity, Battlefield 1942 had a playerbase in the of thousands, and Day of Defeat commanded a small but loyal playerbase mostly made up, as far as I could tell at the time, of myself and people who were sick of Counter-Strike. Everyone was waiting to see what Infinity Ward did next. And what they did next was the game that launched a quarter million Xbox 360 consoles: Call of Duty 2.

With twenty years between then and now, Call of Duty has become a very different beast; there’s a lot to be said for its often-dubious messaging and its long-time domination of console multiplayer (picking up where Halo left off, helped in no small part by being multi-platform) but also in how much the series itself has changed over the years. Call of Duty 2, unlike the more recent games, isn’t interested in weaving a fictional action movie storyline with more fleshed-out characters and an ongoing narrative. In that sense it’s less like, oh I don’t know, Saving Private Ryan, and more like the 1962 war epic The Longest Day (which greatly influenced the first game), in that it gives a wide-shot overview of the war from three different sides: the Americans, the British and the Soviet Union. Characters are cardboard cutouts at best (Nolan North in an early role as Sergeant Randall notwithstanding); the protagonist is a cipher (save for diary entries serving as loading screens) and the only thing you need to know is where the Nazis are.

But hey, that’s not a bad thing… it’s just, if anything, an artifact of the franchise’s roots and the zeitgeist of early-00s gaming.

If you’ve played Call of Duty 1, you already know what to expect: lots of explosions, gunfire, enemies and allies shouting, bombastic orchestral music, and seeing the “you died” screen a lot. The changes Call of Duty 2 brings are substantial. First is a big update to the renderer. While it’s still the Quake III engine underneath, it makes use of a lot of new graphical wizardry that was coming into widespread use in the aftermath of Doom 3, Half-Life 2, Far Cry and their competitors. Personally, I think it low-key looks like dogshit now, with Call of Duty 1 having aged a lot better graphically, but it is what it is — and those smoke effects are nice, at least. But then there’s the series’ most lasting changes: regenerating health, a console-style checkpoint system, and a reduced weapon capacity, Halo style. Controversial upon release, these changes nevertheless would most define the series from that point on.

All these changes aside, Call of Duty 2 is pretty indistinguishable from the first game. We still get the same trio of narratives: American, British and Soviet, though in a twist, we start with the Soviets first. While you can play the three factions in their entirety in order, as you progress you gradually unlock missions for the other factions as well, allowing you to play in roughly chronological order (the Soviet campaign, set entirely during the Battle of Stalingrad, sometimes overlaps with the British campaign, which covers North Africa and Caen and thus overlaps with the American campaign, which starts with the Normandy landings and ends with taking part in the invasion of Germany.) However which way you play it, there’s just about no overlap between the three campaigns, unlike the original where the British and American characters sometimes interact.

While the introduction of regenerating health has largely been a benefit, I think it also gave Infinity Ward the excuse they needed to make the game more difficult. One section I struggled with involved an ambush in North Africa; after surviving the initial onslaught in the street, I struggled to cross a wide plaza that had a lot of overlapping lines of sight from multiple entrenched Nazi positions. The enemy also has a tendency to grenade-spam, and while Call of Duty 2 does have a grenade indicator, it’s a little ridiculous to sometimes have three or four grenades all land at your feet at once — in large part because the AI is coded to often prioritize you over your allies, an infuriating thing that a lot of World War II shooters do.

Nonetheless Call of Duty 2 is still great fun; it’s a real blast to grab hold of a Thompson and just unload on a whole gaggle of Nazis, or commandeer a mounted gun and punch a hole in a tank. The introduction of smoke grenades makes approaches across open ground a little safer, though the game can be shockingly stingy about giving you more if you’ve run out. While I think, ultimately, I still prefer the original, the sequel really is the game that changed the entire World War II shooter genre, and ultimately for the better — at least, before it petered out entirely by the end of the Aughts.

 

-june❤ 

Part of a series on Call of Duty 

Call of Duty	United Offensive	Call of Duty 2
Call of Duty 3
Finest Hour	2: Big Red One	Roads to Victory
4: Modern Warfare	Modern Warfare 2	Modern Warfare 3
Modern Warfare DS	Modern Warfare Mobilized	Modern Warfare 3: Defiance
Modern Warfare 2019	Modern Warfare II	Modern Warfare III
Warzone
World At War	WaW: Final Fronts	World At War DS
Black Ops	Black Ops DS	Black Ops: Declassified
Black Ops II	Black Ops III	Black Ops IIII
Black Ops: Cold War	Black Ops 6	Black Ops 7
Ghosts	Advanced Warfare	Infinite Warfare
WWII	Vanguard	???
Zombies