Call of Duty: Finest Hour

Spark Unlimited

images c/o Neoseeker (PlayStation 2)

Despite being directly competing franchises, the link between Medal of Honor and Call of Duty is actually pretty strong. Infinity Ward, creator of the Call of Duty franchise, was founded by former Medal of Honor developers from 2015, Inc.; the original Call of Duty was rather explicitly intended to be a followup to Medal of Honor: Allied Assault. Medal of Honor in turn would take a lot of ideas from Call of Duty, from implementing ADS to changing the gameplay from espionage action to full-scale combat. And to develop Call of Duty: Finest Hour, the first console adaptation of the new hit shooter franchise, new studio Spark Unlimited hired people from Electronic Arts Los Angeles — who better to develop Call of Duty than people who worked for the main Medal of Honor studio?

Put a pin in that — we’ll come back to it.

Call of Duty: Finest Hour follows a lot of the same structure as the PC game. Three campaigns, one Soviet, one British, and one American, each one telling a couple of stories from the second World War. It starts with the Russians, with the opening moments mimicking the PC version’s Soviet campaign, taking part in the battle of Stalingrad. The British campaign is the shortest at only four missions, with a tale of derring-do in North Africa. The American campaign is all about the final push to Berlin, starting with the battle of Aachen, through the Battle of the Bulge, and finally the capture of the bridge at Remagen. In a somewhat unusual case for this early in the franchise, you’ll actually play six characters: a Soviet infantryman, a female sniper who takes the former for a spotter, and the commander of a T-34 tank crew, with all three working together at one point. The British campaign has you playing just one guy, but the American campaign puts you in the shoes of a soldier from the Army 1st Infantry division — yeah, those guys — with a brief interlude as another tank commander, this time a black man from the 1st Armored, which, while the exact unit is inaccurate, is not ahistorical. (Turns out Call of Duty’s been woke all this time.)

Let’s get down to brass tacks: Call of Duty: Finest Hour is a Medal of Honor game in disguise. And I do mean this as an insult: it has the distinction of being one of the worst World War II shooters out there. The jank is so palpable you can almost taste it. Nothing about this game feels good; performance is garbage even on the original hardware, with framerate drops into the 20s at times. Turning is either too fast or too slow. It just feels clunky, and strange; sometimes I can’t grab items on tables unless I literally stand on those tables. Cover won’t protect you from enemies, but meanwhile hit detection on them is inconsistent at best. Worse, the further you get, the tougher they are, taking multiple bullets to the face without even flinching. Pathing errors are rife; sometimes NPCs will just plain get stuck running in place. And of course there’s always the lovely feature of enemies all targeting you while ignoring your buddies. And one of my very “favorite” features from Medal of Honor? You guessed it: lengthy, dramatic, “oh I am slain!” death animations, made worse by the fact that the hit indicator (Finest Hour being the first in the series to implement them!) still registers hits even after an enemy dies so it’s even less clear that you’ve killed him. It’s even got veteran interviews in the credits! It’s so much like Medal of Honor that it’s a wonder they didn’t get sued.

Oh wait, they did. About that pin...

The short version, if you don’t wanna read that article: when Spark Unlimited was commissioned by Activision to make a Call of Duty game for consoles to sell alongside the popular PC release, a sizeable chunk of Spark’s staff were still employed at Electronic Arts. Spark Unlimited was a brand new company, and had little in the way of cash until the deal with Activision was closed. The EA Los Angeles employees didn’t want to quit their original jobs until it looked like Spark Unlimited was going to be a sure thing. When a couple dozen EA Los Angeles staff all quit at once, Electronic Arts smelled a rat, and sued for employee poaching and corporate espionage. Activision wound up having to eat $800,00 in legal bills protecting Spark Unlimited, which they were having difficulties with themselves due to differences in development philosophies. It’s not clear what the outcome of all that is, but I am going to say that Spark Unlimited’s choice of devs to poach from EA Los Angeles, as well as the legal and technical troubles, likely contributed to this game not being all it could be.

I don’t think Call of Duty: Finest Hour was ready for prime time. The music is awesome (especially in the final stage); the opening levels of the first campaign are great fun, with some cool character interactions and generally feeling slightly more polished. But towards the end of the game I started seeing a lot more bugs and a lot more unfair situations (like whole hordes of anti-tank troopers all showing up at once.) It feels like they had a deadline they were rushing to, and it shows. In general it’s really just a bad game overall.

Maybe that’s what Electronic Arts should have sued about: being too much like Medal of Honor, and not in a good way.

 

 -June <3

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