Overview

During my recent Poland adventure, I attended Activision’s Call of Duty that was set up near Hitler’s Wolfschanze, his network of personal command bunkers, located not too far from the actual OKW (Germany High Command) bunkers. But we’ll get to that in another article.

Call of Duty 2 takes the phrase “don’t mess with success” close to heart. Even though it has a new game engine and is built from the ground up, the similarities to the original are clear in every respect. The movement code, the way weapons look, feel and fire, the reactions of characters to being hit – all the dozens of little touches we so loved about Call of Duty are present in the sequel.

Infinity Ward haven’t rested on their laurels, however. Call of Duty 2 features many updates and improvements, ranging from the obvious like the graphics engine, to the subtle like AI and gameplay changes. The venerable Quake III engine has been retired in favor of an in-house custom job, featuring pixel shaders, bump maps and much-improved shadows and lighting. In an interesting twist, it seems that the new game engine is either capable of playing original Call of Duty maps, or – more likely - it wasn’t difficult to import them. I say this because the multiplayer testing we did was deathmatch in Carentan. Unfortunately, it was only raw deathmatch so we couldn’t report on any new game modes available yet.

Jeep in Normandy

European bombing

Stalingrad burning

The solo campaign consumed the bulk of the presentation however, with a variety of maps to choose from. The Russians, Americans, and Brits were all playable, in a frozen Stalingrad, sun-scorched Toujane in North Africa and a soaking wet Pointe du Hoc in Normandy, respectively. All three settings provided abundant evidence of the expanded maps that were a design focus for Infinity Ward. Though a far cry from Far Cry (oh teh punny! -ed.), the maps were larger and more open than in the original, offering the player multiple options at assaulting a target at times. These attack options didn’t always boil down to the dumb head-on charge and the sneaky flanking maneuver either; sometimes sneaking around would only expose the player to another group of enemies, pinning him down in a withering crossfire.

Another notable improvement is with the artificial intelligence of both friends and foes. The developers have cut down on the instances of nonsensical behavior of AI characters and improved their range of abilities. The AI is considerably more likely to seek out proper cover and to use grenades to flush the player out. In conjunction with the map layout, it is also more capable of pulling off attacks on the player’s position by flanking. This is more likely a level design development than AI, or at least purely AI, but we’ll reserve final judgment for the review.