More gameplay

During my time with the game I began ramping up the difficulty on each new map, in order not to blow through the experience too quickly. While playing the regular difficulty mode, Call of Duty was the standard run-and-gun shooter, with pauses to rest and observe the situation. More or less, the player dominates the action and it’s fairly easy to even charge a heavily defended position by yourself.

Once the difficulty was bumped up to the two highest settings, new features in CoD 2’s AI became apparent. For example, the player’s squad no longer waits for him to lead. Call of Duty had the squadmates pushing up only to the player’s current location and immediate area, waiting on him before moving forward. In the sequel, the AI is more pro-active about attacking enemy positions. It’s not particularly successful – after all, the player’s character is the hero – but it does it.

It took me until the higher difficulty levels to notice this because there are many more situations where you find yourself pinned down by enemy fire while you heal up before making the next move. At times like this, the AI would go forward and take a few Germans down or at least distract them. In fact, on the highest difficulty level, I wouldn’t be surprised if I permitted more squadmates to die than I actually killed enemies. Despite this, the higher difficulty settings force the player into a more realistic way of playing.

Pointe du Hoc trenches

Russian allies

Crusader tanks in the desert

Healing brings us to another new feature in Call of Duty 2. The developers had noticed that players in the original game would stop the action and go back to earlier parts of the map for health packs, especially if facing an unknown or difficult situation ahead. Even though enemies dropped health on occasion, this wasn’t enough to keep the player constantly pushing forward in the action – a mark of good gameplay. So the new damage system is regenerative. Your avatar takes hits and his vision starts going red, the heart pumping sound kicks in and the more he gets beat up, the worse these effects are. Take too many hits and you’ll be pushing up daisies. However, during lulls in the action, the shock effects fade away and the character returns to full health. We’re not sure if this is how all characters operate.

The developers have continued their tradition of basing battles off actual engagements during the war. One of the most talked about is of course the battle of Pointe du Hoc, the cliff assault on D-Day, with the objective of surprising the German defenders (who assumed the cliffs were impassable) and getting at heavy artillery batteries that had a good view of Omaha beach.