Call of Duty 2: Big Red One

"An average FPS in an all-too-familiar setting."

Gameplay: 3 out of 5
Now, it's not that the gameplay is bad; it's just that it's incredibly unoriginal, and can get very boring at times. The gameplay will start to pick up after the first handful of missions. Expect to start out disliking this game, but also finding it strangely addictive. It grew on me.

Basically, you're thrown in generic situation after generic situation in which you kill French Nazis, or Italians, or Germans, over and over and over again. This might include moving forward through a one-path level, killing all the Nazis who try to stop you, or manning some kind of powerful gun, or blowing up [insert typical WWII target]s. So, you're basically shooting up Axis members who have the intelligence of trained monkeys, using either a rifle, a machine gun, an anti-aircraft gun, a tank, a gun that's on some vehicle like a plane or a ship, a rocket launcher, or with some grenades. There's a decent variety, but it's all the same stuff that you've seen time and time again.

The worst part, though, is how incredibly scripted and stupid the enemies are. If you die, expect the enemy soldiers to be waiting in the EXACT same place where you found them before, doing the EXACT same thing, with the EXACT same aim and range, with the EXACT same timing of arrival, while your fellow soldiers counter these tactics in the EXACT same way. Sometimes, you'll even encounter a dreaded “endless supply of Nazis who run up and do the exact same thing that they dead guy before them did.” To battle these superior numbers, your prime tactic will be running up closer to them so that the game realizes that it needs to stop pumping out Nazis to shoot at. The utter lack of any AI whatsoever means that you could have just as much fun shooting a bunch of wooden ducks with big red bullseyes painted on them.

Story: 2 out of 5
You play a soldier in World War II along with a bunch of other members in your squad who are all unique in their own little way. Yeah, I haven't heard of that one before either.

I did grow a little attached to them, but after the first death, things started to become very predictable. That's right, the deaths of the main characters are scripted like a book. My ass that's spoilers. You know they're going to die. It's a damn war game. I'm just not saying who dies and who doesn't.

Control: 4 out of 5
If you've ever played any FPS before, you'll find yourself knowing exactly what to do within the first two minutes of the game. It's very simple and has a quick learning curb, and if you don't like it, there are multiple controller setups to choose from.

Replayability & Length: 1 out of 5
The campaign takes a week or two of playing to finish. Then, once you finish the campaign, you're done. That's it. There isn't other gameplay modes or extra missions or anything like that. The only possible way you could squeeze more game out of the finished thing is by playing on a different difficulty setting, which there only happens to be three of. But that wouldn't be any fun, because, as I said above, your enemies are stupid and scripted. In the harder modes, you'll simply get hurt more by Nazi bullets and hurt Nazis less with your bullets.

Graphics: 4 out of 5
The graphics are nice. What else can I say? They're definitely not the most amazing graphics that you'll ever see, but they do their job well. There's a variety of levels that progress from desert, to air, to cities, to sea, to beach landings, to trenches, to snow. There's quite a bit of focus on details, which you'll notice in the untranslatable gibberish Arabic writings in Morocco, the detailed explosions that cause you to go into some sort of panic mode if you're too close, and soldiers moving all around you in the air, in passing tanks, in squads that are off accomplishing other goals, or in your own squad.

Occasionally, you'll find the graphics are quite ugly in some areas. For the perfect example, look at the river that you cross in the last level. It resembles something that was colored in by a brown crayon and has to be one of the laziest excuses for a graphic that ever graced the Gamecube.

Music & Sound: 4.5 out of 5
The sound is amazing. It does an incredible job of portraying the chaos of the war around you, and you'll really be missing out on a big part of the game if you don't play with a high-quality sound system. Falling bombs, rattling machine guns, soldiers barking orders, firing artillery, bullets whizzing past your ears or penetrating flesh, crashing planes – you'll hear it all at once and it makes you feel like a part of the war. It's all around you during battle, and perpetually audible off in the distance. My only major complaint is that there isn't a lot of music, and that you'll occasionally hear soldiers repeating the same line (though it certainly is not as ridiculous as some other games).

Final Recommendation: Worth a rental, and only a rental. Don't waste your money on this, it's over too quick and isn't fun enough to keep replaying.

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 02/21/06