First a big thank you to Activision for providing Call of Duty 2 for this Review.

I must say after playing Call of Duty 2 I’m quite surprised at how well the game is put together. For me to say that about this game is amazing considering the first call of duty lasted about 1 hour before taking it off my machine and never playing it again. I figured Call of Duty 2 was going to be much like the first game and there for at first I wasn’t to interested in playing it. However do to the fact Activision donated the game I figured I at least had to look at it and I’m glad I did..

The single player in the game covers 3 main theaters of World War 2. You start out fighting with the Russians on the Russian front and then move on to the British in Africa and finally the game ends with you fighting for the United States doing the beach invasion on D day at the end of the war.

The single player on the hardest level may take about 2 days to finish if you don’t sleep for them 2 days. On the hardest level in the game it can be quite a challenge at times to complete a mission. Something else to keep in mind in mind is this game does not have a save feature in the single player. The game uses a check point kind of save where if you make it so far in a mission and it automatically saves as you go. The checkpoint save idea works well in the game but there a few spots where it saved my game when I was in a really bad spot and every time the mission would reload I would be dead in 2 seconds. Do to the checkpoint save setup there was one time I had to restart the entire level do to the poor spot where the game saved.

The game also does have vehicles in it and you can drive some tanks in the Africa missions. In terms of driving in the game it only happens in a few spots and even then your confined to a pretty small space when driving and you can’t drive around all over the place you have to stick to a certain path. There are also some times in the game where you do not drive but are a gunner and you have to shoot stuff while the AI driver drives along its set path.

One of the coolest missions for me was one in the Africa theater where its night time and they have these big spot lights setup and the beam coming off them looks really cool. There are also other times in the game where you see smoke and the smoke in this game is the best I have seen in any first person shooter. The smoke looks realistic and adds a lot to the over all feel of the game.

Probably the best part of this game is the weapons. You can tell they spent a lot of time getting the weapons to not only look good but to also function as you would expect for weapons of that time frame. The bolt action rifle and the iron sights are top notch in the way they were done. The sniper rifle is also really well done and even has scope drift. In order to steady the sniper rifle you have to hold shift down and that makes you hold your breath and the scope looses the scope drift which is a nice touch. You can’t hold your breath for ever though you can only do that for a few seconds which adds to the realism of the game.

The Multi Player in the game also impressed me. The game has all your standard game play modes plus they also included the mode where you have one side plant a bomb and the other has to defuse the bomb in a set period of time. I really like the bomb/defuse mode it reminds me of counter strike and thats a good thing.

The maps for the multi player also seem well done. The maps are not huge by any means but they are not tiny either. Here again you can see the team who made the maps spent a lot time on them and you can see it in the lay out of the maps and the way the graphics are in these maps. I really like the grass and how that looks in the maps.

The multi player servers I seen for the game can host up to 64 players. On some of the maps in the game when you have that many people it wont take you long to find something to shoot at. In my time playing this game it ran really smooth in multi player and I never really noticed any problems.

One thing I would have like to have seen for a multi player option would be a CO-OP mode. This is a mode that very few games support today and its a shame because it would be nice to have your buddies beside you with the VOIP going then having the AI beside you in the single player.

The one thing that really caught my attention in the multi player is the Voice Over IP function the game has. The VOIP in the game really is top notch and the quality of the voices you here are on par with what you would here on a Team Speak server with a 19.5kbit setting. I think its about time game makers started to pay attention to the VOIP and finally get rid of the crappy sounding VOIP that some games have. VOIP is a huge thing in organized game play and its finally nice to be able to clearly here what your team mates are saying to you.

The only thing about the multi player i didn’t like was the fact you have people clearly wall hacking in the game already. I seen a guy shooting through a boarded up window that he shouldn’t have been able to see through and he was killing guys non stop. This is something game makers have to do something about. It’s clear to me things like punkbuster and other anti-cheat programs may slow cheating down but hey don’t really stop cheating.

The game performance for the most part was pretty smooth but keep in mind I played the game with recommended settings instead of going in there and cranking stuff up. Despite the fact it was smooth for the most part, there were some parts in the game that dipped down below 30 Frames Per Second and got pretty choppy. Below I will put a screen shot of what I had my graphic settings at and also the specs of my computer.

Graphics in the game are all pretty top notch. Keep in mind though if you want to crank all the details in this game to max and up the resolution you will need a top of the line machine to pull this off. If you can run it all maxed out then you will no doubt be playing one really good looking game.

In conclusion I think the game is a great game and is worth buying. At the time of this article Call of Duty 2 was selling for $49.95 U.S.

This game was tested on the following machine.

AMD XP 2500
ASUS A7N8X MOTHERBOARD
2 GIGS OF PC 3200 RAM
ATI X800XL 256 MEG
2 MAXTOR 120 GIG 7200 RPM 8 MEG CACHE EIDE ATA 133 DRIVES
AUDIGY SOUND CARD

Below are some screen shots of the game and all screen shots were taken at the “Recommended Settings in game” at 1024 by 768 resolution enjoy!

Here is a picture of the Call of Duty 2 box.

Here is a another picture of the Call of Duty 2 box.

Here is a in game screen shot.

Here is a in game screen shot.

Here is a in game screen shot.

Here is a in game screen shot.

Here is a in game screen shot.

Here is a in game screen shot.

Here is a in game screen shot.

Here is a in game screen shot.

WolfManz611..