The 2nd game in the COD series is your typical sequel, it takes what worked and amplifies it while changing or removing things that didn't work in the original.

But ultimately, while its a better game in every way I do find it more forgettable and less interesting than the first one, still 3 campaigns in this one, same factions, Cpt Price appears again which made me realize theres only 2 mainline COD entries from Infinity Ward that don't feature him as a main character which...is kinda sad when you think about it.

Anyways, story is once again nothing to write home about not that anybody cares about the story in a formulaic ww2 shooter.

The levels are a bit by the numbers, yeah there's the parts where you snipe, where you drive a tank, dozens of DEFEND THE AREA sections which I started to hate, you name it, this game has it.

But that's not much of a negative, sure its formulaic but it is a good formula for this game and given the good-but-not-great gunplay and the more open/less liniar level design of certain missions, they do a lot to save the game from feeling really bland.

Most of what I said about COD1 also applies here.
There's no health packs here which is nice, regenerating health works a lot better for this type of game even if it makes you sorta op when you can take 15 bullets, lie on your ass for 10 secs and then get up and be completely fine but whatever, its fun.

They also removed quick saving (only checkpoints this time, though they're a lot more frequent so its no big deal) so you can't F5 your way through harder sections of the game for better or for worse.

That's kinda it when it comes to cod2, its an intense but rather formulaic shooter that builds onto the original in some expected but nice ways but not enough to make it great when coming into it these days.

What I'll say to end the review, the best and worst of the series has yet to come and the series is only just about to truly start.

Yet another classic shooter. In my opinion this one of the few times this franchise peaked.

(Campaign Only)

-The gameplay is fantastic, basically just CoD1 but they knew exactly what they wanted to improve, what to add, and what to remove. It is obvious there was a passionate team behind this game. Playing it right now might not seem such big deal; because these mechanics are now a norm and in some cases a must, but at the time of release many of them were brand new, or at least not as well done as in this game.

-The campaign is divided into 3 parts; Russian, British, and American. Each of them have their unique atmosphere, and I'm not talking about simple things like the accents. Each campaign has a unique set of guns (except for the Germans, which use the same guns). Other than that each campaign take place in a different place, which makes it hella fun. The Russian campaign is majorly in the snowy Stalingrad (and other parts of Russia), the British campaign is in the deserts of North Africa, and the American campaign takes place in France and Germany. There are also some missions (like controlling a tank) which are a breath of fresh air and makes the game more interesting.

-The graphics are amazing for 2005. First of all, for some reason the game supports up to 4K. And second, the particle effects are amazing; the smoke grenades, the mists, pieces of dirt flying around when a grenade blows up, etc.

-Sound design and voice acting is also great specially considering nobody really took games serious in 2005.

-The only real issue is that there is basically no story.

Um bom FPS. O feeling de guerra é captado de forma excelente aqui, tanto pelo ambiente quanto pelo gunplay, vc sente que está lutando por sua vida o tempo todo, o fogo cruzado está presente do começo ao fim graças ao sound design ótimo, além da física excelente aplicada nos inimigos, onde por diversas vezes quando recebem tiros não letais, se arrastam pelo campo de batalha pedindo por ajuda ou caem mas usam suas pistolas, lutando pra sobreviver. Boa variação de missões, várias são criativas e torna o jogo menos repetitivo, menos pq ainda é repetitivo, a estrutura de missões são muito similares, principalmente nas últimas missões, onde vc faz quase a mesma coisa.

OST impressionantemente boa, na maioria das vezes o silêncio incomoda, COD não é como Halo ou Metro, onde a ambientação importa tanto quanto a ação, logo, é estranho vc estar num tiroteio intenso sem algo tocando pra te empolgar, mas, tbm se torna um mérito em algumas sessões, pq quando finalmente toca algo, é de extrema qualidade. Graficamente falando é lindo, não importa a época que foi lançado, o gráfico é realmente bom, de problemático, no máximo algumas texturas estranhas e background zoados, o que é compreensível pra um jogo de 2005.

IA dos aliados é horrível, são muito burros e pouco ajudam, principalmente quando vc está em perigo, já os inimigos, são ok, não chegam a ser inteligentes pq ficam parados tomando bala, mas procuram flanquear ou te atacar em grupo, o que dificulta um pouco. Por falar em dificuldade, esse é outro demérito, sendo boa parte do jogo, fácil/moderada, no entanto, estupidamente mais difícil em sua reta final, onde a quantidade de inimigos por missão triplica.

COD 2 é um jogo feito com alma e amor, era quando os desenvolvedores não tinham pressão de uma empresa corporativista que só olha para os números e tinham liberdade pra trabalhar e entregar um bom jogo. Infelizmente hj em dia, isso está longe de ser o caso.

There is not one mechanic that was changed in this game that I like. The regenerating health sucks. In the first game getting hit by a stray bullet was noticable, here it's NOT getting hit that's noticable, because if one or two bullets from an entire magazine do not hit you, you can just run-and-gun into the enemy with no repercussions. Submachine guns feel better here, but the rifles suffer a good bit. Maybe I could enjoy this change if they didn't remove the quicksave feature. I'd be more than happy to charge in if it didn't mean going back several minutes every time. No idea why the sprint from the expansion pack was removed (especially since your allies can sprint but you cannot) making the checkpoint system even worse as you have to slowly get to the point you already were in, but due to the incosistent enemy behavior you sometimes will die retreading these steps. The levels are also much smaller and shorter, you can see this especially during the defensive ones. The Soviet campaign ends with something akin to Pavlov's House from the original, but instead of the building you defend being several stories tall, here you have two rooms one each floor, two floors total, and a staircase next to each room. There's just not enough space to maneuver. Also, one of the biggest selling points of Call of Duty was moving together with your squad, I think, but here your squad is trash and cannot shoot enemies standing right in front of them and nobody is checking their behinds, meaning you will occasionally get killed by a random enemy who spawned behind you or didn't peek their head before. And possibly the worst thing is the grenades spam. Some chokepoints are just annoying in the worst sense of the word, super unsatisfying, and on harder difficulties alternating between running away from grenades and running into cover after getting shot once means you can spend way too much time on one checkpoint.
Also, why in the world does a sidearm take up an entire weapon slot now? You move much faster with it so it could totally fix the sprint issue, but it takes up as much space as an anti-tank weapon apparently?

As for additions, I like the multiple objectives in theory, but these missions tend to get more frustrating than anything due to the endlessly respawning enemies. There's apparently thousands of enemies just behind each objective that disappear when you walk next to the building's window. Also, nobody secures the objectives you already captured, meaning that the AI who runs there will still run there and you will, again, get shot in the back. Smoke grenades are my favorite addition, they allow for cheeky plays like running through the smoke to catch enemies unaware provided you know their positions, because they do not move.

Game could still be fun if it had larger levels, there's still that great sound design and those good feeling guns. Some okay bits but largely I was just reminiscing of the better missions from the original. Big ups for being able to throw potatos at NPCs in the tutorial, best part of the whole experience tbh.

I used to hold this game as my favorite Call of Duty in the series, then I got more experience with the series and decided COD4 was the best one. Now, after playing 1 I revisit 2 after not playing it for years and years.

To be honest, I am disappointed, as my memory hailed this a straight up masterpiece. COD 2 is not a masterpiece lol. I actually prefer 1 as it features much more clever and interesting levels, despite them being confined and small-scale. This will be a campaign focused review, though I recall the multiplayer was really fun.

So, I see a lot of people saying this is a fully realized version of 1, but I heavily disagree. This game simply operates and feels far different. Where 1 felt like Medal of Honor but you're a regular soldier, 2 feels like its own thing. It is pure war, the way this games sandbox is able to create intense firefights is something to behold, as the sound design and graphics are on point. It really feels like you are deep in the shit, truly in a grueling war where every inch of ground must be fought over. The best way I could describe gunfights is "visceral." While this design of "fighting for every inch" has its own place, I feel like something was lost in this change.

Levels are much more open ended and expansive as to allow these chaotic firefights to function, but from what I experienced level design is much more sloppy and less meticulous compared to 1. Enemy Ai also seemingly can shoot you from any range, so as these levels are larger, it just puts the player at a disadvantage.

Speaking on Enemy Ai, they're OK at best. I played this game on hardened difficulty, and they're just ridiculous on this. Nary missing a shot, they will shoot you almost immediately upon you entering their line of sight, they know where you are about 80% of the time, and are all equipped with a literal infinite amount of grenades, that they will spam throw at you nonstop. Seriously what is up with the grenade spam, it's absurd. Enemies are also able to tank many hits, so you have to shoot everyone quite a bit to put them down for good, which can feel unsatisfying at times.

Friendly Ai is bad. They will constantly get in your way, making it difficult to shoot at enemies, or difficult to move as you desire. They're able to kill enemies, but RARELY ever do it. This is unfortunately notable when enemies will literally stand right next to your friendlies, ignore them and shoot at you, while the friendly also ignores the enemy. Countless times I was shot in the back or side despite my teammates being right there.

This game also lacks a bit of the variety that I believe is so crucial to the COD campaigns. Almost the entire campaign consist of attacking/clearing areas with gun, defending areas with gun, and pressing f to place a bomb on things. The tank levels are the only source of variety I can honestly think of, lmk if I'm forgetting something.

There is, however, great variety in the looks of the game. Going from the snowbound lands of the eastern front, to the rocky lands of Africa, and the familiar green fields of Normandy. These locations all feel uniquely different, and each mission has their own aesthetics to them. This is one of the main highlights in the game. Despite almost all of the missions playing the same, they look vastly different and are varied in concept.

I still think this is a classic and should be played, it's a good game no doubt, I'm just being very harsh on it. I believe it's just too repetitive at times and is lacking in clever level ideas, but it is still a great WW2 shooter and is worth playing.

Randomly got the urge to play COD games on Veteran

After bringing back the MP servers for multiple cod games I randomly got the urge to play through the campaigns on veteran difficulty. I beat all the COD campaigns up until ghost BUT never finished one on veteran so I thought it would be fun and thus COD 2 has been FINISHED.

Was it as good as I remembered?

I was never the biggest fan of COD 2 but I could respect what it did for the genre and I do LOVE some of the moments the game has. In addition it just feels good to play an older style COD game really making me miss the simpler times in gaming where you just booted up a game and have the full experience right in front of your eyes versus dealing with all these DLC , MICROTRANSACTION and becoming Nikki Minaj in warzone. However, while I still think it's a good game, COD 2 does have some issues in terms of how it's aged after all this game. That isn’t to say it's a bad game because noooooo that is far from it , the game is still a solid time if you want to play through a good campaign.

What were my issues?

To get this right out of the bag having no sprint feels insanely terrible and makes the game feel so much slower. I can’t tell you the amount of times I wish I had sprint throughout playing the game again after so long and after playing so many CODs since then. Furthermore, some of the later levels were insanely difficult on veteran, really making for a quite simply frustrating experience as I slowly made my way through each level. I know veteran is supposed to be very challenging but when you have moments where you literally are stuck in one spot and will get one shotted the moment you peak from 6 different angles is not fun lol. I bring this very specific situation up because there is a specific level ( if you played this on veteran you most likely know what I am talking about) where you have about 5-6 objectives on the screen at once where you need to take over all these buildings. Imagining running around an open field sometimes or just running from building to building having constant streams of bullets showered at you the moment you try anything. Oh you cleared the streets? Well tough luck you got hit from a window , oh you cleared the house? You better hope there isn’t one last guy upstairs aiming straight at you the moment you walk up. I could go on for a long time about this mission but the layout made for one the worst levels I have played in awhile lol. Furthermore, I also had some bugs and glitches where the game would give me checkpoints , I would randomly die by a nade that wasn’t even marked on my screen and even a weird glitch where my character FLEW backwards very fast which was funny lol. In addition, I really don’t like the weapon pool the game gives you. To explain , most of the time you will be picking up MP40s or Kar98s off enemy bodies since you will run out of ammo from the weapons you start with. This makes for a very depressing pool of weapons since you almost can never refill ammo on the guns you start with unless your AI teammates die.

The AI???

This needs to get its own little section because if there was one thing that this game really made me appreciate was good AI teammates. My lord when I say playing around your AI teammates is VITAL to winning I really mean it because the AI in COD 2 is honestly very good in the sense that your teammates will actually KILL THE ENEMIES….. Crazy I know right? It really makes you think WHY they made the AI worse as time went on lol.


Overall

Even though I have issues with the level design of some levels making for some very frustrating moments I overall still enjoyed my replay of the game. I was amazed by some of the moments the game had really given me a newfound respect for what they were able to accomplish cinematically during this era of gaming. I am not sure how fast I will tackle the other CODs because playing on veteran is truly a mental crushing experience that should probably not be done back to back lol. If you for some reason have not played COD 2 by now I do recommend giving it a playthrough. It's a solid game !

Mit für damalige Verhältnisse sehr realistischen Raucheffekten bedeckte Schlachtfelder und zerstörte Häuser erzeugen eine dichte Atmosphäre in diesem zweiten Hauptteil der CoD-Reihe. Der recht gute Soundtrack sowie ganz besonders die deutsche Synchro mit den kontextabhängigen Rufen der Soldaten tun ihr Übriges.

Eine kleine, aber feine Neuerung stellt das Schadenskonzept dar, denn das teils nervige Haushalten mit Medipacks wird durch automatisches Heilen beim In-Deckung-Gehen ersetzt – ein erfrischend moderner Gameplay-Aspekt. Auch die aus anderen Shootern seit jeher bekannten explosiven roten Fässer sind nun ebenfalls mit von der Partie.

Ganze vier Kampagnen bietet Call of Duty 2, darunter eine russische, eine britische und zwei amerikanische; diese Einzelgeschichten sind allesamt erstaunlich lang. Lediglich das unnötig patriotische Propaganda-Introvideo der Amerikaner nervt einfach nur. Immerhin gibt es – ähnlich wie im Konsolenableger „Finest Hour“ – mehrere Länder bzw. Kontinente zu sehen und ein wenig zu erkunden, darunter Afrika, Russland, Deutschland und Frankreich. Ganz besonders schön und eindrucksvoll umgesetzt ist die D-Day-Mission, bei der man als Soldat an der Küste zusammen mit unzähligen anderen im Boot ankommt und erstmal per Seil die Steilküste zu den Schlachtplatz-Gräben heraufklettern muss.

An der Panzersteuerung hat sich endlich etwas getan, sodass diese eine für PC-Spieler natürlichere Bewegung ermöglicht. Dank der extrem flüssigen FPS, durch die mein Framerate-Graph zu keiner Zeit auch nur einen Hüpfer gemacht hat, ist das Spielgefühl insgesamt ein sehr gutes.

Das ist übrigens mein dritter COD-Teil.

Gespielte Fassung: Uncut-Windows-Version mit deutscher Synchro unter Linux

This is where the Call of Duty formula came into its element. The first game feels almost like a prototype compared to this. Everything that Call of Duty tried and failed to do was brought to a functional condition here. The regenerating health was the missing piece of the puzzle. The level design was also improved significantly, now allowing for some basic flanking and maneuvering. The "horde-mode" missions, which IW seems to love for some reason, in the first game were infuriating, but here they work pretty okay. The tank mission, while still pretty dumb, was actually kinda fun here because you're just thrown into an open field with other tanks and infantry, and your tank's speed is way higher, so it ends up feeling like a WW2-version of Carmageddon. All scripted scenes work as intended most of the time (after a long battle towards the end of the game, I was ran over by a reinforcement car as my fellow soldiers cheered. Ngl it was hilarious), even though the scenarios the game throws at you are nothing we haven't seen before. It's still nice to get a more polished version of what's essentially the same game. With all the improvements and innovations, CoD2 is just more fun in general.

With all that fun, however, came a major shift in direction. The original CoD and MoH:AA were games with a specific rhythm. They both drew heavily from cinema and alternated between big battle set-pieces and quieter, more immersive moments, like infiltration missions, sniper sections or those village missions where you had to clear a house after a house with little to no action in between them. CoD2 ditches that structure in favor of continuous chaos. Except for that one bit with the pipe-crawling from Enemy at the Gates, the entire game consists of loud, large-scale battles with dozens of enemies on the screen simultaneously. It honestly gets very exhausting. But worse than that, it actually deprives all these events of value. That one D-Day mission in Allied Assault felt memorable because most of the game was quieter. CoD 2, on the other hand, ends up feeling like a Michael Bay movie.

It isn't helped that with the more intricate level design, the AI seems even dumber than before. With all the flanking and the increased number of enemies, you end up feeling like a super-soldier, as you drop down on the heads of unsuspecting soldiers and gun down like 10-15 people at a time single-handedly. Again I am reminded of that phrase CoD fans repeat when praising the game: "it makes you feel like one of the many expendable soldiers on the battlefield", and while there was a sliver of truth in that in the first game, here that goes out the window.

The resulting effect actually made me think of how this is a game about the bloodiest conflict in human history, and whether it's ethical to turn it into a fun explosion bonanza, while still presenting it as a somewhat realistic depiction. Where's the cost of war? This never bothered me before because earlier games felt very focused on the low-scale special operations (with very rare set-pieces), but here you witness hell for 7.5 hours and the entire time it's accompanied by triumphant music and a sense of inevitable victory. Where are the stakes? Where are the consequences of the Nazi invasion? Where are blood and gore? Speaking of the lack of gore, there seems to be very little difference between various guns precisely for that reason. The impact of a heavy machine gun is barely different from the impact of an assault rifle. Thankfully, IIRC, World at War fixes this problem in the future.

It all concludes, of course, with a very anti-climactic ending, just like the first game. After what seems like another regular battle, it just kinda ends, leaving you confused as to what you've been doing this entire time. Despite its level of polish, from mission to mission, Call of Duty 2 delivers mild entertainment and little of anything else. Unlike its predecessor, it is an actually good game with little to no flaws, but one that is extremely unremarkable. I would say this is probably one of the most generic and forgettable gaming experiences I've ever had. Which, again, isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it does make me never wanna play this again.

A verdadeira essência de um Call of Duty. Uma obra onde os cenários de ficção estão bem relacionados com eventos da realidade, uma coisa que sinto falta nos mais novos títulos da franquia. A narrativa conta com missões são bem articuladas, junta uma visão de cenário aberto de guerra com elementos de uma batalha real que te deixam imersivo na situação, trazendo tantos momentos de tensão que influenciam muito na jogatina, sem contar com a trilha sonora, que por mais que se passe despercebida ao meio de gritos e o barulho do tiroteio, faz sua justiça em ocasiões específicas, em sua maioria sendo no clímax ou desfecho da missão. A inteligência artificial no inimigo é consideravelmente boa, principalmente para época, em especial nas dificuldades avançadas, propondo ao jogador um verdadeiro desafio. Esse é, de longe, um dos melhores jogos baseado em guerras que aconteceram na vida real que eu tive o prazer de jogar.