I don't like to drop games but I got soft-locked about halfway through the British campaign in this (so around halfway through the entire campaign as well), already wasn't having a good time, and decided I would probably be better off just leaving it there. Apparently, this is one of the "good" Call of Duty games and while the series is certainly in pretty abysmal territory now I don't think CoD 2 is anything to strive for either. It is cool to see a WWII shooter that has you play through campaigns as the Russians in Stalingrad and the British in North Africa before doing the generic American D-Day stuff, but the actual missions are monotonous, the gunplay is weak and unsatisfying, and outside of some decent skyboxes, the presentation isn't much either. Worst of all the game is painfully linear, something that stood out especially because this is the game people always bring up when criticizing the linearity of modern CoD games. I think everything I've played or seen from the series since Black Ops 3 has been awful, but outside of a lack of scripted setpieces there's not really any choice or freedom to the mission design here either. The game wants you to think there is, and constantly tells you that you can deal with mission objectives in any order, but each time it did the variety boiled down to two or three identical clusters of enemies or pieces of artillery that were never more than a quick sprint apart. If you aren't looking at the minimap you probably wouldn't even register them as various different objectives instead of normal enemies populating the level. The lack of flashy setpieces only highlights how weak the gameplay really is with nothing to break it up. I think playing Isonzo at the same time as this killed it for me, that game is both more interesting on every level and more fun and satisfying to play. Maybe that's an unfair comparison since Isonzo is an online-only game that came out just a couple of years ago while CoD 2 is two decades old now, but it's not my fault people hyped this game up to a ridiculous degree!

I feel like I should at least try to bring up some stuff I liked about this game so here are some notes:
- Again, it is really neat to do a WWII game that starts you off with the Eastern Front and North Africa, but I wish they went all the way and had the American campaign be in the Pacific instead of just doing Normandy again. I think World at War has a Pacific campaign so maybe I should try that instead.
- I like that you've always got a small squad with you that moves through the whole level and can cover for you at times, for a while every CoD game had this and I wish it would come back in modern shooters.
- Constantly seeing Patton quotes on the death screens reminded me that I really need to watch the George C. Scott movie about him at some point.
- The tank missions (before I got softlocked) made me want to rewatch Girls und Panzer or just finally start watching the Finale movies.
- most of these attempts at finding positive qualities in this game were just me wanting to spend my time watching/playing other, better things. Make of that what you will.


Maybe the only good games in this whole series are MW2 and Black Ops.