this is about the campaign

i miss how fucking simple cod used to be
this game has no pretense of a story or any semblance of a connecting narrative beyond you playing through somewhat chronological vignettes
and that to me is peak cod single player content because when they try and tell a story it's very frequently not good
even the original modern warfare has a story that isn't very good and blows its load half way through and then coasts on a typical american military thriller plot that on paper is really fucking boring
but i still love that game, i am unfortunately a massive cod enjoyer
like a lot of people my age i grew up with this shit and this game specifically always stuck out to me even after playing later games and their improved gamefeel
the success of call of duty is that it nailed /that/ gamefeel in 2007 and has just been that ever since
even in entries which seek to massively change how movement feels (you know, the ones that ripped titanfall off), the core has at worst been consistent and at best is the entries post new modern warfare
i have a lot of problems with those games (at least mw1 and 2 which are the ones i've played), primarily that they're the most blatant examples of how this series has been a weirdo psy op for years
but the foundational mechanics and how it feels to do anything in those games is absolutely fucking sublime
easily the best call of duty has ever felt to play
but it definitely feels like call of duty

this is the game that infinity ward made right before they really figured out what call of duty was going to be going forward (i didn't play 3 so i can't really speak on that, seems like most people can't)
it's lacking in the pristine polish of modern warfare but in so doing is lacking in any of the narrative bullshit
the structure is reminiscent of episodic 90's/early 2000's pc shooters in that there are three campaigns representing three different military endeavors in ww2 that lack in any connective tissue beyond just being a shooter where you shoot nazis
soviets do stuff, the english do stuff (in africa for the most part, which is neat because i can't recall another ww2 shooter using that location) and americans do d-day and also stuff
once again this is no story
instead, it's characters that carry over from mission to mission
there's not very many missions, but they're all* pretty long and split into multiple levels
they don't even conclude beyond a "we did it!!!!!!" and then that part of the game is just over
while the game does have an order of events, you're also very welcome to just not follow them and instead play another campaign once it unlocks after doing a mission or two in another campaign
it's very loose with its pacing which is to say there really isn't any, it's a collection of shooter levels where you shoot people (nazis, so not really people)
most of your objectives are very straight forward, rarely are you doing anything that specifically relates to a set piece
you are a soldier who is good at being that and you are meant to go do good soldier things
that's what's so appealing about the earlier cods
it feels like history nerds wanted to make a cool shooter game that paid its respects to the boots on the ground grunts that died or nearly died fighting a fight that in some way shape or form was the "ideal battle"
a war that needed to be won, a definitive "good side" and bad side
this along with the human toll of the war is probably why ww2 fiction and nonfiction has stuck around so heavily in popular culture: it's a really important and well documented time in recent human history and it's very easy to write a story when things are a little more black and white than
say
literally every other conflict the united states has taken part

call of duty will never give the subject the true nuance it deserves but i also do not want that from call of duty
i don't think anyone really does if they thought about it
its intent was the same as the series that inspired it
(which probably isn't the right way to put it given the relationship early medal of honor and infinity ward as a company have)
and i'm perfectly okay with this simplistic hollywood neo liberal take on things because it's a video game that knows its a video game and doesn't pretend to be anything more than that
it says "man that war thing fucking sucked but there's a cool game there"
it's tasteful is what i'm saying
it doesn't really feel too disrespectful, it doesn't feel patronizing
it's the same reason why i like a movie like saving private ryan
yes, it fundamentally fails at being an anti-war work because it revels in the spectacle of the warfare thus showing itself to on some level think war is kinda cool and based actually, but because i'm fundamentally just a kind of smarter version of an ape i like the shiny
but i also respect the artists' intentions, the execution didn't come across as exploitative
this is something that cannot be said of entries past this one

so anyway as a video game that you can play and look at it's pretty damn good
call of duty kinda nailed being a solid shooter the first try and has steadily went up ever since
and two is an example of how talented infinity ward was early on when it came to making a competent shooter
if you have played call of duty this will, for the most part, feel like home
that being said there are
things
due to the game's age
the most jarring thing about the game is that there's no sprint
instead we're using counter strike rules, which is really funny because pistols are basically useless and the game rarely gives you one in a mission's starting loadout so i only realized this was a thing when i saw a big iron (the webley is not a big iron but whatever) and tried it out
once i noticed it i noticed the different speeds you get with different weapons and promptly thought "i don't really care" and never took advantage of it
or maybe i did, because most of the time i was using smgs since yes indeed this is a cod game
shoutout to every smg in this game fucking ultra hard, my favorite was ppsh which fits because the first campaign (the russian one) is the easily the best one even though i liked the rest perfectly fine
the second most jarring thing is that the game slows down like a mother fucker on 360 when you either see even a little bit of some big particle effects (so any time you or somebody else tossed a smoke) or you looked down a sniper scope
and this makes the not q u i t e there analog aiming a bit worse
not bad! just noticeably worse than when i recently went through world at war on ps3 very recently
but we had ads snapping even back in this one so it's really not that big of a deal

and man that's the only mechanical complaints i got because it's still cod baby
the pace is slower than other cods in theory but in practice it's just as hectic if not more so
constant yelling and gunfire, allies biting it left and right and it all sticking out more because you're just some dude and not Special Elite Cunt
the progression of levels is plenty scripted but they mostly rely on straight forward objectives that give you (a bit of) freedom in how you go about it
the progression is very linear, there isn't a big sand box or anything, but it's significantly less hand holdy than cod would get later on (something i'm glad they've experimented with in newer entries)
and the game does a very good job of minimizing its weaknesses
my favorite encounters were always when you had to go in and clear houses room by room, floor by floor
so when the game just says "go clear out these buildings and don't die!" the whole "wait i'm just a guy oh fuck" bit worked for me more than it does in other entries
the tricks that cod has always used to convey the chaotic spectacle of hollywood war portrayals just works way more in this context
so while this game isn't hardcore in the slightest it still manages to capture a greater sense of intensity than you'd get in
again
other cods while being the last cod campaign to have a T rating
world at war is the closest we've come to this kind of "i'm literally you" since but the game's need to be teh grim darkest of all really fucking sucks sometimes
and while this game doesn't have the same highs those other titles reach it has set pieces of its own while continuing to have no real bullshit
that's the operative and oft repeated phrase today:

no bullshit

cod 2 has a simple goal and it achieves that, it is nothing more and nothing less and that's why i like it a lot in comparison to the other games which i also do like for the most part
i wish modern entries would come back to this sense of purity but the series already came back here and it didn't quite stick the landing both times its tried since (again i never played 3 lol)
cod will never be this simple again, it will never be this tasteful in dealing with real life subjects again, it will instead be a skinner box with campaigns that are mechanically impressive for the series but continuously mired in the miasma that is totally not political dirty harry with bombs retreads
while i do enjoy cod, i do not purchase them unless it is second hand
a lot of that's because they're stupid expensive anywhere else but ya know

this review could've been a paragraph long and instead it was two and a half pages of text lmao

My first FPS and Call of Duty game, so I'm probably biased. The gameplay still feels very modern and fluid despite the game being nearly 2 decades old at the time of writing. There's a lot of missions which admittedly lack variety besides just shooting enemies and blowing stuff up. However, said shooting feels great that you don't mind doing solely that for the entirety of the game's runtime.
Where Call of Duty 2 improves over the first game is its larger scale, less scripted missions, more refined gameplay, and regenerating health as opposed to health kits. The larger levels like Demolition, End of the Beginning, and Hill 400 really makes the battles feel like the large scale engagements they were meant to depict, something that even current CoD games can't replicate.
The Back-2-Fronts mod really elevates the experience even further (even if it can kill some of the original vanilla style somewhat).