Big Red One is a good entry in the Call of Duty series but lacks some qualities that made previous ones really great...
As the name implies, you will take the role of a soldier in the Fighting First going from North Africa, through Italy and through Europe to fight decisive battles in the war, so there's a lot of different environments to be seen. This is also a departure from what previous games in the series have done, which is to allow players to play the war from three different perspectives, American, British, and Russian. This change can be good and bad in some ways, for one thing, when you always play with the same squad, then there's time to make some pretty interesting characters (though its not to over done like Call of Duty 3), but negatively, you won't get as big of a selection of weaponry.
The game plays out like most other Call of Duty games. Each mission is a long, epic battle where you'll be doing something different every few minutes thanks to an awesome objective system. For example, one mission (the D-Day one, which finally is done differently for a change) tasks you with spotting targets on the beach for your ship's guns to take out, then once you land battle through tons of opposition, protecting engineers as they take out barricades and then finally track down radios and destroy them. Now, its important to note that that is only the first maybe 12-15 minutes of that level and it even continues on from that point. Just like every other Call of Duty game, this one creates an intense atmosphere and gives the players plenty to do. This atmosphere is a little marred by bad AI, in most other Call of Duty games, then enemies will do everything they can to take you out, but in this one, they aren't very challenging at all and only when they're in large groups or have heavy weaponry, will fighting them be a challenge at all.
Another great thing the game offers is that there are breaks in between the standard on-foot combat where you either jump into a tank, jeep, bomber or boat to continue the fight. These missions are amazingly fun and are a great way to break up the standard combat.
There is also a 16 player online mode which is pretty fun, but there aren't that many interesting modes like the previous Call of Duty games had.
Big Red One is for the most part well done and the level design is great, but the multiplayer and the AI definitely need improvement, as, even though it doesn't seem like it could, they hinder the game experience quite a bit.
The graphics in this game are superb and there are only a few small problems. The battles are huge (sometimes you'll see maybe 20 characters total onscreen) and full of scripted sequences but there are never any slowdowns. The models and effects for the most part look great, though there are some poorly done ones, but the only true flaw in the graphics are the textures, which can sometimes look pretty poor or just grainy.
The sound is, as always amazing. The battles are filled with chatter (that can actually be very helpful) of both enemies and allies screaming the locations of the opposition and there are just a ton of sound effects playing at once in any given fight, which really immerses you in the experience. The voice-overs are great (if I recall correctly Treyarch did actually hire some TV show actors) and the music and sound effects are pretty amazing as well.
The singleplayer in this game will last you a while (10 or so hours) and you will probably find some levels extremely fun that are worth replaying. The multiplayer will also be pretty fun and could last you a while if you can get over the fact that its not that in-depth as it could be.
The game is overall great, especially its production values, but some pretty major parts of the game (like its atmosphere and multiplayer) are flawed. But even still, the game is definitely worth picking up if you're a fan of the series or a fan of FPSs