Incremental improvements make a great game even better and it still runs on your same hardware.
The best new features are the missions and damage modeling. You are not tied to one path as much as in previous games. There are multiple routes and approaches to take to finish an objective although still not as free form as one would wish. One big change is that your damage/health is no longer displayed. You get red flashes and blurry vision when you are taking too many hits. Simply getting out of the line of fire for awhile will heal you. This is by far the best approach to damage/health in a FPS yet. It prevents you from being penalized for a bit of bad luck when in an area without medkits. It also eliminates the whole silly searching for medkit concept completely. If you take too many hits without a breather you will die but the game will restart at the last save. This whole approach keeps the game moving and overall has a much better feel to it. All FPS shooters should adopt this approach.
Perhaps the single best feature is that even if you do almost nothing the mission will progress. This works out very well on those few missions where you are either stuck or can’t quite figure out what you have to do or, better yet, you just want to do something else. The missions are still heavily scripted which limits replay a bit but they are done in a more segmented way that allows for the mission flexibility. You can at least replay the game trying different approaches to the missions.
One minor downside to the game is the save system. You cannot make any manual saves. But the game does auto-save at key points and these are rarely a problem. Some are perhaps not quite where you would want to save but close enough. Again the system keeps you in the game and keeps things moving.
There are other issues as well: MG42s with endless ammo and no overheating. The tank missions are a bit too fast moving; it is almost like flying fighters instead of tanks. Another annoyance is the three campaigns; you are forced to go in the order of Soviet, British, and American. There is also still no way to play the Germans. The game is very brief as well, maybe 20 hours or so to complete everything.
Overall while in makes no giant leaps for the genre it does make some solid advances and the overall quality makes it the best WW2 shooter yet. Anyone new to the genre will love it and veterans should appreciate it as well. The game even gives a refreshing twist on D-Day with Pointe Du Hoc missions. Recommended..