Call of Duty can't connect with everything...
Anyone who’s been gaming for the past five years knows exactly where I’m coming from when I say, “Another WWII shooter?” For all the flak we give them though, the WWII setting has produced some of the best titles ever made like Battlefield 1942, Medal of Honor: Allied Assault, and who can forget the multiplayer in Return to Castle Wolfenstein?
Thus we come to Call of Duty: Finest Hour, developer Spark Unlimited’s attempt at a competent shooter on the consoles. As you’ve no doubt read our Playstation 2 review, there’s no need to hit up a lot of the details he elaborated on and while it is little better than its console brother, the Xbox version still suffers from frustrating gameplay and some annoying glitches.
The single-player campaigns will span across three locales: the eastern front where you’ll play as the Soviets, Africa campaign as the British, and cover Western Europe as the Americans. The missions you’ll face will vary from killing squads of Nazis, to killing platoons of Nazis, and even killing entire brigades of Nazis. All jokes aside, you’ll be playing everything from ground-based search and destroy missions to rail-shooters. There’s even some tank commanding missions thrown in as well. The overall mix of mission types is decent and keeps the gameplay from getting stale over time.
If there’s going to be any complaints about the missions, it’s going to be over the checkpoint system. As mentioned in our Playstation 2 review, the PC version featured a checkpoint system that frequently updated the missions with safety checkpoints. In the unfortunate event that you died, you would load up at the last checkpoint, thus eliminating a lot of stress and irritation at having to redo an entire mission. Finest Hour features a limited version of that checkpoint system that will leave players steaming in a pile of their own frustration as futility hovers over their heads.
It’s not something that players will immediately notice either; you’ll easily be able to blow through the first half of the game in three to four hours. Once you hit the middle of the Africa campaign, however, your play will come to a grinding halt. It’s a combination of tougher enemies and more difficult positions to reach that will bring your demise and ultimate restart to the beginning. Yes, you will eventually beat the levels but should any player have to do the same mission six or seven times to beat it? I don’t think so, and this is something the developer should have looked at.
As Paul mentioned, the missions in Finest Hour are scripted, almost too much. You’ll see tanks devoid of any intelligence make their rounds in the same circle pattern, shooting at you in a futile effort to kill you. Once you make their pattern they are easy pickings. If you ever have to repeat missions, you’ll see the same soldiers die in the same position each time you play, no matter how many enemies you kill and even if you’ve killed them all. In one particular mission where you have to escort a group of armor the battles will actually come to a complete halt if you are far enough away from the tanks. All these combine to take any semblance of realism and immersion in the environment away in a puff of scripted smoke. I can’t think of one battle in history that had to stop because Private Faubert ran away from the front lines to gather some well-needed health packs.
Scripting problems aside, there are some bright points to the campaigns. I spoke about atmosphere and immersion and you’ll never feel more immersed than you will in the Soviet campaign to re-take Stalingrad. In usual videogame bravado, the first mission is an awesome display of Hollywood-style visuals mixed in with the run and gun gameplay of Finest Hour. The first seconds of the game are akin to Enemy at the Gates where you’re handed only ammo because the guy in front of you got the gun. Later in the missions you’ll see several dozen Soviet soldiers rally to cheer before rushing headlong into a line of German machine gun fire. To the game’s credit, it’s the spiffy graphics engine that makes this type of action possible.
Unlike Finest Hour’s Playstation 2 counterpart, there were hardly any frame rate drops in the Xbox version. Even during heavy battles the game never skipped a beat and I was able to take in every ground-pounding, head-popping, life-destroying artillery round that hit the ground at a full forty frames per second. The tracer rounds from the enemy and friendly machine guns were a bit unrealistic and the soldiers detail was fairly average, that’s the tradeoff though for being able to have a myriad of things happening on screen at the same time. Overall, the graphics were industry-standard but the developer made full effectiveness with what they had to work with.
On the same ticket are the sound effects. Voiceovers of the characters are done adequately and the acting is both bearable and believable. You’ll hear battle cries in actual German as opposed to cheesy-euro trash accents who brutalize the English language. Allied troops, even the Soviets, all speak English but that sacrifice is needed for player comprehension.
Music will play intermittently throughout missions, normally at the beginning of a mission or after an objective has been achieved. The songs themselves are a mix of classical instrumental work with excellent supplemental chorus lines. The complete sound package rounds out as nothing special but better than most.
If I couldn’t complain about the graphics or sound, then I certainly could about the game’s AI. It borders on incompetent and if you’re AI allies aren’t running right in front of you cutting off your line of fire, then they’re charging head-first into an enemy machine gun nest. While not as incompetent as a more celebrated shooter, say Halo, the AI will still leave you cringing when they finally do kick the bucket. More often than not you’ll end missions with only one, if any of your fellow soldiers left standing.
In regards to the enemy, there isn’t much challenge there. You’re biggest concern is sheer numbers and the fact that the enemy you’re fragging isn’t the one who just threw a grenade at your feet. The AI will use the lean effect to exhaustingly effective results though, often times shooting you at impossible angles. With the AI, it’s a solid bet that if there isn’t open ground then the enemy will be pinned behind a corner. It does show some brilliance though as the AI will reinforce failing or fallen positions and at times will try to flank your position on the more open battlefields.
The multiplayer is nothing new to the scene however it is restricted to Xbox Live. You’ll have your standard affair of death match, team death match, capture the flag, and search and destroy. Live users will find that playing Finest Hour online goes quite smoothly and matches are found and started quicker than most.
For everything good there is about Finest Hour, there is much more to cast doubt on. While the PC version of the game was sheer quality, that same level of development was lost making this for the console market. While the Xbox version is a little better than its Playstation 2 counterpart, it’s still just a weekend renter.