Not Call of Duty Finest Hour. More like Call of Duty Barely Competent Hour.
Cons: …Hallway ones aren’t; There are much better WWII shooters out there (even the other CoDs beat this game out); Multiplayer is bad; No splitscreen; Muddy graphics
It seems that no matter what, games will revisit WWII as much as possible. It’s been several years, and 10x as many games in WWII. Some are great (BF1942, CoH, CoD, MoHAA just to name a few), some suck (most other games, not to say that all suck though). The rest of them are solid, yet unremarkable. Unlike its superior predecessors, CoDFH is just that.
Many of these WWII games are shooter. Like the rest of them, CoDFH involves moving, aiming, and shooting down tons and tons of Nazis. For the most part, as long as you get behind something, and only poke your head out to fire a few shots, you can survive. Each difficulty just restricts your health, and the items that heal it, which does make the gameplay much less forgiving higher up.
It’s pretty well tuned, and thankfully, the game at least realizes that it’s a shooter, and builds around that instead of going off track. Unfortunately, for the most part this places you in battles that take place in repetitive building type of settings, and are just as repetitive as the buildings, often giving you 2 or less Nazis at a time, thus making things extremely easy.
On the other side of the spectrum, however, there are large-scale battles, such as the one at the beginning of the game that are tense, and really force you to keep your head down, as several Nazis pour fire on your position, and drop your teammates (who, for better or worse, don’t serve much of a purpose besides atmosphere). These just feel great, and are much more challenging than the other parts of the game, often being cruel on the hardest difficulty.
All in all, the single player should take you 5-10 hours, but unless you replay it, there isn’t much to go back to the game for. Yes, there is multiplayer. No, it isn’t fun. It’s pretty repetitive, gives you about five weapons (which you get stuck with until you die), and tells you to have fun. It seems to have most things that good online shooters have, yet manages to make them boring with large maps, and poor weapon selections.
And that’s not all there is to complain about. The graphics in the game are muddy, and ugly to look at. The character models are pretty bad (at least they animate nicely), and the environments are only a bit better. Even when you first load up single player and see your comrades, you will notice that they look ugly, the water looks ugly, you can’t see far, and many other things. When you move to a battlefield, there are more details and they don’t look as bad, but the game definitely needed some visual polish.
The sound on the other hand is great. As you play, dramatic music booms in the back, and can often set an appropriate mood (during those large scale battles). The guns are solid, and at least sound like a gun (note the lack of an s, as they all sound similar). Then the voice acting is well done too. Your teammates bark out commands and reactions, and sound really into it. Then you have appropriate accents on the characters, and it works.
If you must play CoDFH, then by all means, do it. But for the rest of us, not constrained to ransom or law, you might as well avoid it. It’s not bad, but with the sheer abundance of WWII shooters out there, it’s hard to feel like you’ve made the finest decision playing this game.