It's exciting. It's frustrating. It's war!
As a war game, Call of Duty is, prehaps thankfully, not an entirely accurate protrayal of the survival of WW2 by three individuals from each of the different allied armies (a US grunt, British paratrooper and a Russian Conscript). To suggest this game gives an accurate portrayal of life in the field would be to also suggest that approximately 90% of all German casualties was caused by less then 1% of all Allied forces. The amount of German infantry, assorted tanks, planes, motorbikes and gun emplacemets you get to personally mow down, blow up, run over, capture and blast through simply beggars belief. By the end of the third level you'll feel like you've shot up every German they dared station in France.
The realism that COD offers then, is much more of the cinematic, Hollywood propaganda variety. Guns, explosions, and lots and lots of dead guys as result. You get the picture...
The levels are exciting and varied. In the opening levels you play as brave US marine sent to clear the fields of Normandy. It opens quietly with you sneaking around a French farm house. Suddenly, all hell brakes lose, and it pretty much stays like that for the rest of the game. If it were not for the loading screens you would never be more then a few seconds away from another spectacular set-piece skirmish, mortar explosion or wild fire fight. As you go on it only get's better. The British paratrooper levels being my personal fvaourites as you get sent far behind enemy lines to secure a brudge for D-day. Que intense and prolonged defense aginst impossible odds. The Russian levels, on the other hand, are something else all together. Dumped straight into the middle of besieged Stalingrad without even a rifle, it's up to you to help clear the city of the facists. Que lots an lots of taking part in desperate rushes against German emplacements. Truly cinematic, utterly fantastic.
So it's a great war experience, but unfortunetly this tempered by some frustrating gameplay. The levels are mostly well designed and the player always has at least a fighting chance, but there will be times when war reveals itself as the cruel, unfair mistress it is. I lost count of the number of times I was seconds away from completeing a vital objective, or making it to the next checkpoint only to be blown away by a stray grenade or German bullet. Enemy placement can also be cruel, placing riflemen on ledges and rooftops where ypu simply can't get to them. You can save manually whenever you want, but you just can't help feeling a bit cheap and ruins the flow of the game.
Also, despite containing some spectacular set pieces, there are some sections of COD which are, frankly, boring. One level, for example, started with an exciting storming of a dam top, only to degenerate into a long and tedious battle through samey corridor after samey corridor. Why couldn't the game designers simply have given us some more of the great open battle sequences that make this game so great? Luckily there are only a handful of sections like this, and are usually sandwhiched in between some of the best gaming action ever.
As far as great War-games experiences go, COD is a real gem. Not a perfect one, but persist, and you will be greatly rewarded.