Buy 'CALL OF DUTY: Finest Hour':
Xbox | GameCube | PlayStation 2

For a game that’s about history, Call of Duty: Finest Hour is, oddly, a victim of it. It’s picked virtually the worst possible time to be released, in a holiday season that’s choked with big-ticket FPSes and a genre that’s already creaking under the weight of World War II games. At this point, I’m expecting Germany to issue a formal complaint.

In the current rankings, I’d put Call of Duty ahead of Killzone but behind Halo 2. Finest Hour puts you into the role of six different Allied soldiers on three fronts during the closing days of World War II. Over the course of nineteen missions, you’ll retake cities, drive tanks, fight in the siege of Stalingrad, sabotage Rommel’s plans in North Africa, and be among the first soldiers on the ground when the Allies march into Germany.

The first and most obvious comparison here is the Medal of Honor series, which shares Call of Duty’s most obvious merits: historical accuracy and high production values. Everything in Call of Duty looks like a future museum piece, from the tank columns that provide your cover throughout the last few stages to the rifles that the Nazis are firing at you.

More to the point, Call of Duty really feels like a war. A lot of it’s prescripted, obviously, but the game’s rich with vast explosions, oncoming storms of machine-gun fire, and morons with Panzerschreck anti-tank guns around every corner. Call of Duty gives you a lot of room to make mistakes, especially on earlier levels, but it’s just as fond of unmercifully cutting you down like a dog in the street when you blunder into a turret gunner’s line of sight.

It also differs from Medal of Honor in that you’re just a grunt on the ground, most of the time, with a unit to look after. Instead of playing as a virtual one-man army, you’re a scared Russian conscript watching your fellow scared Russian conscripts die around you by the dozen or an American sergeant with a bad habit of getting thrown headlong into really dangerous missions.

As an FPS, Finest Hour isn’t bad. It’s perched in the sweet spot between realistic action and cartoony run-and-gun; there’re magical health packs everywhere and you can absorb a lot of punishment before kicking over dead.

At the same time, automatic weapons tend to be wildly inaccurate and tanks steer like – get this – tanks. You have to guide the turret and treads independently and simultaneously, which gives you a hefty blind spot and a slow reaction time. If you go from Halo 2’s Scorpions and Wraiths to a Sherman tank, expect to be frustrated.

As a matter of fact, expect to be frustrated anyway. The tank levels are the worst offenders, with missiles coming at you from every direction, your armor evaporating like dry ice, and the bizarre rules under which you’re allowed to disembark, but there are any number of smaller problems that can make Call of Duty a chore.

For example, as near as I can tell, the final stage can only be beaten if you’re carrying a Panzerschreck and/or a sniper rifle, neither of which are readily available. If you restart early in a stage, you’ll be kicked back to the beginning with that stage’s default weapons, which are often totally unsuited to the job at hand.

That job is usually made harder than it has to be by the lemmings masquerading as your squadmates, who have a bad habit of happily running off to their demise. The only exceptions are soldiers that the game needs for cutscenes, who’re functionally invulnerable. If anyone else is planning an FPS with CPU soldiers like this one, could you do me a favor and throw in some kind of elementary command system? I’d really like to be able to convince these guys that they should hang back, as opposed to charging the mounted guns.

Fortunately, the singleplayer campaign takes a firm backseat to the multiplayer mode, which isn’t bad at all. It offers Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, Capture the Flag, and Search & Destroy; the latter mode is your typical defend/attack objectives minigame. It’s slower-paced and more tactically-oriented than other, twitchier online shooters, and it’s easier to find a game than I thought it’d be. My only gripe with it is that the game doesn’t always show you another player’s name or the green slash-and-circle that denotes a member of your team, and it’s surprisingly easy to do a lot of team-killing because of that.

Call of Duty’s biggest problem, as noted above, is that it’s coming out at the wrong time, for the wrong systems, to be the modest hit that it deserves to be. On the Xbox, it’s overshadowed by Halo 2, and rightfully so; on the PS2, it’s got to contend with stuff like Goldeneye: Rogue Agent, which is a little more fun in a variety of sick ways, and Killzone, which isn’t much fun at all but has a higher profile.

If you haven’t already had your fill of shooting Nazis and winning World War II, Call of Duty: Finest Hour is among the best historical FPSes on console. It has its share of noteworthy flaws, but it’s an engaging and entertaining experience, particularly online.

Score: 7.9/10