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Call Of Duty 2 PC Infinity Ward/Activision  Let
me be the first one to admit that the Ultra-Real High-Tension Team-Based
First-Person-Shooting World-War-2-Simulator isn't exactly my 'thing'.
Strap me to a Mario Kart, feed me a giant green mushroom and let me
loose on Chocolate Town, I'm as happy as a fifty foot Katamari. Throw
me into the middle of one of the longest, bloodiest, most chaotic
and brutal conflicts in world history with nought but my crappy old
rifle and emaciated team mates for comfort, that elicits a rather
different response. What I mean to say is that I was fucking terrified
from beginning to end; absolutely shitting shrapnel. Several of my untested assumptions about war were resoundingly confirmed by 'Call Of Duty 2'. For one: guns, on the whole, are bad. There are many, many kinds of guns. Used correctly, almost all guns can kill you. Getting killed is bad. It really, really sucks. A gun without bullets can even kill you: the bottom-end, or 'butt', of a rifle has the added functionality of caving your face in. Getting your face caved in is bad. Explosions are bad. Getting run over by tanks is pretty shitty. Most things in World War 2, it seems, kill you. The impression slowly formed that war, for the most part, is bad. What I didn't know, however, is that war is also rather exhilarating. As opposed to being killed, killing people is buckets of fun. Whether spastically showering the enemy with your quaint rat-a-tatter, popping craniums from afar with your sniper rifle, liquefying whole crowds with your mounted machine gun, launching majestic man-showers with the aid of a grenade, or running them down in a jeep, truck, tank or boat, we allied-westerners can all agree that there is no simpler and more morally satisfying pastime than the age-old tradition of Killing Nazis. Those Nazis, it seems, were made for it. And my word, but there's a lot of them. War is also quite beautiful, at least in 'COD2'. Explosions are beautiful, smoke is beautiful, planes and boats and tanks are very impressive indeed. Not that there's any time to take it all in: whether in snowy Moscow town, African deserts or a smouldering post-air-raid urban wasteland, stopping to appreciate the huge and intricately detailed environment won't win you any points with the Nazis. The overall tone, the "mood" that Infinity Ward have set out to convey in 'COD2' seems to be one of constant and imminent Deadly Threat. In this they have spectacularly succeeded. There wasn't a moment went by in 'COD2' that I didn't get the feeling I was somehow about to be horribly and noisily eviscerated. Even the loading screen freaked me out. The winning combination of killing people and avoiding being killed in so many new, fast, loud, beautiful and historically accurate ways is sure to make 'COD2' a deeply satisfying experience for fans of the killing-while-not-dying genre. And if you're a big pussy like me, it'll scare you shitless.  |
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