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| Just one of the large battles you'll be a part of. |
Call of Duty was released in 2003 and immediately developed a very loyal
following. Not surprising for a game that featured excellent level design,
compelling gameplay, and top-notch production values … and that was an absolute
blast to play. Now Call of Duty has an expansion pack in United Offensive that
attempts to extend the magic of the original with a whole new campaign of
missions and some multiplayer enhancements. Does it succeed? Mostly, but there
seems to be a little something missing…
Like the original game, United Offensive’s missions are divided into
American, British, and Russian min-campaigns. There are 13 new missions in all,
and they will take you to the Battle of the Bulge, the skies over Germany, and
the Battle of Kursk, respectively. The American missions place you in the snows
of the Ardennes during the height of the German counterattack. You’ll face waves
of German infantry supported by armor and you will also need to assault villages
to take out German gun emplacements heavily defended by infantry, machine guns,
armor, and infantry. The first mission is very reminiscent of the missions in
Call of Duty as it has you server as the gunner on a jeep making a frantic race
through the woods as the initial elements of the German assault come crashing
into the American lines. After that, though, you’ll begin to feel that the
character of the game has been changed in United Offensive. The primary
difference is that the game’s difficulty has been ratcheted a lot higher. There
are a lot more enemies in United Offensive than you had to face in Call of Duty
and if you don’t try to continually move to your next objective they’ll keep
coming and coming. This forces you to be very aggressive while advancing and as
a result you will end up dead a lot in the process. There are also plenty of
sequences that are designed to be just plain deadly and it will take you several
attempts just to get past them. For example, one has you running across a field
while taking artillery and machine gun fire. Press the run key and pray. Another
one requires you to cross a bridge defended by machine gun nests, an anti-tank
gun, and an endless supply of Germans. It may take you an entire evening to get
past this one. Finally United Offensive is not above pulling dirty tricks on the
player. Your path through the missions is carefully controlled, so the game
knows where you have to go. It takes advantage of this to pull tricks like
placing a machine gunner in a window of a building behind you as your path leads
you in the opposite direction. Sure you have to be ready for anything in war,
but there are instances in United Offensive where the situation feels a bit
contrived and takes away from the game’s immersive experience; Call of Duty did
not rely on set-ups like this. I’m not saying that United Offensive is a bad
game because of differences between the missions in it and those in the original
Call of Duty. United Offensive generates a lot of excitement and the mayhem in
the large battles that you find yourself in is amazing. It’s just that United
Offensive has added a degree of frustration to the game that wasn’t a part of
the original and the overall game experience can’t help but to suffer a little
bit because of this. It’s one thing to be killed due to a mistake or bad
decision on your part and another to die because the game overwhelmed you.
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