Call of Duty: Finest Hour will bring the excellent Call of Duty PC game
experience to consoles for the first time. I use the phrase “game experience”
because Finest Hour is not a port of the PC version, but rather a new game
designed for consoles that preserves the same gameplay that PC gamers have
enjoyed since the end of last year. You’ll still fight the Germans in three
different campaigns as a soldier in the American, British, and Russian armies,
but the missions will be new and specially created for Finest Hour. With one
exception, that is, I don’t think that gamers will complain too much that it has
found its way into Finest Hour as well.
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| Stalingrad under fire. |
The mission in question here is the opening of the battle of Stalingrad in
the Russian campaign. While unfortunately Finest Hour was not available for play
at E3, Activision was showing the introductory cinematic and gameplay from the
mission in a theater designed to keep out the cacophony of noise that is E3. The
mission opens in a scene straight out of Enemy at the Gates, with Russian
infantry packed into flimsy boats trying to cross the Volga under relentless
German gunfire and air attack. As you crouch down in your boat with your fellow
comrades, a propaganda officer stands at the boat’s bow shouting over the din of
the battle. His speech is partially to boost morale, but the point he really
wants to get across is that if anyone has second thoughts about charging into
the fray they can expect to get a bullet in their back from him. As if the
battle wasn’t fierce enough on its own, the Russians are experiencing severe
supply shortages so only every other soldier gets a gun. Yep, you only get a
weapon if the German War Machine shoots down your partner before you take one
for Mother Russia. In the game demo shown at E3, the Germans were happy to
oblige, so it looks like you’ll soon get to have a weapon in hand albeit a slow
shooting and reloading Russian model (gameplay hint: get your hands on a German
MP40 submachine gun as soon as you can). The demo then proceeded to show the
fierce building to building fighting in the near total ruins of the factories of
Stalingrad. Suffice it to say that the action is pretty intense and almost
non-stop as the city is literally crawling with Germans.
On the PC, Call of Duty presents gamers with amazing squad and enemy AI,
intense battles, well-designed missions, and probably the most realistic sound
to ever appear in a World War II shooter. Finest Hour will bring all of this to
console gamers, and with its original missions will be a special treat for PC
gamers lucky enough to own a videogame console as well. Look for Finest Hour to
be released at the end of 2004.
