COD with health packs, zero sprinting, and on the GameCube?!???! Based as fuck!

COD really was a different series prior to Modern Warfare and whether it changed for the better or worse depends on personal preference. In stark contrast to the run and gun, fast-paced action we see today, Finest Hour perfectly encapsulates old-style COD's gritty atmosphere and slower pacing.

For a World War II campaign, Finest Hour does a good job showing different perspectives of the war which serves both the scope of the narrative and the variety of missions on hand. Granted, it's hard to become attached to any specific character when it's constantly swapping between perspectives and doesn't develop anything, but I think it serves its purpose for giving enough context to really understand the stakes in each mission. The introduction mission is amazing as, for as cheesy and overused as this sounds, it really feels like you're there in the war with chaos spewing from all sides as countless Russian soldiers charge and die before your eyes. There's quite an impressive amount of detail and it's all the more immersive since you're in control throughout this situation rather than if this was all crammed in a cutscene.

Unfortunately, the game really shows its age in some areas. Movement in general is really slow and while the pace of combat never demands anything too crazy from the player, sometimes the sluggish aiming is enough for enemies to get a few extra hits in that feel a bit unfair. Additionally, sometimes a well aimed grenade from an enemy can make it nigh impossible to get away from without taking some damage. I'm also not sure if something was up with my copy of the game but I found the visuals very dark for some reason? Like sometimes I couldn't see where enemies were firing from in dimly lit areas and that was a bit of a pain. Idk I've never had this issue with any other game but every gameplay video I find of this game looks a lot brighter.

A lot of this wouldn't annoy me all THAT much if it wasn't for the game's most crippling flaw: the fucking checkpoint system. Who did this? Who thought it was a good idea to have the player redo 20+ minutes of gameplay at a time due to no checkpoints or a quicksave feature? You're often lucky if you get one scripted checkpoint in the middle of a mission as that'll be all you get most of the time. This led to the later missions of this game being a lot more frustrating and I was honestly relieved to finish the last couple parts of the game.

It's a competent shooter at the end of the day as it works well enough for the GameCube and has some solid missions in there, but I would be lying if I said this game didn't become a chore to play due to those scarce checkpoints.

How well Finest Hour started, a pity.
Really the worst CoD game I played, and I played Ghost at the time.
It's really horrible, the gameplay is hard and slow, the constant frame drops don't help it either, even putting the emulator in the lowest graphics didn't work any better.
The first one to bring cinematics that are more than welcome, that with "good" characters put us in all the allied fronts to follow a story and kill Nazis.
The only good thing about this game is the tank sections, very well done and fun to control.
But then with wall-hacked enemies, aim-hacks and a life bar that drops faster than Activision's stocks with the harassment drama.
Honestly very few times I quit a game because I find it unbearable, this time was one of them, a completely skippable game and a bad port of the first cod.

Don't ask a woman her age
A man how much he earns
Germany what they did between 1939 and 1945.
And never ask what happened to Activision/Blizzard in 2022.

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Que bien que empezó Finest Hour, una lastima.
Realmente el peor juego de CoD que jugué, y jugué al Ghost en su época.
Es realmente horrible el gameplay duro y lento, los bajones constantes de frames tampoco lo ayudan, hasta poniendo el emulador en los gráficos mas bajo no iba mejor.
El primero en traer cinemáticas que la verdad son mas que bienvenidas, con "buenos" personajes nos ponen en todos los frentes aliados a seguir una historia y matar Nazis.
Lo único bueno que tiene este juego son las secciones de tanques, muy bien hechas y divertido de controlar.
Pero después con unos enemigos con wall-hack, aim-hacks y una barra de vida que baja mas rápido que las acciones de Activision con el drama del acoso.
Sinceramente muy pocas veces dejo un juego porque me parece insoportable, esta vez fue una de ellas, un juego completamente salteable y un port malo del primer cod.

No le preguntes a una mujer su edad
A un hombre cuanto gana
A Alemania que hacia entre los años 1939 y 1945
Y nunca preguntes que paso con Activision/Blizzard en 2022

What seems to be a good idea first, might become a bad one later on. The fact that CoD's first attempt at a console exclusive title were like this, shows that at the time, developers did not know what to do with the IP, because Finest Hour is not just too safe with it's mission design and campaigns, but also pretty lazy.

Essentially, the game is pretty much the same as CoD 1 in terms of variety. You can play as the russians, the british and americans, but what makes this one unique is that each soldier has a reason to fight and they tell you who they are at the beginning of their mission. You will also meet every playable character in the game in other missions, making the campaigns feel like an unique experience, rather than a random pile of ideas.

What makes this one bad, is that the gunplay is not satisfying at all, and the design of some of the missions are very cheap. Do this for 9 minutes, drive around in a tank for 6 minutes, hop out, shoot 4 guys, hop back, destroy XY etc etc. You get the idea, it is pretty safe and cheap.

The enemy can also literally spawn right in front of you, and the game uses a health pack system, that will probably let you down, because with the combination of a checkpoint system, some parts are utterly terrible.

Not only that, but guns are inaccurate as well, making them unenjoyable to use. Sometimes the game lets you grab and carry a heavier, more stationary weapon, but the recoil and accuracy is so off, that you basically cannot enjoy them at all.

However, I really liked the opening soviet union campaign, which was the most refined experience out of all of them, while the british campaign was undercooked, and the american suffered from recycling ideas.

Finest Hour is a decent time to be very honest, because in the end, you are playing Call of Duty, and Call of Duty is always at least fun, even when it isn't well made in every aspect.

Fun fact: This game was made by Spark Unlimited, the developers of Turning Point: Fall of Liberty, Legendary and Lost Planet 3. This was their first game.

This is psychological torture. There's no other way of describing it. None of its aspects work at all. The gameplay is slow, but really, really slow, you feel like a worm, your guns don't shoot fast, the movement feels sluggish and jumping is merely a detail. The gunplay is just bad, aiming is terrible with an horribly implemented aim assist and the shooting lacks any feedback at all, and you'll get constantly swarmed by enemies with perfect aim all the time to an absurd degree and you'll die a lot of times, because the only way to regain health is via scarce medkits. This is not hard, it's unfair. "But if I die, I'll just respawn at the last checkpoint, right?", you may ask. No, not at all, there aren't any savepoints in this game. I mean, there will occassionally be one or two in certain missions, but for the most time there won't be any, meaning that you'll restart the mission aaaall over again.

And I wouldn't mind that if the missions were good, but they're not. It's just: "Defend this position", "Escort this ally", "Assault this place", "Drive a tank" or "Kill all the enemies/tanks/planes/whatever". It's just lazy and uninspired. And this brings me to my next point. This is the most nothing game I've ever played. It's literally about nothing, you just go from mission to mission with almost no plot or characters. This may very well be the videogame equivalent of the WW2 documentary you could find zapping on the TV after dinner. No, in fact when you finish a campaing they do drop you some bits that are just a narration of the actual events of WW2 over real footage. THIS IS A FRICKIN' HISTORY CHANNEL DOCUMENTARY!!!!!. And you could argue that World at War did the same thing, and while it's technically true, at least they tried to tell something about the war instead of dropping you onto whatever battle they felt like.

Lastly, the thing that pisses me off the most. The atrocious framerate. Now, I don't certainly know if this is a my monitor thing, because I'm playing on an original PS2 with a HDMI converter and a modern 1080p monitor, but I tested the other games that I have (Scarface, No One Lives Forever, Enter The Matrix, Manhunt and Ghosthunter), and all of them have a consistent framerate, not necessarily high or anything (except for Ghosthunter which shockingly had a pretty high FPS count), but consistent. Finest Hour didn't have a consistent framerate. Sometimes you'll be at like 30 FPS and ten seconds later you'll be at 8 FPS, it's ridiculous. This just worsens the experience a lot making everything feel even more worse. I mean, was it that hard to make your game with a stable framerate? Guess it was pretty hard after all. But even if the framerate was better, all you were to have was a pretty mediocre, badly designed and forgettable First-Person Shooter.

I don't know if these words showed you the hatred this game filled me with, I genuinely don't want anything to do with this ever again in my entire life, I just want to forget that I played this. It's not just that it's a middling game, it's infuriating, horrible in every single way, I despise it, I hate it with all my heart. It is now that I wonder why did I decided to play this first with my new PS2 instead of, you know, actual good games, but I don't know. I may just be fucking stupid.

I haven't played too many console shooters before this, definitely not recently, so I really enjoyed seeing how the series is tweaked towards them when it is built with only them in mind. Enemies shoot less often, aim assist allows for less accurate aiming, both rifles and machine guns are viable. All that makes for slower, more methodical approaches, although it can ramp up to faster run-and-gun segments very effectively. Very enjoyable gameflow.

Then you hit the tank missions, those are fantastic. You move between tight and open areas, you control all your weaponry and have to aim the machine gun unlike the other games. These are the most fun missions in the game, and the pace is great thanks to the fact that the tank's health regenerates.

But then, everything comes crashing down starting from the African missions and onward. The checkpoints became incredibly scarce, you'll get a maximum of one checkpoint for most levels going forward, some missions you have to complete in one go. On the highest difficulty (which is hard not veteran in this game) this is just brutal, you can explore and scrounge for healthpacks but sometimes it's just not enough. This is especially annoying when the mounted machine guns come into play, you just can't move past them without taking damage but you have to shoot them down, so just hope and pray you can aim in time before they annihilate your healthbar. From here on out the game becomes largely unsatisfying, with the exception of another fantastic tank level and the final assault on a bridge with healthpacks aplenty.

Had to resort to save states for a lot of the second half of the game to not rip off all my remaining hair, but the tank sections coupled with other select levels are so good that I can't discredit the experience, it was well worth it. Comes recommended on difficulties other than hard, alternatively you can try hard, but there's no reason to feel bad about using save states when going gets too hard.

I was honestly a bit surprised at how well this game holds up today.

Mechanically FPS games of this era will still figuring things out, and only a small few actually managed to pull it off. Call of duty: Finest hour is one such example.

This is a spin off of the main game which at the time was a PC exclusive. However don't let the games spin off status fool you, it's just as good if not arguably even better than its PC bigger brother.

There is much more characterisation in the protagonists here and the set pieces are much more cinematic. The only thing holding this game back from surpassing the original game, is the slightly dated controls.

Everything is so sluggish, while it controls quite well and it's influence on console shooters can even be seen in games today, there is no sprint button meaning the default movement is a tedious crawl. Even turning and aiming is operating at 0.5x speed.

Pair the sluggishness with an absolutely brutal checkpoint system that can have you replaying entire 20 minute long mission from the start and unfortunately despite the praise I have for this game and how well it still holds up compared to it's contemporaries, I can only really recommend this for CoD superfans who want to play every game in the series.

Had I reviewed this game when it initially release my score may have been higher but by todays standards It is merely mediocre, if impressive.

"A Poor Transition To Console"

What seemed be a port of the first game in the series to consoles ended up being something that was slightly original, at least in the case of it not being a port at all. "Finest Hour" contains a standalone campaign built specifically for consoles, which is no easy feat for a studio that had barely gotten its series started. However, the awful controls, lack of good shooting feedback, empty story, and all too familiar level design of the first game (yet worse) resulted in a pretty forgettable first entry for "Call of Duty" on home consoles.

The controls in this game were really bad. Aiming is really stiff yet doused in stick acceleration, meaning it feels much harder to fight enemies than it should've been. Hitboxes being as poor as they were didn't help either, so you would constantly miss shots that would have been a breeze on PC (aim assist was useless here as well).

Levels were sort of similar to the first game, though there are plenty of original missions here. Unfortunately, these ones aren't really exciting and mostly involve things like wave defense or tank segments (at least during the first third of the game). There is a new setting in North Africa which at first sounded appealing, but the actual gameplay is so repetitive that I figured the change of scenery wouldn't matter.

There are characters introduced in the story that you do take control of, but they also weren't notable. Most had some slightly generic backstory with an okay voice actor, but they lacked personality throughout each of their two missions. The plot is, well, WWII again, but Exact Ent. didn't really seem interested in forming any stories with a particular character or squad like future games in the series would go on to do.

This is just a really bland FPS that controls like crud on console. The only shooter I can sort of think about that had this issue was "Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30", though in "that" game you couldn't even hit enemies with your gun most of the time. It's better than that here, though not by a huge margin. This one isn't really worth the time playing through since it mostly boils down the core COD mechanics while also failing to create a fun game out of the remains.

Final Verdict: 3/10 (Poor)

Consoles first Call of Duty, and let me tell you, I do not like this game. What is essentially a spin off, and an attempt to give consoles a taste of the Call of Duty game/expansion on PC, it's a poor transition. Yes, I understand technology was pretty limited and developers were still trying to figure out control schemes and mechanics at the time but it's hard to ignore the lack of polish. Nothing in this game stands out, and I find it hard to recommend.

It follows a similar format to the pc counterpart, where the campaign is split up into 3 sections, Soviet, British, and America. This game takes a different approach with the characters than the first game, where it attempts to flush them out a lot more, give them a bit more life. Instead of you playing as what felt like generic infantryman. Being the best out of the three stories and starting off strong with the Soviet campaign, it has one of the coolest story missions in the series where you get to play as a female sniper, Tanya Pavelovna. Who as soon as she appeared I immediately wanted to marry. Time to rewatch Enemy at the Gates I guess. She also happens to be the ONLY memorable character in this game and she isn't around for very long and when she does leave, that's when the game becomes a sloggy, uninteresting mess. The British campaign is very short, which is sad to see because I'd argue it has the coolest setting, Africa. Having some neat set pieces and fun moments it's easily forgotten. The American story is fairly long, but shares a similar fate with the previous campaign, and that it's just kind of boring and forgettable but still having some neat views.

Gameplay is what you would most likely expect, shoot, move up, shoot. The problem with that is, hit detection is inconsistent, sometimes aiming directly at enemies, shots just don't seem to land no matter what, not only that, guns seem to have a hard detection drop off, with in combination with the terrible aiming acceleration where you will often just overshoot and miss targets constantly, it makes it very hard to actually enjoy. When you aren't boots on the ground you are most likely in a tank, which drag on for way to long. It's a way to break up gameplay but by god are they just boring, at least they give you the option of 3rd person which is cool but it just feels a lot more inaccurate when shooting. Unlike the first game you get a dedicated grenade button which is a nice feature, but at the same time they also took away the ability to sprint which they added in the expansion United Offensive. You do adjust to the slower move speed after awhile though. Call of duty 1 had this thing where you couldn't open doors, in this one it seems they got a bit excited about it all and now you have to open every single door to progress, or you can tell your squad to do it. On that note, Ai is shit, plain and simple. Running in front of you, running into fire or grenades, standing there, even the enemies will act lobotomized, then mow you down with pixel perfect accuracy. Health packs make a return, from PC but with the added bonus of being able to actually carry some on you, which is a nice addition.

Multiplayer I did not get to try.

Heavily unstable framerate, sometimes affecting the entire mission feeling extremely slow, adding to the already sluggish feeling of the gameplay itself. Which just adds to the frustration when you are also dealing with the terrible checkpoint system. If you die, or fail then you will sometimes have to start a 20 minute mission all over again, and it will happen.

Visually the game is actually decently detailed, environments are full, and the effects are okay. Although they went with the terrible muzzle flash that the first game had. The game does promote a bit of exploration but it's usually into empty rooms to find a health pack or gun.

The orchestral soundtrack is dramatic which does fit in well with the games style. Sound design, footsteps, bullets flying about and explosions sound pretty okay, except for when mounted machine guns seemed to have this heavy "crunchy" sound to them when hitting an object like a tank, which honestly gave me a headache every time I was near it.

surprisingly enjoyable... i didnt think i would ever find myself saying that about a CoD game, but this is so snappy and has such little fat. the soviet campaign especially is short, fun, varied, and actually moved me at a few moments. i can't really say as much about the two other campaigns but the eastern front was great. this is such a cinematic and large scale (it feels like it is, anyways) game that you really don't expect out of this generation of gaming, it almost feels a little anachronistic.