Call of Duty plays and feels like a slightly enhanced version of Allied Assault. It is clear that the team knew how to make an FPS game that feels mechanically strong. The set pieces are awesome and finally being able to aim down the sight is a godsend. However, a lot of these improvements are made hollow by some pretty annoying checkpoints and the enemy AI being particularly laser sighted. It just felt unfair a lot of the time. The campaign structure itself also suffers a bit from jumping around aimlessly. The missions themselves are often interesting, but there is little connective tissue and it doesn't hit as hard as it could.

I also played some MP which I had fun with although the server availability is pretty bad so the choice of maps was rather limited and I was dealing with high ping so a lot of that precision from the SP version did not apply. That being said IF you get a good populated server it is actually pretty fun and somewhere in that low 7 range.

This game is like a rollercoaster where you occasionally fall off the rails.

It basically tries to recreate the authenticity of war without the realism of it. In other words, sell you the illusion of war. It does so by carefully curating the player experience with linear level design and scripted scenes. The result feels like a movie. When it works that is...

When it doesn't, the illusion breaks and you find yourself in mediocre shootouts with stupid AI in cardboard sets. The seams come off and everything starts falling apart. At its worst moments the game feels like a 'Simon Says' game.

The most notable mission in the game, the storming of a hill in Stalingrad, was ruined for me as a moment, because I kept getting killed by the enemy machine guns for apparently no reason. I was doing what I was told and still I was getting gunned down every time. I suppose I must've walked a step to the side of the path I was supposed to walk or something, and the script gods didn't have mercy on me. Then there are missions like Pavlov's House, where it's like a horde mode. I must've killed at least 100 nazis there alone. It gets ridiculous. Thank God this game has quick saves. The tank mission must've been the worst. Invisible walls would appear and disappear randomly. I backtracked to the beginning of the level and back (on that slow-ass tank) only to realize that there was one tank hiding somewhere that I needed to kill in order to progress. Otherwise I was trying to drive down an open road only to hit the "wall" and my partner shout at me "are you blind?" "Don't you see the path is blocked?". No, I'm sorry, IW, I don't see it. Perhaps you should've placed some object there that would later get cleared.

I didn't have as many issues in earlier missions, I suppose because they were easier. The British missions were mostly boring. The majority of them took place in tight corridors with little to no spectacle. In one of the American missions I had a huge bug where a tank I was supposed to destroy disappeared, but kept firing somehow. I kept shooting at it with the anti-artillery gun, because from the distance I couldn't see that it's not there. Must've lost about 20 minutes there before I realized the game bugged.

In conclusion, I'd say this is a game with a solid start, but gets increasingly worse as you progress, so leaves you with a bad taste in your mouth after the completion. The ending is pretty anticlimactic too. The last mission for some reason is like 4 times shorter than the one preceding it, and nothing much happens in it.

So...I got a 2 week break from school for no reason in particular and I've got nothing to do right now, so what better way to spend those 2 weeks than to go through every call of duty game, well I could think of some, many if given enough time actually.

But I do think that call of duty is kinda overhated, not like it’s some great series or anything but I do find myself enjoying a lot of them despite their many many flaws and it is interesting to check out a series that changed so dramatically so many times yet is also ‘the same every year’, like how does that even work?

How can a series that spawned ww2 shooters, modern shooters, futuristic shooters, one semi scifi weird one and some more shit be “samey”? Well let’s find out...also i should say that I won’t be able to play mw2019 since I don’t own it and can’t pirate it unlike everything before bo4 (also no bo4 review, no sg to speak off in that one + we all know its shit) and lets be honest, pirating a COD game isn’t as much of a crime as it is to sell them for prices this high even after so many years (every cod game after and including bo2 is still 60$ with bo1 also being 40$ even though its like 11 years old)

So yeah let’s actually start this review now.

Call of Duty is a decent ww2 shooter...thats it.

Well ok there's a bit more to be said, it's one of those games thats kinda janky and painfully outdated in certain parts but it also has its own little charm that makes it enjoyable even if me and my friends were laughing more at the game than with it a lot of the time.

Let's start by saying that there isn't much to be said about the story, it's just really forgettable but I found it funny when motherfucking Captain Price himself showed up as a main character in the story, being featured in basically every mission in the middle section before being killed off screen which is kinda weird and more than a bit funny when you think about how he's basically the most known character from this whole series and it's not particularly close, yet he dies in the first game he's featured in. Obvs different Cpt Price but still I like to imagine that it's the same guy from the mw series and he just doesn't age at all for some reason.

The story is split between 3 campaigns, you play as, yup you guessed! Americans, British and Russians. The only 3 that matter to video game devs wanting to make ww2 shooters though I guess at the time it was fresh to see 3 different pov's in a ww2 game so I'll excuse it.

There's a bit of variety between close and long range combat in the story to keep it a bit fresh but that doesn't mean that you won't just use the mp40 the whole way since its the only gun you'll find ammo for consistently outside of like what, 2 missions? Both of which being the ones in which you drive a tank.

Nowadays playing through the game feels like going through a checklists of cliche things that happen in ww2 games but at the time I assume the game felt a bit more fresh when it came out and it's clear the devs knew what they were doing since they're the same guys behind the old Medal Of Honor games that I’ve heard are like at least ok.

The level design is mostly tight, levels are liniar in fashion and the game kinda turns into a corridor shooter whenever you enter a building but it is fun to just go rambo on everyone since there’s a chance enemies will drop health packs which should keep you at full hp while everyone in the room and the next room are spraying everything they got at you.

Speaking of which, I actually like the fact that your health doesn't regenerate and u have to rely on health packs, makes certain situations more tense even if I desperately missed it when I had to defend an area for 4-5 bloody minutes with like what, 5 med kits?

The game was turning into max payne during those where I just F5'd my way through that shit since checkpoints don’t come around often during these painful ‘defend the area’ parts.

Gunplay is pretty good, the guns feel nice to use, especially the snipers. Also it was clear the game wasn’t meant for 120 fov because you can see that a lot of the reload animations are just the dude taking out and putting back his clip with set fov, no reason to mention this other than me and my friends finding it hilarious.

Game is like 4-5 hours long, pretty short but there’s also little filler in the game’s missions I guess so it’s excusable. I’d say the best campaign was the British one and I’m not saying that only because of Cpt Price though it is mostly because of him. Just felt like that one had the most memorable missions though you’d be forgiven for not even noticing that you fight for 3 different factions throughout the game as there isn’t much difference between them in the game, at least between the American and British, with the Russians you can see how much more aggressive they were and how they would willingly kill one of their own doing something as simple as trying to retreat.

The ending is pretty much identical to the one from WAW but you aren’t the one...ugh let’s not spoil WAW since that one's really good and worth playing, carrying the thing to the top of the building or whatever. Real specific on my part.

Anyways, that’s all I had to say, I enjoyed my time with the first COD game though it’s more interesting in the context of what the series became rather than as it’s own game, if you get what I mean.

I never played a Call of Duty game in my life since it was always trendy and a game that everyone I know always plays 24/7.

While everyone I know from High School plays the newer games, I decided to play the game that started it all. Call of Duty, from 2003. It's not the best game, but the game captures the feeling of what it's like to be in war. The game is separated into 3 different scenarios, the U.S, the U.K, and the Soviets. Both campaigns are pretty mediocre, but the gameplay is a bit fun. The series is a bit promising so far, but really curious to see how the series goes downhill.

May check out Killzone or other FPS games in the future since I should play more "bad" games (due to my average rating being high).

An excellent feeling game first and foremost—loud, overwhelming and oppressive at times. The levels are quite long, making for pretty intense and frequent shooting segments only made better by the health pack system everyone seems to shun. A stray bullet hurts a lot, making for a more methodical approach of desperately trying to shoot down the enemy closest to you to lower the chances of getting hit as much as possible. This is faciliated by the quicksave system which is there for a reason—if you get hit too hard you just reload and rethink your approach. It's a unique gameflow, which the following games unfortunately completely give up on.

The defence sections on Veteran, be that the bridge in the American campaign or the multi-level building in the Soviet campaign, are some of the most memorable moments in any FPS I've played—there's this level desperation of trying to get past a horde of enemies, make just a small opening with a few shots to get to an anti-tank weapon before it blows up your position. It might seem unfair, but in reality the size of these levels allows for switching firing positions and experimenting with your approach to defense, which is really lacking in the next game. For those moments alone the game comes highly recommended.

Worth noting is that the switch from the first two campaigns to the third one is really jarring, the Soviets are misrepresented in a pretty clear attempt at glorifying the US and UK forces by contrasting them with the "reality" of the other side of the war. The scenarios they showcase are just ripped from a movie Enemy at the Gates, and not even based on some of the true cases from history which have not been easily disproven.

Regardless, good game, surprisingly good even. Give it a shot.

It's amazing to me, going back to the game that started this mega, era/genre defining franchise, just how much of the DNA that would come to be associated with the series was in here from the beginning. Just a little rougher around the edges is all.

Almost 20 years later this game still plays amazingly well and has a cinematic flair to it's combat that would only be improved upon and perfected in later entries.

It's not entirely without flaw however. This game has a preference for big open combat arena's as opposed to the narrow corridors and whack a mole enemy encounters typical of later CoD games. While for some this may be preferable design, for myself I found it quite frustrating as, when you combine it's open arena's with its lack of regenerating health (we wouldn't see that series staple until the sequels) it lead to a lot of cheap deaths. The checkpoint system in this game can also be very unforgiving.

Overall though it's merit's far outweigh its shortcomings and I can easily still recommend this entry even today, for fans of the series, or of FPS games in general.