It is one of the last of its kind, the first wave of the cinematic shooters of the early 2000s, and it really shows.
The "cinematic" sections are hit or miss. Bigger scale battles are usually just defending a single place while the Banzai charge comes wave after wave. There are some nice change of pace, like the Tarawa landing and the flyboys mission, but it feels like most of the levels are just going through one jungle after another in a linear line, occassionally stopping to clear out a Japanese encampment.
Then there is the gunplay. The hit-detection is really abysmal, it's hard to know whether you hit an enemy successfully or not because the damage animation for the enemies is just bad. Not only that, even the bolt-action rifles are not guaranteed to hit the target you are aimining at, sometimes missing for inexplicable reason. Then there is the submachine guns that are a tad too weak even considering the game's arcade-like nature. Also, the reloading is just absolutely horrendous, taking too long in many cases (not sure why he's so gentle when pushing the clipped ammo into bolt-action rifles), adding to the poor gunplay. Some guns having blatantly incorrect reload animation doesn't help either.
While it's good to really have your squadmates all the time, unlike Allied Assault where they just die out mid-way through a mission every time, but they are not really interesting characters--so far to the point I don't actually know which one has which name.
You can't exactly argue that it is technically a generation before Call of Duty 2, it really is only a year apart--and this game is a PC exclusive so it really shouldn't have that excuse to begin with. And somehow, it still manages to slow down in my machine that came out 13 years after.
The "cinematic" sections are hit or miss. Bigger scale battles are usually just defending a single place while the Banzai charge comes wave after wave. There are some nice change of pace, like the Tarawa landing and the flyboys mission, but it feels like most of the levels are just going through one jungle after another in a linear line, occassionally stopping to clear out a Japanese encampment.
Then there is the gunplay. The hit-detection is really abysmal, it's hard to know whether you hit an enemy successfully or not because the damage animation for the enemies is just bad. Not only that, even the bolt-action rifles are not guaranteed to hit the target you are aimining at, sometimes missing for inexplicable reason. Then there is the submachine guns that are a tad too weak even considering the game's arcade-like nature. Also, the reloading is just absolutely horrendous, taking too long in many cases (not sure why he's so gentle when pushing the clipped ammo into bolt-action rifles), adding to the poor gunplay. Some guns having blatantly incorrect reload animation doesn't help either.
While it's good to really have your squadmates all the time, unlike Allied Assault where they just die out mid-way through a mission every time, but they are not really interesting characters--so far to the point I don't actually know which one has which name.
You can't exactly argue that it is technically a generation before Call of Duty 2, it really is only a year apart--and this game is a PC exclusive so it really shouldn't have that excuse to begin with. And somehow, it still manages to slow down in my machine that came out 13 years after.