Some of the cinematic scenes they stole from the PC version are reasonably ambitious for its day, but when you look at the AI, animation, movement and remember that Halo 2 came out the same year, it's harder to be so generous.
Let's get the only good parts out of the way: The Rhine crossing mission rules conceptually and mechanically, and its theme is the cherry on a generally strong score. Unlike its PC brethren, it does make an old college try at writing dialogue intent on character development. Even though the writing overall is worse than its predecessor, it does make the missions feel a little higher stakes and a little more lived in. But that's about all I can say.
The in-engine scenes just do not have the same choreography and composition of its source material. Not to mention, the original has such variety — trench warfare, espionage and infil, daring escapes, sieges. Meanwhile you spend probably 85% of Finest Hour in crumbling buildings or city streets. The North African stretch is a nice touch, but where are the fields? The villages? The snowy forests? At least we have plenty of underground tunnels!
Truly horrible character mobility. The look system has a screwy and floaty dead zone, quite unlike its contemporary console/analog stick FPS cousins, and it feels like you're walking through a swamp. Not to mention getting glued in place if you're being shredded by a buzzsaw MG42 or within 20 feet of a grenade.
The gunplay is where things get really rotten, though. Often I'd have an enemy dead in my iron sights 10 feet away and still miss. Good luck if you need to murk a sniper and you ran out of anything but MP40 ammo. I get it if you want guns to be less accurate to feel more realistic, but if you're going to design a game around that concept, you should probably not also require enemies to take 5-8 bullets to the head before they die on EASY difficulty. I truly couldn't believe how grueling the endgame was. I will say the tank movement and shooting feels relatively fine, but like almost all tank combat in gaming, it is too sluggish and imprecise to really be that exciting. And there is a LOT of tank combat here.
More than a few times, the mission trigger didn't pop and I got stuck, which meant I had to go back to the previous awfully designed checkpoint and often lose like 10-15 minutes of progress. Who designed this? CoD PC is a brutal game, but it at least acknowledges itself and gives you quicksaves and fairly frequent checkpoints.
I'm a big fan of the series and the early PC games had a cinematic quality that make them the definitive WW2 sim experience for their day. But this, this is just cash-in garbage farmed out to a team that either misconstrued or was technologically incapable to deliver what worked so well about the original.
Let's get the only good parts out of the way: The Rhine crossing mission rules conceptually and mechanically, and its theme is the cherry on a generally strong score. Unlike its PC brethren, it does make an old college try at writing dialogue intent on character development. Even though the writing overall is worse than its predecessor, it does make the missions feel a little higher stakes and a little more lived in. But that's about all I can say.
The in-engine scenes just do not have the same choreography and composition of its source material. Not to mention, the original has such variety — trench warfare, espionage and infil, daring escapes, sieges. Meanwhile you spend probably 85% of Finest Hour in crumbling buildings or city streets. The North African stretch is a nice touch, but where are the fields? The villages? The snowy forests? At least we have plenty of underground tunnels!
Truly horrible character mobility. The look system has a screwy and floaty dead zone, quite unlike its contemporary console/analog stick FPS cousins, and it feels like you're walking through a swamp. Not to mention getting glued in place if you're being shredded by a buzzsaw MG42 or within 20 feet of a grenade.
The gunplay is where things get really rotten, though. Often I'd have an enemy dead in my iron sights 10 feet away and still miss. Good luck if you need to murk a sniper and you ran out of anything but MP40 ammo. I get it if you want guns to be less accurate to feel more realistic, but if you're going to design a game around that concept, you should probably not also require enemies to take 5-8 bullets to the head before they die on EASY difficulty. I truly couldn't believe how grueling the endgame was. I will say the tank movement and shooting feels relatively fine, but like almost all tank combat in gaming, it is too sluggish and imprecise to really be that exciting. And there is a LOT of tank combat here.
More than a few times, the mission trigger didn't pop and I got stuck, which meant I had to go back to the previous awfully designed checkpoint and often lose like 10-15 minutes of progress. Who designed this? CoD PC is a brutal game, but it at least acknowledges itself and gives you quicksaves and fairly frequent checkpoints.
I'm a big fan of the series and the early PC games had a cinematic quality that make them the definitive WW2 sim experience for their day. But this, this is just cash-in garbage farmed out to a team that either misconstrued or was technologically incapable to deliver what worked so well about the original.