Call of Duty: Finest Hour Review

Platform: Xbox, PlayStation 2

Developer/Publisher: Activision

ESRB Rating: T for Teen

I hate shooters based on World Wars. I tried the Medal of Honor games and loathed them. Maybe I was spoiled on the futuristic shooters of Doom and Halo. Yeah, that’s it. Then I happened to pick up Call of Duty: Finest Hour for the Xbox for real cheap. I needed something new to play and maybe I can get into this. I did get into it, but quickly got frustrated.

There are actually three different stories, one for each country. While in the real world, this is called conflict of interest, the Russians, British and Americans don’t care. Within each nationality you take control of the lives of corresponding countrymen. Some of them were thrown into the war, while others joined ranks to serve their mother country.

I liked how Call of Duty: Finest Hour was presented: you’re given an introduction to the characters and how he or she got to be in the war. Then you’re thrown right in and expected to follow orders.

Each different scenario has you going to historic places battling real battles that occurred, but the outcomes depend on you.

It’s a shooter, with antique weapons. Most of the time, you follow a comrade or a team of allies in order to complete mission objectives. This could range from taking out a radio to defending a tank. You could be a sniper expert or a tank runner. It just depends on the story you're in and the character you currently control.

Some of the missions were long with no way to save. Checkpoints were very, very rare. Sometimes I would lose on a long mission and have to return to the beginning just to go through the sequence again. That was annoying. Other times, I couldn’t hear my commanding officer and really didn’t know what to do.

One other thing I hated was that sometimes you were overwhelmed. In one mission, I played a sniper woman from Russia. I got to a point where my comrades and I were holed up in a warehouse and needed to defend a tank from the rushing Germans for 10 minutes. And it’s actual 10 minutes people. The problem was the Germans were coming in waves and I had to shoot them down. My first priority were the rocket launcher guys, and then the 2nd priority were the machine gun turret people. I fared fine during the first 5 minutes, but then they just bombarded me with Germans. They came from the left and from the right and just swarmed the place. And all I could do was forget my sniping and just go full blast outside in hopes of stopping them. It took me 4 real days to finally beat that part of the mission. It would have been nice to have a checkpoint after very couple waves so I didn’t have to sit through another 10 minutes of possibly losing.

The graphics in Call of Duty: Finest Hour are good. Nothing extraordinary. There was some slowdown when lots of action was on the screen. The character animation was unrealistic, but overall, the graphics satisfied.

The controls were top-notch. Movement was smooth and the response time was good. The warbly, slow-mo experience when explosions happened near you were sensible, which deactivated any real-time movement.

It’s a Halo setup (then again, what isn’t nowadays), so not much getting use to here. The only learning curve is getting use to the older weapons and how they acted. But once you did, you quickly compensated for any unbalance, or heavy reaction from kick back.

There’s plenty of action in this game to keep you interested. I liked how everything was happening around you during your missions and that it didn’t seem like it was all about you. Call of Duty: Finest Hour is an above average WWII shooter that delivers on experience, but falters on graphics. There’s a lot of competition in the Historic Shooter genre and Finest Hour sits near the middle of the pack.

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