Too much of the same thing?

By Martin Kingsley

Looks like someone hit a fuel canister, or there was a box of matches sitting on top of a fuel canister that then fell into the canister and set off the explosion

The best way I can think to describe Call of Duty: Finest Hour, (and, oh, how I have racked my brains over this trying to be witty) is 'lost in translation', and even then there's no Bill Murray, so here the description lacks a certain something.

But I digress.

What's important to note here, apart from a lack of the amazing Mr Murray, is that this is a game with enormous potential, potential squandered by too-much-of-the-same-for-too-much-of-the-game in a market far too competitive for this kind of thing to go unnoticed.

The Call of Duty series' first foray into the home console market, 'Finest Hour' has a lot going for it from the start, not least a stunning pedigree carried over from the PC version, which garnered something in the region of eighty separate Game of the Year awards from across the world, and more praise than would ordinarily seem possible.

And things look quite reasonable to start with, what with the three entirely new campaigns designed specifically for console gamers, the rather spiffy (though, it must be said, slightly aged) graphics, and, again, potential for Nazi-killing fun.

Starting with the Russian campaign of '43 to take back Stalingrad by crossing the Volga (admittedly, the opening sequence is almost a clone of the one featured in the PC game, but bear with me here), things get furious fast, and once you grab a gun from one of your dead countrymen, there is no lack of moving targets simply begging for your attention.

Things start to go awry for Finest Hour at about this point, though most gamers won't really notice for at the very least the first campaign. Everything starts feeling samey and - more importantly - soulless, quite, quite quickly, and, being at heart a PC gamer, I'm forced to compare the (to be blunt) mediocrity of the experience with the pulse-pounding, highly immersive sweat bath that is CoD vanilla.

Take, for instance, the idiosyncratic (not to mention slightly bewildering) design choice to have the player linearly jumping between characters every few missions (for instance, from a lowly grunt to a female Russian sniper during the abovementioned campaign).

It doesn't do anything bar advance the story in a very makeshift, rickety fashion, and it certainly doesn't help you gain any sense of attachment to your character because you know they're mincemeat bound for the metaphorical impellers of the script writers come the end of that next loading screen.

"Drat and dash it! Those planes are being attacked by giant gnats."

The only way Finest Hour could feel any more linear is if someone slapped some rails on this thing and called it a long-distance prequel to the bone-creakingly painful Cyberia (may you forever rot in corporate Hell, Cryo Interactive, yea, verily).

Also not helping Finest Hour are the visuals, which, while serviceable, are definitely sub-par, even on the Xbox, while the PS2 suffers blatantly from its extreme old age (and Sony's once-behemoth has not gotten old gracefully, evidenced fully by the heavy lag one experiences when you get any kind of reasonable explosion happening on-screen).

In the design department, too, sounds are weak and do not shine in any way, shape or form, and your 5.1 Dolby Digital system will merely laugh heartily at the low-rent audio presented to it, before doing its own rendition of 'blow this for a game of soldiers', scored for tinny gunfire and piss-weak explosions.

It's not all bad, though. At its best, during the second campaign as the British fighting through North Africa in '44 and towards the third American series of missions, things improve drastically, and, while over-the-top antics-wise (this is World War II done Rambo-style), Finest Hour puts up a good front gameplay-wise when inevitably compared with the PC CoD, yet in the face of games like Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30, it taps out faster than a hobo boxer on Ritalin.

Enemy AI sits somewhere between good and awful, and where players will suffer most is actually in the animations department. How, you ask? Well, the Finest Hour animators went a tad overboard, and so, in length and polygonal overacting, it's hard to tell a gunshot-reaction animation from a death animation, and you're going to end up wasting a fair bit of ammo on enemies just making sure they're going to stay down.

Offering online play, as most half-decent shooters do these days, Finest Hour suffers as it does in single-player mode, from mediocrity. It's reasonable, but it all feels very redundant, for why bother with multiplayer when there are so many better dedicated online shooters available?

Add to that some very strange frame-dropping problems that lead to everybody sliding about the map instead of having anything approaching a normal walk-cycle, and you've pretty much driven the final nail in the Finest Hour coffin.

If you really can't get Call of Duty on PC, and are desperate for some of that World War II action…I'd tell you to go get a copy of Brothers in Arms, though if that doesn't ice your muffin, consider Finest Hour.

Game: Call of Duty: Finest Hour
System: Xbox
Players: 1-multi
Online: Yes
Developer: Spark Unlimited
Distributor: Activision

Rating: 70%

(Ratings Key/Explanation)

Call of Duty: Finest Hour is on the shelves now.