It's true that you can have too much of a good thing. Like caviar, fine wines and the work of Jean-Paul Sartre, war games are best played and released in moderation (small sips, darling, small sips) lest you get burnt out on them too quickly.
But someone, evidently, hasn't told the industry because if there's one thing you'd think we don't need any more of, it's bloody World War II shooters.
It's not that games like Brothers in Arms, Allied Assault, the original Call of Duty, or the ever-multiplying number of expansion packs for those above-mentioned, are bad, per se, it's just that one eventually has to come to the conclusion that there were other wars, y'see, and there's only so many times you can shoot Fritz in the head before it begins to lose its effect.
Happily, we're not quite at that point yet, and thank goodness for that, because, boy, is Call of Duty 2 a ripper of a game.
The work of series developer Infinity Ward, CoD2 is a refinement of all the things that made their original masterwork great, with a shiny new engine bolted on and a few interesting gameplay changes to be found within.
While it won't revolutionise the way we think about war games, I don't think anybody could seriously say that was the point: Infinity Ward know what they're about, and so do we, and this time around there are more chaotic, sprawling battles, heated firefights, explosions, and flying bits of hot metal than ever.
Put on your helmets, get a firm grip on your panzerschreks and hunker down in your bunkers; we're going to war.
As with the original, Call of Duty 2 spans the length of the entire war and features three separate, yet uniformly excellent single-player campaigns (Soviet, British, American, in that order as you unlock them), and in them you can expect to, respectively, stalk the wintery streets of Stalingrad, assault and hold baking Tunisian towns (and, towards the end of the war, French villages) and, as an American, assail the cliffs of Pointe Du Hoc on D-Day, though this is by no means a definitive summary of the breadth of each campaign.
As well as broad, CoD2 is surprisingly long, particularly on the higher difficulty levels, and even the most dedicated armchair commandos will find themselves tested to plough through this game in less than two all-day sittings, thanks as much to the exceptionally sharp AI as the expansive battlefields.
To go with the lengthy play time, Infinity Ward have allowed an equally large arsenal of both Allied and Axis-supplied weaponry, most of it making a return, albeit tweaked (in most cases for greater historical accuracy and balance), from the first game, though multiplayer gamers now get their hands on the M3 "Grease Gun" and a Winchester trench-gun (a six round pump-action shotgun) which is sadly absent from the single-player side of the game. More on the multiplayer later, though.
"Aaaaah! Flying monkeys!! Kill 'em all!"
As is plainly obvious, the graphics seen inCOD2 are some of the best in the business
Dug-in stationary gun emplacements used to behard to counter in the original game, but with theaddition of smoke grenades they are less brutal
Having had several years to work on presentation, it is no big surprise to learn that Call of Duty 2 looks absolutely sumptuous, even when one does not have access to two hot chunks of parallel SLI goodness (which it natively supports), and what's more it plays rather well if one remembers to turn down the anti-aliasing, even on relatively low-end systems.
Troops pour into trenches, buildings come tumbling down, tanks roll with deadly grace, machine-guns chew through ammo and men die in explosions of blood and smoke.
In fact, if there's one thing I can pick out as a true winner, it's the particle effects, whether from smoke grenades, artillery bombardments, grenade blasts or gunfire. Bombing runs have never looked so good, and despite all the hardcore fighting going on around you, there's always time to look around and enjoy the scenery.
Speaking of which, you'll be hard-pressed to find firefights more immersive or engrossing, thanks to convincing animations, frenetic action and, as mentioned above, fantastic AI (though there was not much to improve on from the original game), on your side as well as where the Axis is concerned.
Flanking, cover-taking, grenade-throwing, tactical retreat; these guys have and do it all. They, and you, can even use smoke grenades, a big tactical addition to the game thanks once again to the excellent smoke effects producing, in effect, giant walls of impenetrable fog from behind which you can escape bombardment from AI machine guns and attack squads.
There are even a few vehicular segues, though if there is a half-baked element of the game it would be this one, with the British tank mission possibly the weakest of the lot, though in a game this good even that is not so bad.
Much has been made of the introduction of a controversial method of healing to CoD2, that of automatic healing.
Simply put, you can take a certain amount of damage, and provided you get behind cover and away from the prying bullets of the enemy, given a few seconds you're fighting fit once more.
On the easiest difficulty levels, this makes you feel like Rambo, but at the hardest it's the only thing keeping you alive for more than two minutes at any one time. Personally, I feel it's less interruptive to the flow of play to have on-the-go healing as opposed to the constant hunt for medpacks and such, and realism be damned.
For those of us more interested in the multiplayer side of things, there's not a lot to offer for the serious online military enthusiast beyond what was already present in the first instalment in this influential series, and certainly nothing that could hope to tear you away from Battlefield 2.
Maps are generally too small for anything over about sixteen players, and too often the game degenerates into a sniper-fest, but on certain maps with plenty of cover there's good gaming to be had. Pity about a lack of vehicles, though.
Infinitely polished if not eternally creative, Call of Duty 2 goes where plenty of other war games have gone before, but does it with more than enough style, panache and conviction to get by without causing you to fall asleep in your foxhole.
The World War II-subgenre may have hit a brick wall but, oh, what a wall to hit.
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