Difficulty:

Just Right

Time Spent:

10 Hours or Less

The Bottom Line:

"Ambitious"

Capturing what World War II was like in a video game is no easy task. Do that in a first person shooter while making sure to not over do the hero saves the world cliché is also just as difficult. But all of Duty manages to pull this off with dignity that no other Call of Duty has since been able to achieve. Although the game's rusty mechanics leave this game in the proverbial dust, the game still showed how large budgets are meant to be used.

Most importantly the first in the series had a more meaningful message to say, such as war was fought not by one man, and war is wasteful. These messages are told various times with some care, mostly through the spectacle of the numbers and how moments are presented and through the quotations after your death and especially at the end of the game. It was told, but it was never trying to tell it best, here Is a game still about the spectacle of WW2, with ambitious cinematic moments and a scale and vision that would later provide the blueprint for later Call of Duty games.

Gameplay wise, this is not the deepest first-person shooter just like its younger brothers you're here for the adventure of war in the comfort of your living room. But the shooting still works very well, and was fresh and intuitive when it was first released. Providing relative skill mostly in the frame of where is the best place to stand and shoot (preferably with good cover). Unfortunately, the shooting falls short compared to its younger brothers especially if you've played the others thin.

The scale and ambition remains in how the game manages to pull off very large scale moments such as the beach landing mission where seemingly hundreds of comrades are dying wastefully as well as the scope of missions ranging from Tank missions to escape from Nazi territory and the variety of locales you visit. When you've finished the game, you've been seemingly everywhere and what an adventure it was. But the original awe that such production values provided are today no longer present, making many of these moments weak and sometimes pointless.

And here in lies the biggest problems of the game. The Call of Duty series borrows so much with little innovation that the original amazing production has basically been lost in a sea of imitations that have done it better. The gameplay and the production value are today no longer satisfactory, but at the time they were revolutionary. One stand out factor remains and it's the messages the game tried to convey, and they highlight how Call of Duty has lost meaning in recent years,

So here is a masterpiece of the ages, that has ironically aged very poorly. The game does not stand up as a single product today so well, but that's only because of what lead from it. If you could compare this game to any ordinary product than let's use the original telephone. Not a very useful appliance today but thank god it existed, or we wouldn't have the endless copy cats, and the multi-trillion dollar series as of 2011.