U.S. Campaign

After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the U.S. began the long preparation for war. By agreement with the other Allied nations, their war machine would be focused on conquering Germany and the other European Axis members before concentrating on Japan, but preparations for retaking the continent weren't complete until two and a half years after the attack on Hawaii galvanized the U.S. Zero hour for the invasion was the early morning of June 6th, 1944, but the previous night, massive amounts of troops were dropped behind the invasion zone in the largest paratrooper operation in history. You begin Call of Duty as one of these paratroopers.

Before you head off to France, however, you begin the game in England, where you start your paratrooping career with a bit of basic training. The first mission is something of a tutorial, designed to show you how to move over and around obstacles, and how to use the various types of weapons that you'll encounter during the game itself. If you're an FPS vet, you shouldn't have too much of a problem with the tasks that the tutorial sets up for you, so breeze through as quickly as you can and move along to the first real mission of the game.

Mission 1--Pathfinder

As an advance unit, dispatched behind enemy lines, you find yourself alone in a field near where your fellow troops will be dropped in shortly after you. You and your cohort, one Sgt. Heath, are tasked with setting up a radio beacon that your planes will lock onto before dropping their cargo.

Before you begin running around, however, you might want to take a moment and adjust the game's brightness settings. You're going to be in the dark for the first couple of missions of the game, and the default gamma settings are awfully dark. Head to the Options screen and slide your brightness bar in the graphics menu up a few notches if you're having trouble seeing; otherwise, you can expect to have a hard time proceeding through the following missions.

After you take care of your vision problems, check your compass; it'll point you towards your first objective, which is to meet up with Sergeant Heath. Your first kill will occur at the top of the hill near where you begin, as a German guard is doing something rather undignified near a tree. Proceed towards him quickly and fire off a few rounds before he can pick up his weapon, then head through the arboreal passageway nearby to stumble across the dear, departed Sgt. Heath. Grab his legbag, and, if you wish, you can switch out your M1A1 Carbine for his M1 Garand. (You should definitely hold on to your Thompson, however.)

Two more Germans are playing checkers in a nearby bunker. You can dispose of them either by charging in with your BAR, or by tossing in a grenade. You'll come across the location for your radio beacon nearby. Place it and head deeper into the field ahead.

It's easy to not see this window open, so watch out for grenades from above.

The next objective is to "defend the dropzone," a suitably vague task that essentially means that you should stand around for a few moments while your teammates drop in from on high. As they come down, make your way to the buildings to your west; one building towards the north end will soon be populated by Germans firing out of the windows, and you'll want to be underneath those windows when this occurs. After the gunfire starts, use your BAR to clear out the soldiers at short range while your teammates begin advancing on the building. You won't actually be able to proceed inside the building until a friendly soldier comes along and kicks the door in. You should be getting an idea for how Call of Duty handles its single-player game; there are relatively few static enemies in these levels. Rather, the bulk of the game will consist of scripted events that won't activate until you step past a trigger point. While this makes for exciting gameplay, the drawback is that every enemy appears in the same point during each play-through, so if you run across a spot of bad luck, just reload your game and you should be able to predict where the trouble will be coming from the next time through.

Proceed cautiously through the next few areas, as Germans have taken up positions inside most of the buildings here. As you move through the houses and courtyards, be wary of upper-floor windows, some of which conceal Germans who will begin firing out or even throwing grenades at your squad as you try to move along.