Okay, World War II objective based enjoyment...great gaming...oh, and it's free!
The game is primarily online maps, where one team has a whole bunch of objectives (usually the Allied team) and your team completes them. The other team tried to stop them. The maps are extremely well designed, as well, and keeps everyone together for the most part. In fact, many of the ideas from the new Enemy Territory: Quake Wars were created in this brilliantly fun game. There are five classes, and they are distinct yet all necessary. The soldiers shoot stuff and basically hamper the other team from killing off the rest. The engineers are the ones who usually complete the objectives, building stuff and blowing up other things. The medic heal. The covert ops sneak around and do their covert stuff. Everyone has a part to play, and they are all distinctly enjoyable to be.
As you are helping your team move forward, you also get rewards for doing things. As you kill, heal, or whatever your class is supposed to do, you get experience, just like in an RPG, and then you can level up and get better, faster, stronger, etc. This makes the game even deeper, and then then game presents how brilliant it really is.
I downloaded BoBot, a bot program that lets me play with computers. It owrks really well, in fact, and so you basically have a single player version as well, and the bots play really well. In fact, when there is some lag, it's nice to just fire up a map with the bots to play with.
There are a lot of maps to play on, was well. Planet Wolfenstein is a good website that has tons and tons of maps for it, and playing online guarantees that the game will lats a while long while for you. Add the bots to that and you have a full, well made package that you can have for free. What's wrong with that?
Going beyond that, the graphics are excellent, not because they blow anyone away, but because they're done with such polish. There are so many little details in the graphics engine that bring out the atmosphere, and it works very well. Besides, it works on a variety of machines, so you're bound to be able to run it with maybe a hint of slowdown on the older boxes. A plethora of special effects, like explosions, debris, and smoke make it a joy to look at.
That WWII atmosphere is plenty well done, too. Opening with some game footage in black and white, the theme is echoed throughout to give off a very genuine WWII shooter feel, even if the gameplay is much better than those other linear games. Sometimes it does feel like it is a little overdone, but that's a minority feeling.
The sound is very nice as well, with a dynamic undertone main theme and a few echoes of music elsewhere. The voice-overs are also good, mostly "NEED A MEDIC!" type things, but they're done professionally and with finesse. The audio is another reason why this game is so dang good.
The main installer comes with six maps, which could have been enough as it were. Those maps are varied and fun, and they are genuinely pleasing to play online or with bots. As said before, many, many maps have been made since the game's release to the public, and the game can be played for a long, long time.
In the end, what you have here is a good, good game. But the thing about this game is that it's free, too, so just go head and grab it. You will not be sorry.