Originally posted on 12/9/09
I know this game is about a yea old, but I only got rid of it last week and i'd like to share my thoughts on it now. That and it's a warning to people who're getting restless waiting on COD4:2.
CODWAUGH, as me and Cogan called it, had a lot to build on. It followed COD4, which was a new direction for the COD series, and it had proved highly popular and successful, which you just need to look at its sales figures even now to confirm. While CODWAUGH would be back in WWII (well we need a war that the Americans win in, right?) it still had things to build on. It would be made byh a different developer in Treyarch, but it could still use the basics of COD4. And did it? Of course not!
The single player mode is as predictable as ever, with America and Russia doing all the work, the Russians being portrayed by Gary Oldman in a questionable accent as a bunch of psychotic folk who want to paint their re-built walls with Nazi blood, and the Americans being voiced by Kiefer Sutherlund, yes that's Jack Bauer, as the grizzled, manly types who view bullets and the slanty eyed jap bastards they're killing as nothing more than minor inconvinences in showing off their willingness to do anything for a country that the world hates. That and all the American brotherly spirit crap, which gets wearing before you open the bloody box.
I feel I should do the Russian/American campaigns seperately, just to emphasise just how annoying they can get. When you play as the Americans, who have the luxury of calling in artillery strikes on 3 Japanese blokes at the one time you embark on a lovely journey of saving the part of the world that didn't have the most evil man in history looming over it, so you lose interest pretty quick. Unless you're smart, and pick up the gun from the first Jap you kill, you wont have a hells chance as the Thompson is questionable as to why it ever got into a warzone in the first place, and the M1 Garand is a pathetic excuse for a weapon. The American campaign is predictable story/acting wise, and doesn't offer a shred of achievement when you finish, mainly because you realise you've just slaughted about 200 Japanese guys who will never go home to their families, and not even Jack Bauer can cheer you up about it. Christ when Jack Bauer can't make you feel good about killing folk, you know the game has failed.
Now, on to Gareeeeeeee Oldmahn and the Russian campaign. You start in Red Square, not long after the Germans shat all over and obliterated everything, and you have to kill a made up General. Fast forward 3 years and you meet up with your long lost lover in 1945, during the Red Army's advance to Berlin. Where Gary greets you as if he longs for you, every possible opportunity shotuing (and it is always shouting) DEEEEEEEMEEEEEEETREEEEEEEE AND I FOUUUUUGHT THRUUUUUGH THE MASSACRE IN STALINGRRRRRAD, emphasising how big a wank he is and how much better he thinks he is than the rest of the folk you're fighting with. You fight your way to the Reichstag, made easier because to compensate for the shitty guns Uncle Sam expects its soldiers to persevere with, the Russians have got guns that can kill a man from 3 miles away with one stray, and when you run out of ammo for the PPSH you can pick up the MP40, a gun with recoil worse than a portable missile silo, or the STG44, a good version of the MP44 from COD4. Persevering to the end of the Reichstag barely seems worth it mind, when after killing at lest 1000 Nazis on your own, and carrying the Soviet flag to fly from the top after GAREEEEEEEEE has chopped down the Swastika, even after GAREEEEEEEEEE has killed the Nazi that has popped up from nowhere and shot you, and when you drag yourself to the front and plant the flag..... that's about a fifth of the size of the one that was there. Brilliant. Drag my badly voiced arse all the way up here, watch the fat, sensitive soldier who inevitably dies and who I actually cared about slightly who was carrying the flag originally get burnt right before we stormed the poxy building, and then the end result is in proportion to Chris Healy's first boner. Thanks a lot Treyarch! You managed to take the most significant event of WWII and make it utterly pointless.
Oh well, now that that atrocity is over, let's move on to its few good points before we can really go in for the kill. Nazi Zombies is genius. Locking you and up to 3 friends in a room whilst all the folk you killed in campaign (the important one that mattered to WWII that is) come in the windows. Simple, yet genius. My personal record is 23 btw, and I got to that along with Cogan and McManus too. Co-op mode is also fun, even if the campaigns you can do are a little samey. The Death Cards you pick up throughout the game make it a bit better, but it's hardly game saving. What is game killing, however, is not the pro-American shite, which is to be expected, nor the bad acting nor the predictable story, it is the multiplayer.
Multiplayer is what keeps games like this going. Even as I write this, i'm playing COD4 online. My playtime over over 9 and a half days on that is either a testament to its addictiveness or a testament to how little a life I have, but either way i've carried on playing it. COD5 on the other hand is a different story. I only bought this game, because around Christmas when other people besides me and James got a PS3, no-one had COD4, and everyone had 5. Wonderful, to start with. Being a COD4 veteran, I was topping the leaderboards in every game! You could see other folk who'd played COD4. The level threes getting 20 kills and 3 deaths. Wonderful. Even better when you went in to the bootcamp mode for levels 1-8. 38 kills 2 deaths. That was on Seelow, a map which feels like you have to run across the whole of Germany before actually finding someone to kill.
Once you get past the easiness mind you, you realise that it's still a a shit game, even with Jack Bauer telling you what to do. The guns are utterly useless, the rifles are underpowered, the SMGs aren't powered, the bolt action rifles shoot rubber bullets, and the LMGs have recoil so massive and waits to reload so long you'd be quicker and more efficient farting on the guy trying to shoot you to kill him. That is until you unlock the PPSH that you took down the Nazis with, and you become unstoppable. That is the main reason the MP is so crap, the sheer unbalanced nature of it all. They tried to make up for the over-powered guns in COD4, and replaced them with peashooter. And then there's the grenades. In COD4 you could take a building down with a grenade, those in COD5 would be lucky to wake you up if they were thrown at you.
Tanks I feel deserve a section of their own, because they were so bad, they made maps have big, flat areas where the tanks could actually move, and this makes foot comabt, which you have to do if you're not scum, boring. To put it nicely that is. To be fair, it makes it shite. And to take down tanks you either have to be in one, meaning you become scum, or have a bazooka and a sticky grenade, and even then it wont work. And even the prestige badges, all hideous. Nothing compared to the gold cross everyone aspires to in COD4. That, and 65 levels each? Fucking wonderful, have to play it more!
I realise my scorn is tailing off, partially because I want to watch Sin City, partially because I realise now i'm finally rid of this shitty game, but i'm glad I no longer have it. I only hope COD4:2 has some variation of Nazi Zombies, because that, and that alone needs to be kept in Call of Duty
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