Call of Duty: Finest Hour Xbox Review San Jose CA

provided by: 

Last year Infinity Ward made a spectacular debut with their first title Call of Duty. Call of Duty for the PC completely redefinedWorld War II games and raised the bar for those trying to do a war game in 2004. With success already on the PC, a console version was in development and obviously things had to change. Like Medal of Honor, the console versions needed a rebuild from almost the start. Spark took hold of the project to completion and while the game is fairly decent, it is a shame they didn't have the spark to polish it as much as the PC version. Unfortunately, like Medal of Honor: Rising Sun, this just does not live up to the PC game.

Call of Duty Finest Hour contains five storylines, which is actually two more than the PC. In only one instance do these two story lines overlap. Throughout the game you play as a Russian conscript, Russian Sniper, Russian Tank, British Special Forces troop and regular US soldier. The game is of course set in World War II and while there aren't many famous battles to fight such as D-Day (which really has been done and dusted many times) there is a lot of intense action but the storyline does have one problem, which is discussed further in the review.

Call of Duty Finest Hour like it's PC counterpart is played from a first person perspective. Most of the time you either have to just reach an area, blow up some enemy equipment or rescue a soldier. Fairly run of the mill if you have played the PC version. There area few things which differ from the PC version however. While some of the missions may seem familiar, they have changed quite a bit and also the characters you play as are different. The only mission we truly recognised to be the same as the PC game is the first mission, which is the Stalingrad mission, PC players will know that leads to quite an intense start to the game.

Another change is that occasionally you can give commands to other troops to open doors for you while you take cover. Unfortunately this only seems to occur in the very early stages of the game which is quite a shame as it improves the game somewhat and gives it a very Rainbow Six 3 feel. Also with the added characters, there seems to be much more character development in this game. As you progress through you take control of new characters who all have a story, played out in cut scenes however one other nice touch is that occasionally you will run into previously playable characters again. While this may seem like a better scenario than the PC game, the structure has led to a few problems.