Call of Duty 2 : The First 15

More on Call Of Duty 2 : The First 15

The AI seems to be greatly improved too, reacting far more to what’s going on around them. I managed to sneak around the flank of a group of soldiers and then opened up on a few to then have their buddies spin around, take fresh cover and then open up on me. The scripting for each section has been carefully thought and certainly in these few opening levels it feels very much like the house to house street fighting that the Battle for Stalingrad was.

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Your squad AI has improved somewhat too, with them being far more cautious than in the original where they’d happily stand in a storm of bullets, take a few potshots and then die. They do still have the annoying tendancy to walk into your line of fire though and I’ve shot two guys in the back already. Close up melee fighting feels more realistic, not because of any of the actions you can perform, you’re till limited to just lashing out with the gun butt, but because the character models are far more detailed and realistic… you almost feel guilty for shooting or clubbing the enemy to the ground...

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Resource-wise, Call Of Duty 2 is a bit of a system monster. To play this with all the eye candy on you’ll need to be running with some serious grunt in your box and sadly the built in system optimizer in the options screen seems to think that we’d be happy playing at 800x600! So it will be very much a case of fiddling with the settings to get what you think is the best balance between performance and eye-candy.