Fall back to the rally point!
Now putting the visual glitches aside, there’s a few other worrying aspects which you might want to mull over before forking out the readies for Call Of Duty 2. The first and biggest one is the health system… essentially there isn’t one. There’s no health meter to know how you’re doing and no health packs to pick up to heal yourself. Instead we’ve got some quasi-health regeneration system which basically allows you to get shot, but as long as you take cover, you won’t die and your health will come back.
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Click for larger imageThe problem is, you’ve no idea how well you are until you take a few shots then you’ll see the edges of the screen mist up and turn read as you take more and more damage, so you then leg it to cover and regenerate before risking popping your head up again. I thoroughly recommend playing Call Of Duty 2 on the harder difficulty levels where only a few shots will take you down otherwise you’ll start to feel immortal. The game offers a challenge on the top two difficulties but anything less than this and you can leg it into a house full of Germans, shoot a few and leg it back out to regen before repeating until all the bad guys are dead.
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Click for larger imageThe other niggle is the lack of a save system of any sort at all. Now I’m not a big fan of quicksave anyway but I do like to be able to save my games where I like so I can stop playing when I like. Call Of Duty 2 ONLY has an autosave feature with various save positions scattered throughout the levels. Quit out before you reach the next one and you’ll have to replay the last part of the mission again. You can’t help but wonder if the save functions were removed to perhaps artificially increase the difficulty or longevity… But I suspect there may be another reason too.
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Click for larger imageYou see the PC isn’t the only platform Call Of Duty 2 will be released on. When it finally arrives in the UK on the 2nd December, the Xbox 360 will have its very own version of Call Of Duty 2 as well… You can’t help but wonder if we’re playing the Xbox 360 port or if the Xbox 360 will be a PC port. It would certainly appear with the ‘dumbing down’ of the game that what we’re seeing here is going to be very little different from what will be appearing on the Xbox 360.
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