Today, Call of Duty is a series that requires no introduction; through the combined efforts of Activision, Infinity Ward and Treyarch, the series has grown into a gigantic franchise that has routinely broken sales records over the course of its life. It has a devoted fanbase willing to purchase the game year after year and has basically become the Madden of first-person shooters. It has millions of fans and probably just as many enemies, but no matter what your feelings are on the game, it is hard to deny that it has had a massive effect on the industry. It is then interesting to note that it was not always so and at one time Call of Duty was a beloved series that received little in terms of hate or scorn. Born on the PC, Call of Duty began as a series that tried to bring the realism back into the war shooter, a counterpoint to EA's Medal of Honor series. In fact, the developers who formed Infinity Ward had all worked previously on Medal of Honor.
During it's early years, Call of Duty had a fairly small presence on consoles. The first Call of Duty for consoles was not even developed directly by Infinity Ward, but instead by Spark Unlimited and Exakt Entertainment while it wasn't until 2009 that the original PC game made it to consoles in the form of Call of Duty Classic. This changed with the impending arrival of the XBOX 360 as Microsoft approached Activision about making Call of Duty 2 a launch title for their new system. This would lead to major successes for both Microsoft and Activision as the launch line-up for the 360 ended up being fairly weak, with Call of Duty being one of the few titles that stood tall as a must-have.
When I purchased my XBOX 360, Call of Duty 2 was one of two titles I picked up with it, the other being Rare's Kameo: Elements of Power. By the time the game had come out, I was already a big fan of shooters, having played games such as Halo 1 and 2, Oddworld: Stranger's Wrath and Star Wars: republic Commando on the original XBOX. However, I had played very, very few World War II shooters, only having spent a little time with Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30. So I had not experienced any of the WWII-fatigue that some were starting to suffer from and thus Call of Duty ended up blowing me away when I first played it. Graphically, it was astounding, completely blowing away the rest of the launch lineup and was a clear indicator of what was to come. Despite being created with an aging engine, one that was used for the original, it was still able to create an experience that not only looked, but felt like it was next gen. The AI alone was a massive improvement over what had come before and it was one of my first experienced with AI that could be considered 'smart'.
What impressed my the most was the scope of the game. Over the course of the single-player, we were given the opportunity to see the war from the views of Soviet, American and British soldiers and experience such famous events as the invasion of Normandy, the battle of Stalingrad and tank vs. tank warfare in Northern Africa. Now, obviously this had been done before, but I hadn't personally experienced it myself, so it had a much grander impact as, for the first time ever, it felt like I was actually experiencing the war directly. The events were no longer just paragraphs or chapters in a book, they were actual events that could be experienced and it's why I wish more historical-based games existed. To me, there's something appealing to venturing into a world that, at one time, had actually existed, it's why I am still a fan of Assassin's Creed today.
If there is one thing that I was never able to experience, it was the multiplayer. For me, it was many, many years before I ever had an internet connection capable of handling online gaming, so I never got a chance to see what the multiplayer was like in Call of Duty 2. Reviews I have read said it was good, but the fact that it didn't seem to really take off until Modern Warfighter makes me think that maybe it wasn't as Earth-shaking as it's successors would be. In any rate, I would argue that with Call of Duty 2, the bigger draw is the main campaign, which I still believe is the best WWII shooter game to date, beating even the fantastic World at War.
Now, I have given quite a flowing overview of my experience with CoD 2, but I will note that while I found the game fantastic and was leaps beyond what I had seen on the original XBOX, there is another game that came out soon after that completely blew me away and first made me realize just what the new generation was truly capable of:
