Call of Duty 2

[Bob the Insane]

Finished SP last night (the wife is away and I was bored) and it adds up to about 10 hours gameplay...

The US Ranger missions really are the pick of the bunch...

Switched up to Hardened for the US missions and it was a much better game, genuinly hard in places. Very authentic action... I am still remembering bits from last night so it must have been good... The end of Hill 400 is particularly scary in a 'i'm gona die, i'm gona die" kind of way. I genuinely found myself thinking "I really, really don't want to be here!" and this is just a game!!!...

In the french villages I got a feeling for what my poor soldiers went through when I was playing the old Close Combat series of games... It's alot easier to command your troops the throw smoke and then storm the old church from an above view. In first person charging through the smoke with rounds zipping past it is not as easy...

It is odd really, that when someone invents a truely realistic and authentic WW2 FPS, the people who play it will probably not find themselves enjoying it, but simple trying to get through it so they can "go home and never do this again!". Now that would be authentic!!

Performance...

Well it depends on the setting you use, set everything to max and you will get that AMD46 FX, 2GB and nvidia 7800 rig to stretch it's legs a bit...

Personally I have it running on 1240x1024 with everthing maxed except (important!) Dynamic lighting (appears to be a real killer), FSAA (switched it off) and somthing called 'Soften Edges'...

So bascially it is very scaleable for different machines, but at lower resolutions and textures it will look just like CoD. With a more powerful machine and Graphic card (and at least 1GB RAM) then it can look a bit special...

Additional the new nvidia beta driver I mentioned above made quite a difference too!