VIDEO GAME GOOD GUYS, BAD GUYS AND THE GOOD WAR l
man machine gun. As the player, you round the corner and see a British Desert Rat kicking down a door. But before he finishes, German MG-42 machinebullets riddle through the door, sending him flying backward with a spraying of wood, blood and smoke. Better him than me, I thought.
This is a violent game that earns its mature rating, but the violence is realistic, not gratuitous. The soldiers curse and scream in the heat of battle. The chaos is so intense that it’s easy to turn a corner and fire at a friendly instead of an enemy. The game throws a wide variety of missions at you to alter the pace of the experience. You can demolish tanks with sticky bombs, defend a house with a machine gun, snipe at enemies far away, drive a tank through the desert at high speed, and scale the cliffs at Pointe du Hoc in Normandy. You can use moving tanks as cover.
Some of the battles test the limits of your trigger instincts. You keep rounding corners, going up stairways, entering buildings only to find yourself in a room with three German soldiers.
Those enemy soldiers are smart. If you pull back into a hiding spot, they will toss a grenade at you. If you stake out a doorway, they will encircle you from another direction. If you’re in a machine-gun nest, you may find the enemies will toss a smoke grenade so they can rush your position.
The open-ended battlefields are much larger than in other games. Above Pointe du Hoc in the Normandy campaign, you can run through any part of the crisscrossing network of trenches that connect the concrete bunkers, and so can the Germans. This means that if you run into the menacing fire of an MG-42, you can circle around the side and hit the gunner with a grenade from the right or left flanks.
And the expansiveness of the battlefield means that there isn’t just one way to finish the mission. One battle that illustrated this was ‘‘ The Silo’’ in the American campaign, where your squad has to take six big houses in a village. You could storm the houses in any order you wanted, but the job was especially tough because you had to avoid the crossfire coming from the adjacent houses.
The experience on the Xbox 360 was just as much fun as on the PC. The horsepower inside the Xbox 360 is beefier than just about any PC on the market today, and there wasn’t a single time when it choked on all the action on the screen. The console can create some very cool effects such as winter mists and shadows moving through smoke. In one scene, you crawl through an empty pipeline as the enemy shoots it full of holes. Shafts of light pierce through those holes.
But the game only looks a little better on the console with an HDTV. The console game certainly didn’t look better on the analog TV, but on a 27-inch Norcent Technologies HDTV, the game’s images were as sharply defined as those on a $4,000 Alienware gaming PC.
Aiming is much easier with a computer mouse than a game controller, but Call of Duty 2 by and large makes the leap to the console thanks to an aim-assist feature. When you pull the left trigger, it immediately targets the next closest enemy. That way, you can squeeze off rounds at multiple targets quickly, as if you were aiming a rifle. That simple innovation helps speed up the pace of firing. But the auto-aiming feature is particularly bad at zeroing in on moving targets. That means that for most of the game, it only pays to shoot at someone who is standing still.
I was a big fan of the original ‘‘ Call of Duty’’ on the PC, and, as with that game, I finished this one in a matter of days. Even though it went through 27 battles within 10 different missions among the Russian, British, and American camps, it wasn’t long enough for me.
I’ve wondered whether this game is good enough to be the next ‘‘ Halo,’’ or a game that could make demand for the 360 take off. Certainly, this is the best game on the new platform, and it puts the PC to shame in many ways. The average critic’s rating on the game is above 90 percent, according to Metacritic. But we’ll see if millions of other gamers out there are ready to become World War II buffs on the Xbox 360, particularly when they can play the game elsewhere. Contact Dean Takahashi at dtakahashi@mercurynews.com or ( 408) 920-5739.