STRAIGHT TO THE PUNCH
Right from the first mission, I sprint toward the first building I see to
look for weapons and ammo. For a gamer, it’s pure instinct. But when I try
to yank the door open, a message pops up in the middle of the screen:
“Closed doors cannot be opened. Don’t even bother trying.”
And honestly, that’s a relief. The game immediately tells me it has no
intention of wasting my time. I don’t need to wonder which route is best,
because there’s only one route. As long as I keep moving forward and
shooting, I’ll find everything I need along the way.
Strip away more than 20 years of game design evolution and this is what you
get: the very first Call of Duty. A group of developers, who left
EA:s Medal of Honor series founded Infinity Ward, and
quickly came to dominate the “war as entertainment” genre. Their debut game
is frantic, exciting, and straight-to-the-punch fun. It lays down a simple
but effective foundation that the studio can always return to whenever later
campaigns become so over-the-top that fans start drifting away.
That foundation is World War II, the great human tragedy that never seems to
lose its grip on our imagination. The story here is refreshingly
unpretentious: it’s mostly conveyed through commanding officers barking
orders and mission briefings on loading screens between levels. Follow the
compass marker in the corner and you’ll find your objective. The primitive
graphics strip away anything superficially beautiful and leave only the core
instinct: kill or be killed.
The game alternates between three short but focused campaigns: American,
British, and Soviet. The first two begin around D-Day, with American
paratroopers fighting to capture and defend small pockets of land, while
British forces attempt to secure bridges behind enemy lines.
The Soviet campaign begins, as tradition demands, in Leningrad. Much of it
is spent sniping through the ruins of the bombed-out city. Your commanders
here are barely better than the enemy. Run in the wrong direction and
they’ll act as judge, jury, and executioner in a trial that lasts all of one
second.
The mission design is the game’s trump card. The scenarios are varied,
chaotic, and—of course—far more cinematic than realistic. Open fields give
way to small villages and manor houses, then narrow corridors and bunkers.
Experimenting with different weapons is a blast. Catching the top of a
helmet in your sniper scope and landing a perfect shot never gets old.
Interiors practically beg for grenades. Unfortunately, the fuse time is so
long that the Germans have enough time to shout, run outside, and smoke a
cigarette before the thing explodes.
One moment you’re capturing a small French village; the next, you’re
defending it against wave after wave of German counterattacks while a timer
ticks down in the corner: “Reinforcements arrive in…” The longer it drags
on, the more terrifying it becomes. Real panic sets in when you hear the
tracks of a German tank rumbling in the distance. Not even the bunker you’re
hiding in can save you. You need something with a lot more punch than an
assault rifle, and you need to deal with that monster fast.
At times, the design slips into pure Michael Bay mode. There’s one sequence
where you’re riding in the back of a jeep, forced to rail-shoot your way
through a German airfield to reach a plane. These are easily the weakest
parts of the game, though they do add some variety. A much better vehicle
sequence comes later, when you’re placed in the driver’s seat of a Soviet
tank, rolling across a snowy Poland with your battalion. Here, you’re in
full control, enjoying the perversely satisfying feeling of being
unstoppable, right up until German tanks come thundering over the hills in
the distance.
The character models are distractingly ugly today. The drill sergeant on the
training course looks like a frog standing on two legs while wearing a
rubber human mask. Every friendly soldier looks exactly the same, and
without name tags you’d never tell them apart.
As a result, it’s hard to get swept up in the whole “band of brothers”
aspect of the game, or whatever you want to call it. People die left and
right, all identical-looking as if they were toys, and you barely react, but
thankfully the game leaves the tragedy mostly unspoken. It’s blunt and
pragmatic: the mission comes first. Grief can wait until later.
That unavoidable graphical “limitation” also has an unexpected upside. Call
of Duty communicates visually with a clarity that makes it a joy to play.
The clean, low-detail environments make it easy to read the battlefield,
which leads to faster decisions. You gain those crucial fractions of a
second that, combined with responsive controls, often mean the difference
between life and death.
And you need every one of them. Bullets crack overhead constantly.
Cover—walls, rubble, stone barriers—is essential for survival. In open
terrain, your best option is to crouch or, better yet, go fully prone to
make yourself a smaller target. A burst from a machine gun ends the
conversation instantly. Peek over a barricade at the wrong moment and the
enemy turns your helmet into a ventilation system. Every now and then you
find medical supplies. On later maps, the gaps between them grow longer,
exactly as they should.
For a long time I stubbornly refused to use quicksave. I stuck to the
checkpoints the game provided automatically. Near the end, during a mission
where you have to defend a five-story building from invading Germans, I
finally abandoned my principles. Death came too quickly and too easily. A
single tank shell could erase two minutes of desperate survival. I’m not
ashamed to admit that, in the final minute, I was crouched in a corner
waiting for reinforcements. Passive gameplay has rarely felt that thrilling.
It’s easy to roll your eyes when you see a trailer for yet another new Call
of Duty. But going back to the original shows just how solid the core idea
really is. Playing with mouse and keyboard, far removed from auto-aim and
visual overload, feels like raw, unfiltered videogame joy. No gimmicks, no
nonsense — just pure, straight-up action.
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