The first WWII game that I ever played all the way through was
Call of Duty.
I've never considered myself to be a very good military tactician, and
typically find myself at a dead end in the more advanced stages of
games that require it. That said, I also never had much of an
attention span for games that made me feel like I was standing on a
conveyor belt moving through some fixed scenery, picking off automaton
targets as I went by.
Call of Duty was the first game
that allowed me to completely suspend disbelief and truly get the
feeling of involvement in epic events. It draws a near perfect
balance between being led down a path while still providing the feeling
that you have some autonomy in deciding exactly how to do so. The
well-timed scripting of the other characters, both friendly and enemy,
and of momentous special effects keeps the action flowing and the
adrenaline pumping right to the end of the game.
However...
That
Call of Duty was on the PC. I'd tried console-based
first person games before, and found them to be extremely frustrating
to play when compared to the more precise controllability on the
PC. There's just no substitute for the mouse as a precision
pointing tool, and the analog sticks on the Xbox don't even come
close. The controls are so twitchy, at least to my old frayed
nerves, that often as not I would get killed by an enemy that I had
been ping-ponging my gunsight over for a relative eternity. When
Call of Duty 2: The Big Red One
was released for the Xbox, I wondered whether or not it would offer the
same levels of believability and fun play as the PC version I had been
so thrilled with. As it turns out, the answer is a qualified yes.
Call of Duty 2: The Big Red One on the Xbox has many of the same
elements that made the PC version feel like a portal to circa 1940's
live combat. You start each mission with a briefing telling you
the overall strategic picture and what your contribution to the effort
is going to be. It may be a matter of taking a building or piece
of ground from the enemy, or conversely, it may be defending a
militarily valuable commodity from falling into the wrong hands.
Armed with at least a general understanding of what you need to
accomplish, but well aware that goals can change from moment to moment
in the confused cacophony of a battlefield, you join your squad and
begin your mission.
I didn't do exhaustive research on the topic, but it seems that your
usual weapon of choice is the trusty M1 Garand semi-automatic
rifle. You will be going up against machine gun toting German
soldiers, so having only the single-shot M1 may seem to be a huge
disadvantage, but such is not necessarily the case. To understand
why, you need to know about the "Aim Down the Sight" (ADS) mode. To
enter ADS mode, you simply pull back on the left trigger on the Xbox
controller. This brings the gun up to your shoulder and aligns
the gun sight with your virtual eye. It also provides two other
essential things: first, it zooms the view to some degree, helping you
to get a good look at your target. Second, it slows the response
rate of the analog stick used to aim the gun. Slowing the aiming
response rate alleviates the twitchiness that I found so frustrating in
past console-based games like this. Releasing the left trigger
immediately returns you to the normal mode, which you will need to do
if you need to re-aim the weapon quickly. The response rate in
the normal, non-ADS mode can be adjusted in the game settings if
desired, but the ADS mode felt more realistic to me and using it for
precision aiming rather than slowing the rate for non-ADS mode allowed
me to retain the option of being able to make much faster corrections
in the normal mode.
Now, why is the M1 sometimes better than a machine gun? Simple:
it provides a higher level of zoom in ADS mode. This makes the M1
more useful for targeting distant enemy soldiers. It's not quite
a sniper rifle (which, by the way, you will get an opportunity to use a
couple of times as you work your way through the campaign) but it does
allow you to take out difficult, well entrenched targets from greater
distances.
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