Video Games : Call of Duty: Finest Hour (Xbox)

Rating: - Good game but annoying!
Call of duty finest hour was my first game on the xbox, and as i'm awful at it, i still haven't completed it, i'm stuck in Aachen shooting lots of nazi's in sewers.

First of all, the plusses, it's a brilliant game. You start the game in a little boat in the fog, and you slowly progress across a lake, and a burining stalingrad, with explosions, bullets flying, fighters strafing you all scaring the hell out of your comrades. An officer is in the boat yelling at you, shooting deserters and probably going to end up doing nothing in the battle. The actual first level is a bit slow to start, as you start without a gun, and you have to follow your sergeant. You follow him to a refinery and the first problems set in, light. My TV is quite old and the remote died long ago. This means i can't change the lighting as there is no setting for this in the game, and you can see nothing!

When you get to the right place you finaly get a rifle, and you get to shoot some of the 6th army. About time. You then follow your sergeant past a giant assualt on a couple of machine guns by about 100 allies, who all die. You go round the side and take it out.

Then it starts getting a bit complicated. After doing this you get the next level, (Find out what it is yourself) and a sniper helps you, you finish that level and you are the sniper. It can get a bit confusing following which characters you are.

The first campaign, the Eastern front, is brilliant. You get to be several russian soldiers and it all revolves around the battle of the bulge.

After that you get to go to north africa as the british, which is quite short. After that you go to AAchen, the first german city to be captured, and where I'm stuck.

I have one paticular problem with this. Invincble Nazis. Now sorry if I'm wrong, but there weren't any invincible Nazi's in WWII. Mmmm... It's not the same one every time. It's usually a panzershreck, who insist on blowing up you/your M12, which is annoying. You can shoot them with an MG42 for half a minute at about 10 meters and there still alive, damn. Then they turn round and shoot you.

Overall it's a brilliant game, and it's fun to replay. Unfortunately on Xbox Live it's OK but there's hardly anyone on, most people have probably gone on to Call of Duty 2/3.

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Rating: - Cool
This game is a pretty good world war 2 game. It is quite realistic and has a fairly interesting storyline. The graphics are meedioca for this day an age but the game gets away with it. One thing that i think lets it down is the fact that you keep changing character and you lose the plot a bit. However you do fight in three major parts of the war and it doe make you feel like you are really there.The game does not take particually long to complete though is reasonably difficult.

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Rating: - Jank
Bit disappointed with this title, seems like game designers are churning out war games all day and not coming up with anything that sticks.
Graphics of the game are pretty tame, the sound does make up for this game a lot though.
The game starts of like most war game of this time as a large epic with loads of stuff going on you cant really take in all at once without having a headache.
Controls got some getting used to, the viewing distance is great as with most Xbox titles but because of the lighting and texturing can sometimes have you squinting at the screen.
Kills are satisfying but not gory if you like that sort of thing, the weapons are modelled will with good physics all round.
I would say controlling the vehicles in the game can have you throwing your 30 pound controller to the floor while Germans shoot the living crap out of you and you men. AI in the game is rather good for the enemy but your own men act like they have just smoked some wacky backy before battle, you will find them running in front of your fire, walking in front of tanks and being slaughtered while storming small buildings.
Bought it, sold it, wont play again.
You might be interested in the Conflict series, or maybe MOH, this is not special.
6/10
Dissected by Killa

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Rating: - Medal of Honour...for masochists
Call of Duty: Finest Hour is indistinguishable from Medal of Honour: Frontline...except stuck permanently on an unfeasibly difficult setting. The gameplay, the visuals, the missions and even the load screens and cut scenes are virtually the same. The compass showing objectives is also borrowed unashamedly from MOH. So it brings very little new to the table. So it's a bog standard shoot 'em up with a well realised WWII setting. There's very little strategy, and the stories are really immaterial, and really you just get from one end of the map to the other shooting Germans on the way.

You can, in Call of Duty, play as first a Russian, then a British and then American soldier. So there is a little more variety - you fight in a wider range of theatres and specific historical battles (including Stalingrad, desert warfare with Popski's Private Army, Remagen Bridge, the Bulge and Aachen - though with little variety - no bad weather, no night missions) and each time you play as different characters, including, interestingly, a leader in an exclusively black (as in African-American) tank group. There was, in the missions involving Chuck Walker and Benny Church, a feel that you're part of a small unit of characters with some familiarity and continuity.

Kit-wise you get to use a large range of firearms and other toys from all sides including Panzerschrecks, gammon bombs, teller mines, Brens, BARs etc. but curiously no bazooka or PIAT. You get also to operate a T34 and a Sherman and ride shotgun in a jeep. The controls are OK if you accept that you're playing on a console; FPS games like Call of Duty really need a mouse for manouvreability, using the thumbstick on the Xbox gamepad makes turning to face - and aiming at - enemies either excruciatingly slow or uncontrollably fast. The other controls are simple and effective though - for shooting, throwing grenades, changing weapons and changing stance. However...the way health packs work is crazy: you have a health bar at the side of the screen - and you pick health packs up along the way (and there are ridiculously few) which you have to pro-actively apply to keep your health up. These are NOT applied automatically when your helth bar runs down. Consequently, you can have up to 4 health packs sitting idle in your rucksack and yet still get killed if your health bar runs out. The game is so intense, and you're so busy that having to constantly keep half an eye on your health whilst fighting again seems really gratuitously hard. There are also far more enemy soldiers on screen than in MOH - and the fire is consequently withering at times. The result is that you're just too busy trying to survive and succeed to really spend time appreciating the graphics or exploring too much. There are undoutedly some nice touches here (like when everything happens briefly in slow motion when you catch a particularly nasty hit, or the great grenade effects), but really you've seen it all before. Enemy AI is OK, friendly AI is good too and your comrades are a genuine boon to fight along side you. There are problems in enclosed spaces however, when you can't get out of the way of stick grenades because your buddies are blocking your exit, but generally it's acceptable.

The maps are actually pretty small but well rendered, and the missions quite short. However, they *seem* to be impossibly big and long because of the sheer uncompromising difficulty of the game, bordering on frustratingly unfair - by virtue of health and save points being very few and far between, not to mention constantly respawning enemy in the places you've already cleared. This leads inevitably to much repetition - you will end up getting 80% of the way to a checkpoint many, many times before you finally succeed. There are 'checkpoints' and 'save points'. A save point occurs at the successful completion of each mission, and this is where you restart next time you play. Checkpoints occur at some places on a map during a mission (if you're lucky!) and, if you get killed in the mission, then this is where you restart from. BUT...unless you subsequently complete the mission in this game session, your checkpoints are not saved. So next time you switch on your Xbox, you're right back to the start of the mission again! Consequently you MUST complete a mission in a session...your progress will not be saved unless you do...and so you can't just dip into this game and play for 15 minutes...if you're playing then you're there for the duration!

Let me give you an example of how hard this game is; in a latter mission, 'Into the Heartland' you begin the mission at one (Allied occupied) end of the Remagen bridge. You have to make your way over the bridge...starting with very little health. You fight your way desperately across the infested bridge (finding a couple of health packs on the way). If you reach the German end of the bridge, you're faced with a broadside of machine gun nests pouring fire down the bridge. If you manage to neutralize these, you then have to fight your way to the top of one of the large towers at the German end of the bridge. This is intense, close-up fighting as you make your way through the labyrinth inside the tower (proliferation of health packs in the labyrinth varies from zero to barely enough). Then *if* you finally reach the top of the tower you have to climb up a step ladder through a small hatch to take out four Germans (where you're very exposed and absolutely peppered) on the roof. If you manage to take these enemy out, THEN you have to man an AA gun and fight off endless waves of Stukas coming from all directions and strafing you mercilessly. From start to finish, this level can take you up to 40 minutes of constant hard work - constantly short of health. At no point is there a checkpoint!!!!! If you get killed, you have to start all over again. Challenging is one thing, but this game really does seem gratuitously and unfairly hard, leading to huge frustration and huge, pointless repetition. You will not really 'enjoy' playing this game - you'll just be 'relieved'...and you will constantly feel like packing it in.

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Rating: - Atmospheric but unplayable
First things first: I know most of the other reviewers here have said it, but it's worth pointing out one more time - the COD games on the PC are fantastic, far better than the Medal Of Honor series, mainly due to the excellent way they recreate the loud chaos of war going on around you. This element is the one thing that 'COD Finest Hour' manages to replicate pretty well for XBox. The sound is defeaning, explosions and gunfire are all around you...it creates a really powerful atmosphere. Unfortunately, almost every other aspect of the PC games has been spoiled in some way, resulting in an almost unplayable title. For example:-

* The weapons in the game are difficult to use with any accuracy and seem to do little damage. Plus, enemies go through an outrageously long death animation whle still standing, meaning you invariably waste ammunition on dead-but-still-standing targets.

* You 'run' at the speed of a snail. Not only that, but you freeze momentarily whenever you are shot. This means that if you are caught out in the open, you have no chance of surviving unless you are carrying plenty of medkits. Automatic weapons will virtually freeze you in place as they eat away at your health and you are unable to move at more than a crawl due to the repeated hits.

* The game's difficulty curve is not at all smooth, it makes sudden leaps which lead to huge levels of frustration; almost the entire second half of the game is completely unfair.

* Only one checkpoint at most (sometimes none) in missions which can last up to half an hour.

* Idiotic AI of your squadmates makes them virtually redundant. You're in desperate need of cover while they're stuck on the scenery.

* The graphics are plain and the textures ugly, although at least there's plenty going on, and the cinematic feel is pretty impressive.

These are gameplay flaws which are simply unforgivable, especially considering how well the series played on PC. What went wrong I can't imagine, but this is a very disappointing title which will only suit the most patient of players.