Quarterlies 2005
TomChick - Features - Comments - 01/01/06
Most Surprising Game of 2005
Call of Duty 2
 I went into Call of Duty 2 slightly bored before I’d even started playing. ‘There you go again,’ I sighed, Reaganesque in my wisdom as I watched the install complete. Less than an hour later, I was like a little kid discovering his first shooter. That’s what guys like Infinity Ward do; they take the ‘jaded’ out of a jaded gamer.
Now that multiplayer is doing so much of the heavy lifting for shooters, it’s easy to forget how well a bit of good old fashioned scripting works. Call of Duty 2 is a perfect storm of noise, effects, scripting, and flexibility that manages to balance it all just right. It hasn’t been done this well in a long time.
It’s also a reminder why innovation is dead, as disingenuously dismayed observers will note from time to time. It’s dead because we don’t need it, and we really never did. Not every game needs to be Darwinia, or Deus Ex, or Guitar Hero, or Katamari Damacy. Innovation sits in its niche -- moribund or overlooked or dead, whatever you want to call it -- until it hits it big, at which point, it’s no longer innovation. Remember when the original Half-Life was innovative?
Otherwise, the same old stuff is just fine when it works and it’s Quake 4 or Serious Sam II when it doesn’t work. But “same old” has a proven track record. People know how to do it and sometimes they even know how to improve it, as Infinity Ward has done slightly and surprisingly sufficiently with Call of Duty 2.
From my Yahoo review: Infinity Ward is unabashed about their sources, and obviously inspired by them as well. At the end of their D-Day mission, they replay a bit of Reagan's famous "Boys of Point du Hoc" speech, written by Peggy Noonan and commemorating the 40th anniversary of D-Day in 1984. And because you just played the mission, it's clear that Infinity Ward used the speech as a basis for their level design. It's enough to make you want to play it a second time, which is high praise considering you've probably played D-Day, or some variation thereof, 10 or 20 times. And this is the crux of what makes Call of Duty 2 work. When something is this well done, just because you've seen it all before doesn't mean it's not worth seeing again.
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