World War Two launched the first-person shooter genre.

With the release of Wolfenstein 3D in May 1992, iD Software helped to shape the overall direction of computer gaming, bringing into play a genre which has moved on to dominate the PC industry. A sequel quickly followed (Spear of Destiny) which remained firmly set in the WW2 era. Both games were far from historically accurate, playing out as fantasy/science-fiction adventures, but the Nazi symbolism, combined with contemporaneous weaponry and character models, made sure the gamer was in no confusion as to when and where the action was set. The genre moved on, with demons from hell and alien races becoming the staple diet of the now-established FPS, but in 1999 a console-only release put WW2 back on the table. That game was Medal of Honour, and it set the blueprint for every WW2 FPS to follow. Take one historically accurate setting, throw in a linear, narrative-driven storyline, and present it all in a cinematic package. This formula proved successful, with the franchise finally launching on the PC with MoH: Allied Assault in 2002. A number of sequels followed, and other companies started to release their own WW2-flavoured FPSers.

The original Call of Duty launched in 2003 to critical acclaim. Developed by Infinity Ward, a dev-co made up of 22 members of the Allied Assault development team, the game took the Medal of Honour blueprint and improved upon it threefold. Rather than have a single narrative throughout the game, Call of Duty had three, each based on a different Allied nationality's viewpoint. Call of Duty 2 expands on this, with a further three campaigns based on Russian, British and American front-lines.

The game is made up of 10 missions, each mission being split into 3 episodes. The missions follow each other chronologically: the Russian campaign starting in 1941, the British campaign 1942 and the American campaign in 1944. Without giving too much away, the mission structure follows a few set patterns which consist of either defending or attacking a place, and searching out and destroying all enemies and various installations. Simplicity itself in concept, and yet Infinity Ward have managed quite successfully to inject enough originality into every episode to keep the gamer interested.

The first mission is a case in point of this originality. Starting with the player defending against a major German offensive, the action then spreads into a battle between two factory ‘bases’, with a no-man's land in the middle. Eventually, you push back the Germans, and launch your own offensive against their positions. Succeed in this, and you are given a few seconds' respite, before a barrage of smoke grenades signal the launch of a German counter-offensive to your own counter-offensive. Exhausting stuff, and this is only the first mission; the game throws situations like this against you repeatedly throughout its ten missions.

That first mission sounds exciting (as it should), but there is no getting away from the fact that what feels like a naturally evolving battlefield, with the ebb and flow of the tide of battle pushing you into the various situations, is in fact only a number of highly scripted set pieces. The problem with any game relying on a cinematic feel is that it needs to be linear in order to succeed; enemies need to attack at certain intervals, and from certain directions, in order to keep the direction and tempo of the game at the place and pace that the designers wanted. It would be pointless if you could break the mission layout, achieving objectives how and when you wished, the game would ultimately lose its ‘epic-ness’.

We have all played linear games, and it can safely be assumed that we all get bored with them if they spawn enemies in the same place, with the enemies reacting in the same way every single time. Call of Duty 2 does away with this - by incorporating an AI system which reacts exceedingly well to your actions. Play aggressively and the enemy AI will hold back more, using more defensive tactics against you, whereas if you play cautiously, relying on your team-mates to push the front-line, with you holding back in order to pick off enemies from a distance, you will find that the enemy AI will attack you more, putting your squad-mates under pressure and holding up any offensive that your side might be launching. On the higher difficulty levels the enemy will start to use flanking manoeuvres more and more, holding you in place with sustained fire whilst another group will attack from the side or from the rear. The enemy AI will also make good usage of grenades: stay too long under cover and you will find a barrage of grenades raining down on your position.

Grenades play a big part in this game; you will find that on normal difficulty, your deaths in the early missions will exclusively be the result of a grenade blast. Luckily enough, a symbol appears on the screen when a grenade lands near you, pointing in which direction the grenade lies, so that you can beat a hasty retreat before it explodes. You also use smoke grenades to conceal your movement across wide-open spaces, and a grenade thrown into a room before you rush through the door is always a good option. Both smoke grenades and explosive grenades are assigned their own buttons, making them both immediately available to you without the need to scroll through weapons lists.

A good game should never be afraid of using ideas plagiarised from other titles. Call of Duty 2 uses two such ideas from the Halo franchise. You can only hold two weapons at a time, but the amount of weapons lying around means that you will never run short of bullets for either. The other idea is that there is no health bar. Rather than worry about searching out health packs, or hunting down a medic to heal you, you only need to get into cover for a few seconds and you will recover your health. You know when you are injured by the screen turning red at the edges, when you are near death a warning will flash up on the screen telling you to find cover. This helps keep the tempo of the game high, without depreciating the gameplay in any way.

As long as the reviewer has been gaming on PCs, his experience is that the First-Person Shooter genre is the most graphics-intensive. A new generation of graphics card normally means a jump up in FPS standards, with each new FPS taking full advantage of every fresh technical boon that the new cards bring. Call of Duty 2 does this, but it also has an engine which has the ability to run scaled back, without losing too much of the gloss finish. Running on a reasonably high-end graphics card, with a moderate processor, the game gave out a steady frame-rate when all the bells and whistles were enabled. This consisted of volumetric smoke (the smoke really does need to be seen to be believed, it moves and expands realistically, filling the space with a dense blanket of greyish mist that cuts visibility to almost zero. There are not many more scarier gaming moments than entering a smoke cloud, only to have a German soldier leap out from the fog with his rifle butt clubbing you in the face), explosions, particle effects, real-time lighting and shadows and corpses strewn around the battlefield. The textures on display on both characters and environments are superb, the clothing on the characters being a personal favourite.

The thing about cinematic packages, especially in this day and age of 7.1 speaker systems, is that the visual is only as important as the aural. Call of Duty 2 matches the visuals perfectly, with the sound of gunfire, ricocheting bullets, enormous explosions, death cries and screams of anger bouncing around the soundscape. Infinity Ward have also developed something they term ‘Battle Chat’ with both your squad mates and the enemy shouting various sentences which always feel appropriate to the moment.

Call of Duty 2 is a magnificent cinematic experience. The narrative is close to being non-existent, the action is made up of a number of set pieces, with a linear approach to mission layouts, forcing the gamer to achieve one objective before another section of the map comes into play, and the single-player game isn’t very long (6-7 hours should see most gamers complete the normal difficulty level) but this game is an exhausting, exhilarating ride which will hold you captivated 'til the very last second of the last mission. It’s a mixture of every World War Two blockbuster condensed into one package, an explosion of Saturday Matinee adrenaline which will evoke memories of playing in the back garden with your Eagle-Eyed Action Man. If you want to play the best example of the WW2 FPS sub-genre then you need to look no further than this title.