Call of Duty

aka: COD, Call of Duty (Game of the Year), Call of Duty 1, Call of Duty Classic, MOH Killer
Moby ID: 10826
Windows Specs
Buy on Windows
$9.99 new on Steam
Add-on (official) Included in See Also

Description official descriptions

Call of Duty is a first-person shooter set during World War II and the first title in a long-running series. It is also the first game by development studio Infinity Ward and in some ways builds upon Medal of Honor: Allied Assault, a similar title a part of the team had been working on at 2015, Inc. before forming a new company.

Players experience the battle in Europe during World War II in different campaigns divided further into missions. Unlike MoH: AA these are not only presented from the view of an American soldier, there is a British and a Soviet campaign as well, each focusing on different parts of the battle. In total there are 24 interconnected missions to play to get to Berlin. In each campaign a different perspective is offered, starting as an American Paratrooper during D-Day, progressing to assume the role as an English Special Forces commando, and finally as a Russian tank commander. Some missions are played in solitary fashion, but in most of them the player is part of a larger group with computer-controlled team mates.

Most of the combat is infantry-based, but some is also set between vehicles or tanks. Multiplayer modes include death match, team death match, behind enemy lines (where the allies are outnumbered) and two objective-based modes: retrieval, and search and destroy.

The later-released console version Call of Duty Classic is a reworking of the original game with enhanced graphics.

Spellings

  • 使命召唤 - Simplified Chinese spelling

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Credits (Windows version)

261 People (190 developers, 71 thanks) · View all

Reviews

Critics

Average score: 87% (based on 66 ratings)

Players

Average score: 4.0 out of 5 (based on 195 ratings with 5 reviews)

Excellence.

The Good
Medal of Honor took the crown for World War II-themed first person shooters and held on to it for a good while, but it's time for the EA title to step down and let Call of Duty take its place.

Call of Duty is essentially a better version of Medal of Honor. The basics are all the same, and there's not too much in Call of Duty that wasn't at least partly implemented in Medal of Honor -- Call of Duty just does it better. Not to say Medal of Honor was bad, it was just time for an upgrade, I think. And boy does Call of Duty pull through.

First of all, the graphics are great. Not just great, they're astounding. There is one particular level in which you are escaping German forces on the back of a truck, and I found myself getting killed too often because I was enjoying the beautiful scenery. The amount of detail in the level design is absolutely wonderful -- particularly the assault on Stalingrad in the Russian campaign. Absolutely beautiful.

Level design is this game's high point, I think. There are smallish details that really make the levels great, such as multiple entrances for certain key areas, or VERY wide-open places with multiple paths to take you to where your destination is.

I haven't played a first person shooter that touched me at all emotionally in quite some time, but this game comes quite close during certain moments. A level where you have to defend a bridge, I'm down to next-to-nothing health, tanks are bombarding the place, I'm holed up in a bunker, I've no ammo for anything but my meager pistol, German troops are attempting to take the bunker...I sit down, I wait for my demise...and then some epic music starts, and I look out the window to see American tanks have come to save the day at last! The British take the bridge, I step outside to see the corpses of my comrades as well as the enemy. Combined with the music, the great graphics, that was truly a great point in any game I've played recently.

Your allies are more competant than they were in Medal of Honor. They'll take cover, provide cover fire, suppressive fire, and they'll come to your aid when you need it. You can also do the same for your allies. And you can dive! I don't know about you, but any game in which you can literally dive for cover is fricken awesome. I found myself diving perhaps more than necesarry...

Playing this game felt like a real World War II movie. All around you something is happening, whether it's planes flying overhead fighting or bombing, or your allies in combat, sieging a tank, opening the hatch and throwing a grenade in, or a grenade going off nearby sending you to the ground in a dull haze, your reality coming back to you in the scream of a mortar shell. And that's just the miscellaneous stuff -- the scripted stuff will blow you away.

I also liked the ragdoll in this game. It wasn't overly focused, like in Max Payne 2 or something, but it's still there. It's quick and easy, and you seldom see an arm sticking through the wall or something like that.

The sound was also absolutely incredible. When the battles start up, you won't be able to hear a damn thing over the gunfire, and when it's over you can hear the battles going on far away, in other parts of the village or city or wherever you're fighting. I loved it.

The Bad
Unfortunately, while the AI is more competant than in Medal of Honor, that doesn't go very far. It's sort of like receiving a gunshot wound instead of a stabbing wound. One might be better, but that doesn't make it good. Your allies will provide cover fire, and all that, but they still can't hit the side of a barn and too often you'll find them abandoning their cover to get shot right in the open. There are times when the AI can impress you, but those times are too spread apart.

Considering the game's boast on how "one man didn't win the war" and all that stuff about team work, you sure do a lot of commando type stuff. I think there's really only one level in which you're alone, but even when in a squad you do a lot of stuff solo. Fact is, I found my allies just slowed me down, really. They would draw the fire from you...sometimes...but that's really all they're good for. There's no medic or anything to patch you up or anything really USEFUL about them.

You can look down the sight of your gun for a more accurate shot, but I didn't think this was any more accurate than just aiming the gun and firing. It was less accurate, in fact, as you lose the crosshair and instead get the gun's crosshair, which is darker and less easy to follow. Plus, when firing an automatic gun while looking down the sight, it's just pointless. Some guns were just too accurate, such as the tommygun. Someone explain how I was able to get five headshots in a row from firing a tommygun at the hip with the crosshairs as spread out as they were? And why can't I pull the same stunt while actually aiming?

The game is too short. If it were longer, or had some levels that were perhaps out of battle (such as talking to your comrades in a bunker or something like that) it could have added so much to the characters you played, so much to the immersion.

The Bottom Line
The best World War II shooter so far. Play this game, let yourself be immersed in the game. If you don't search out the flaws, and just let the game take you away, you'll be in for one hell of an experience.

Windows · by kbmb (415) · 2003

A fantastic trip into a horrible world

The Good
This game is unbelievably good when it comes to impressive scenes. It is brimful with memorable moments, beautiful graphics, massive battlescenes and it even boasts a lot of variety. It lets you, as a player, witness the war from three different views (american, british and russian) and you get involved in missions ranging from storming an airfield and then defending it from dive-bombing Stukas, participating in massive army battles that includes machine guns and tanks and you even get to do some snipering in Stalingrad at the end of the game. I personally enjoyed the russian missions the most, but I am sure almost everyone will find something they love about this game.

The Bad
The only problem I found in this game is that it's all scripted. If you die on a mission and have to reload, EVERY solder and every tankwill appear on exactly the same place and the same time as the last try. This way you always know what's going to happen before it happens if you play the same mission more than one time. It also felt a bit short, but I must tell you it was fun while it lasted.

The Bottom Line
A truly cinematic game, simple in its gameplay as most games in the FPS genre, but thoroughly entertaining if a simple but impressive actiongame suits your taste. Highly recommended!

Windows · by Mattias Kreku (413) · 2003

Very, very good.

The Good
First of all I have to say that I generally don't like "realistic" games - flight sims, Counter Strike and its derivatives, Delta Force and its ilk... I just don't get the same sense of fun and satisfaction that I do from other, fictional games, and the realistic games are also usually extremely frustrating. Well, I'm happy to say that Call of Duty delivers on all fronts: fascinating, satisfying, technically impressive and (almost) flawless in gameplay.

To begin with, the graphics are absolutely astounding. Admittedly the machine I played this game on is quite monstrous (AthlonXP 2800+, 1GB memory, Radeon 9800XT), but at 1280x960 with everything maxxed out only once or twice did the frame rate even hickup (which is more than can be said for other contemporary games). The game looks beautiful: character animations are terrific, physics are realistic (no ragdoll physics, but I don't think they're worth the bother anyways); grass is grass, trees are trees, bunkers are bunkers, the weapons are clearly and accurately rendered; everything looks as it should. No cut corners, no savings in polygon count, lighting is gorgeous - right on target!

Although the game is quite short (about 8 hours net, finished it in a couple of days), it has - much like a good WWII movie - a sense of epic proportions. The missions are huge, varied and never boring or repetitive; there are no pointless "infiltrate with stealth, die if you are discovered" missions, no tacky mission to "obtain the Enigma" or other such crap: what you do get is packed, tight, hardcore action. You get to use practically every relevant weapon (from Luger pistols to Flak guns), drive a tank, take up shotgun while attempting an insane escape from a German-controlled area of France, desperately defend a bridge and fight off the Germans while awaiting reinforcements, commandeer a boat, infiltrate a dam and sabotage power stations, display the Soviet flag on top of the Reichstag... I'm getting out of breath here. The variety and immensity of the missions is simply astounding. The sheer adrenaline rush you get running with a Kark rifle, shooting down Germans while mortars blow up all around you is simply impossible to describe.

Both friendly and enemy AI is very good - far better than I expected, really. The enemies always try and take up hiding places, snipe at you rather than run blindly, jump at you from behind corners... if they're close enough they run and hit your with their guns (as in a melee attack), and they generally cooperate, which is rather impressive. Fortunately the friendly AI is no slouch, and you can almost always trust your comrades to do their job properly and gun down enemies.

Also, the automatic saving system works very well, requiring almost no (quick)save/load of any kind during the game.

... oh, and did I mention that the game never gets old?

The Bad
There's very little I did not like about this game, which is actually a very rare thing for me. I would rate these shortcomings as little more than nitpicking, but they're worth mentioning...

Some scenes in the game are frustrating. Not necessarily difficult, but simply annoying; for example, while infiltrating an airport the player gets to sit in the back of a truck and shoot down enemies. Usually that would have been a really cool scene, only it took me about 3 times to figure out why my truck kept blowing up - turns out that a German with an RPG was standing on a truck somewhere I would never have bothered to look. Realistic may damn well be, but no fun at all. Afterwards you get to fight off Stuka planes with a flak gun, only you are constantly shot at from a nearby roof, and for some reason your comrades are completely ineffective against them - which means you have to both shoot down planes and fire at snipers continuously. In another scene you sit in a Russian zodiac, get yelled at by a sergeant and finally shot at from an airplane; although there's no chance in hell you'll know what to do at that point, if you don't crouch at the right moment you get your head blown off and have to sit through the sergeant's lecture all over again (which is very annoying). Luckily there are very few such issues with the game.

The second thing I didn't appreciate is the music... it is a particularly awful attempt to duplicate the musical style Hans Zimmer coined in The Rock and Crimson Tide, with two exceptions: the first being that this style has got really old, and instead of inspiring it gets really annoying. The second is that in this particular instance, the music is way over dramatic, uninspired at best of times and generally mediocre. I really wish they'd do the soundtrack differently. A thought: various classical pieces put together in appropriate scenes (Beethoven's 9th, Mahler's 2nd... the options are limitless).

Finally, although this game has probably the lowest bug count in recent memory, I still encountered two or three bugs that really ruined my day, at least when at one time I had to reload my game because I literally got stuck between a tree and a rock and could not move.

The Bottom Line
A technically, cinematically, and historically impressive game: a great deal of fun for any gamer, and a very engrossing experience for history and movie buffs alike. Who knows, maybe playing this game will give people a little taste of what it's like to be a soldier and make them think twice in the future... we can only hope.

Windows · by Tomer Gabel (4539) · 2004

[ View all 5 player reviews ]

Trivia

1001 Video Games

The PC version of Call of Duty appears in the book 1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die by General Editor Tony Mott.

Enemy at the Gates

When the battle on the Russian front starts, the first few missions are almost identical to the scenes in the movie Enemy at the Gates.

German version

In the German version all terms like "Nazi" or "Kraut" were replaced with a simple "Deutscher" ("German"); "Wehrmacht" is replaced with "German Army". All swastikas (besides a few smaller ones on uniforms which were missed) were either removed or replaced with iron crosses.

Awards

  • Computer Games Magazine
    • March 2004 - #6 Game of the Year 2003
  • Computer Gaming World
    • March 2004 (Issue #236) – Shooter of the Year
    • March 2004 (Issue #236) – Best Sound of the Year
  • GameSpy
    • 2003 – #6 Game of the Year
    • 2003 – PC Game of the Year
    • 2003 – PC FPS of the Year
    • 2003 – PC Game of the Year (Readers' Vote)
    • 2003 – PC Action Game of the Year (Readers' Vote)
    • 2003 - Best Sound of the Year (PC)
    • 2003 - Best Level of the Year (PC, for Pegasus Bridge)
    • 2011 – #12 Top PC Game of the 2000s
  • PC Gamer
    • April 2005 - #20 in the "50 Best Games of All Time" list

Information also contributed by Cameron Rhyne, Daniel O' Donovan and PCGamer77.

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Contributors to this Entry

Game added by Corn Popper.

Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 added by Masa♥Yuki.

Additional contributors: MAT, Unicorn Lynx, tarmo888, Zeppin, Cantillon, Chris Jeremic, Caelestis, Patrick Bregger, Masa♥Yuki, Plok, FatherJack.

Game added October 30, 2003. Last modified March 7, 2024.