A lot of people have been waiting for this game to come out in the uk and now it is here there are the usual mixed
feelings, I have heard people describe the game as rubbish or crap, but when you discuss this matter further with the
individuals you will find that most of them are merely set in their ways with MOHAA which is fair enough because MOHAA is such a fine game. All of them seem to like the single player campaigns though
which presents so much atmosphere, the likes of which haven’t really been seen
in any WWII first person shooter before. There is a true feeling of depth within this
game where you no longer feel alone but you find yourself in the middle of
something a lot larger. You find yourself in levels where their is so much going on
you may miss a lot of it, there are missions where you will see planes overhead
dropping parachutist and german anti aircraft fire going up in the darkness, some
of your mission will involve taking these AA guns out to assist the troop drops. You
will see dead cattle on the battlefield as well as medic's helping wounded soldiers
to safety, there is one mission where the medic gets shot in front of you, the game
almost feels like you are in the film “Saving Private Ryan”.

Infinity Ward have also addressed a lot of the problems with MOHAA and corrected them in CoD. They seem to
have improved the use of the engine and made walls, buildings and other objects a lot more solid, in MOHAA you could
often find a few places on maps where you could tuck in tight to a wall and fire through it, the same was with doors etc,
in CoD they seem far more solid as you can’t seem to use this old trick anymore which is good as it will bring a more fair level of play to the game. Another feature they have improved on is the friendly fire option, everyone will know that when FF is on it means you have to be a lot more careful where those bullets and grenades go, however in MOHAA you always seemed to have one person who thought it was funny shooting everyone just for the sake of it. Well this is where CoD wins hands down as now if you shoot one of your own team mates, by accident of course, no longer do you injure them, instead your health reduces, okay so this isn’t quite real to life but it will get rid of all of those annoying idiots overnight whilst still keeping the necessity for accuracy and skill amongst players.

The Weapons are pretty much the same in CoD, but you have the addition of British and Russian soldiers and their arsenal of weaponry, other new features are you can look down the sights for all weapons and use the melee attack with them all also. When using the sniper rifle you will notice it sways which makes it a lot harder to hit your target and you have to love the grenade explosions as the snow and dirt is flung extremely high into the air, all in all very realistic.

They have also added a new character position to the game called “prone”, previous games would let you either
stand or crouch, but proning is where you lie on the floor, I have already seen players use this in their tactics, not only can
they hide on brows of hills but when you shoot at them they quickly use the prone key to duck under your fire, sometimes
you can get confused thinking you have killed them and make the unfortunate mistake on stopping your attack, whereby
you will inevitably be killed yourself. One feature the game seems to have lost is the effective way you could creep around
in MOHAA, you can still do this by looking down the sights of your weapon, but this isn’t as effective in my opinion.

A new feature added is the “Kill Cam”, this enables a person to see several
seconds of footage from the attackers point of view, just after you've been killed.
This is a little bit gimmicky, but does enable you that all important few seconds to
see if the opponent could be using a cheat or not. There has been a patch brought
out already though to turn this off, as unfortunately this would hinder clan matches
which would be impossible to play fairly with this feature as it would give your team
the few seconds needed to find out the opponents position and maybe also theirother team mates who maybe in view in their line of sight. You can then pass this
information on via TeamSpeak or other Comms software. All in all though this has
to be one of the BEST WWII games on the market at the moment!

 

 

By Phil Stephens

This article originally appeared in the Southampton Computer Club Newsletter, our thanks to them for allowing us to reproduce it here.