Call of Duty: Finest Hour

Reviewed by CL on 5/7/2008

GameStop was having a “buy-2-get-1-free” deal on used games and I had already picked out two that I wanted so I needed to find a third game which I would get for free. I picked this game on a whim because I had hear a lot of good things about the Call of Duty series. Unfortunately, I picked this game. This was one of the more frustrating and unfulfilling games that I can remember playing in the last few years. This is surprising because the production values are high with nice cut scenes and documentary style narration. However, the gameplay is where the game seriously falters. The level design is absolutely horrid. There are no quicksaves and only a single checkpoint per level. This leads to frustrating do-overs of many sections of the game. This might be ok if dying in the game was due to lack of skill, but this isn’t the case. Dying is a case of the game being cheap and frustrating. There was one section where you had to hold out against the enemy for 10 minutes. I died several times with only minutes to spare because of some unseen bullet or my teammates being dumb (the team AI is horrible, there was actually a point where I tried to turn the friendly fire off so I could shoot my teammates to just get them out of the way. Unfortunately, you can’t do this). After failing this a few times due to these cheap tactics, I just turned the machine off and decided that I wasn’t going to play this game anymore.

The other thing that sucks is that the shooting just isn’t any fun. The guns don’t feel fun to shoot and when you hit a guy, they go through this delayed death animation. I makes it feel like a badly rehearsed play where the actor hits someone and the victim doesn’t react to the blow for a good second or so.

Overall, a piece of junk game that isn’t worth your time.