Call of Duty: Finest Hour (2004)

FPS - Set during World War II and is divided into three main campaigns, focusing on the Eastern Front, North African campaign, and the Western Front.

PROS:

++ More cinematic. Compared to COD 1 and United Offensive, this spin-off provided a more cinematic experience that featured cutscenes and better voice-acting. And the game makes an attempt at establishing characters, and though they're all forgettable, I still appreciated that an effort was made. Overall, this entry was closer to the modern COD formula.

++ Solid soundtrack and sound design.

++ Medkits. Medkits can be collected and saved up for later use, as opposed to being used immediately upon pickup as seen in COD 1 and United Offensive.

CONS:

-- Clunky gameplay. Movement was painfully slow. Aiming down the sights took forever to do. Aiming in general was imprecise because the sensitivity was finicky. But the most annoying part was that the enemies were bullet sponges. This is a mix of them just having lots of health, and the fact that some bullets just didn't register even though I was clearly aiming my reticle over them. Overall, the gameplay just aged poorly.

-- Terrible checkpoints. Some levels had only one checkpoint, and the rest had no checkpoints. If you die in this game, be prepared to restart the entire level. This, along with the dated combat, made for some frustrating moments.

-- Too dark. The missions at night or indoors was way too dark. Couldn't even see where I was aiming at.

-- Tank sections. Too many tank sections. It didn't help that the tank controlled clunkily too.

-- American Campaign. The difficulty in the first two campaigns was ideal. But for some reason, there was a HUGE difficulty spike in the American campaign. Waves and waves of enemies with limited health packs. Quite frustrating. I also hated how enemies would spawn from thin air.

-- Lack of technical polish. Lots of graphical bugs and glitches.

This one sadly has aged pretty badly. I’ll give it credit it has a decent control scheme when every FPS at the time had unique controls. CoD really seemed to set the standard but aside from that its the weakest of the PS2 era. Bullets seem pretty ineffective at range. There is a severe lack of checkpoints which can pretty damn annoying when faced with replaying a sizeable chunk again and I experienced a couple of bugs where I couldn’t pick up ammo or change weapon which resulted in a lot of progress wasted through no fault of my own.

This game certainly feels more like a Medal Of Honor than Call Of Duty, which isn’t surprising as the team who made CoD were ex-MoH devs. Big Red One is a gargantuan improvement on this.

Wish I could have played more but it was quickly becoming more and more frustrating than joyful and with a large backlog, I’d rather save time and move onto the next in line.

I have some real fond memories with Finest Hour. It was the first Call of Duty for consoles and it's a great version of the original CoD campaign. Sorta like a side-story. The soundtrack and its voice acting, its immersive environments and weapons, and the downright brilliant writing and storytelling that actually made you care about your fellow soldiers and what happens to them, made this a standout title.

After the very impactful Stalingrad mission you make your way through the Russian campaign, to the British North African missions, ending with the increasingly difficult Western Campaign. There's many memorable levels and some has key moments in them that I will never forget! Gameplay hasn't aged that well but the presentation and story is really good still!