Call of Duty (

2003

) ½

Excepting a couple of multiplayer matches on my friend's copy of Goldeneye [1997], this was the first FPS I played as a kid. The genre didn't interest teenage SC very much, and I opted to while away most of my youth with JRPGs and Blizzard's strategy games. Tellingly, I didn't even own Call of Duty when I played it the first time, instead, it belonged to a friend of mine. I think I only got to play it because he was stuck on the second mission of the Russian campaign. He seemed to be operating under the belief that there was a way to get past the commissars with machine guns urging the men forward, but unfortunately, this is one case where Call of Duty is quite realistic. Since we were both only children I had to play big brother and help him passed the tricky bit. I played through the next few missions with him over the course of the afternoon, switching off every death or so. It's at this point that, were this a bullshit story, I'd say that my love for FPS was awakened and I plunged into the genre with wild abandoned, going back and playing through all the classics. While that might make a good story, it would be a completely untrue one. In reality, I enjoyed myself for the afternoon and then promptly forgot about the whole genre until college when I spent two weeks of Summer obsessively playing a friend's copy of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare [2007]. I still enjoy a well-made FPS to this day, but I'm no expert on the genre. Hell, I still have not played such luminaries as Doom [1993], Half-Life 2 [2004], and Medal of Honor [1999]. I say all this because while I have a certain nostalgia for this game (especially the first few missions of the Russian campaign), it is far from a major touchstone of my development. The feeling I get coming back to it after all these years is like finding a toy that I barely remembered in the closet of my childhood home.

In the years since my first encounter with this game, the series has gone from being a new exciting IP, to a massively successful juggernaut, to a pitiful joke. I feel like the Call of Duty hate is beginning to subside though, in part due to the latest semi-remake and in part due to the fact that games like Fallout 76 [2018], Metal Gear Survive [2018], and Anthem [2019] have eclipsed it in both terms of greed and stupidity. How I long for the days when the most reviled practice in AAA gaming was releasing shitty rehash sequels every year, rather than the current model of releasing blatantly unfinished games and then exploiting human psychology to foster gambling addiction among the player-base. It's a sorry state of affairs when I feel legitimately nostalgic for games like Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 [2011] and Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 [2012]. The original Call of Duty came before all that nonsense though, indeed in many ways, playing the original Call of Duty now is a breath of fresh air.

Part of this is a commitment to realism and immersion that the series has since discarded in favor of more cynically thrilling gameplay. The pace of the game is much slower than later entries because without regenerating health you're forced to careful change positions and pause at every corridor and opening. Every hit matters, so you have to carefully scan your surroundings and advance only once you're sure that you won't be torn apart by a German machine gun. Sure, it's not exactly realistic to slap a first aid kit on a fresh bullet wound and recover instantly, but at least it's more believable than tanking 4-5 shots and then shaking off the raspberry jam someone smeared over your face while you crouch behind a barricade for ten seconds. There's also no grenade indicator, which on the tin sounds like it would make the game more difficult but instead it actually makes it a good deal easier. Making grenades easier to detect meant that the developers could crank up the number of grenades they were chucking at the player. Later entries in the series, especially on higher difficulties, would see horrendous grenade spam. Without the grenade indicator, the enemies cannot throw four to five grenades a minute, because then almost nobody would be able to survive that. Instead, grenades have to be spaced out. Moreover, the sound of each grenade dropping has to be distinct enough to stand out over a pitched battle.

The slower pace of the game is not just a result of mechanics though, as there are several deliberate scripted sequences that provide breathing space in the action. Take, for instance, your first mission as the Americans where you land behind enemy lines alone at night. At first, everything is quiet, you can take your time, reconnoiter the area, even peak into the nearby farmhouse. There's nobody screaming at you over the radio to capture this or that objective or grab an anti-tank weapon. Or the last mission in the British campaign that begins with a boat ride to the enemy battleship, and then a slow walk to the armory while the Germans still believe that you are one of them. It gives you a chance to survey the whole level, familiarize yourself with all the choke-points and objectives, and hype yourself up for the coming firefight. When the action hits, it hits harder because of the momentary lulls in the plot and action. Later Call of Duty games would make the mistake of trying to be all thrilling action all the time, and consequently, when I look back on them I can recall little more than a long, loud, blur. When everything is trying to stand out, ultimately nothing does.

More striking than the moments of quiet reflection though is your role in all the action. The player character is not the star of the game, rather he (and by extension you) are just one of many soldiers fighting on the same battlefield. You do not capture every objective, or destroy every tank, or kill every enemy. Sometimes you'll line up a shot on an enemy only for one of your friendly squad-mates to kill him just as your pulling the trigger. Even on higher difficulties, the enemy soldiers do no single out the player character for any special attention, instead, they shoot whatever opportune targets present themselves. If your squad-mates are out front in the open and you are ten yards back with a sniper rifle crouched behind a boulder, the Germans will probably blast your allies and ignore you. If you die the battle is not lost and instead continues to rage as the screen slowly fades to black. At times the action gets so confused, with so many different moving pieces that you're not even sure what you should do next. You and your character may be exceptional in some ways (anyone who destroyed as many tanks, killed as many enemies, and captured as many objectives in real life would be awarded the Medal of Honor/Victoria Cross/Hero of the Soviet Union) but the game doggedly denies this exceptionalism at every turn. There's a bitter realism to all of this like you are just one tiny insignificant spec in a conflict made up of millions of other insignificant specks. All your heroism and sacrifice is, on its own, utterly meaningless and can only be worth a damn when multiplied by a few hundred thousandfold.

At least this is how the first few missions of the British and American campaigns go. After those first outings, though your unit is promptly dispatched on a bunch of behind enemy lines commando missions often based on famous WWII movies. The tonal shift is jarring in-and-of-itself, but moreover, it's just a bad decision. Sure, individual missions in these sections can be very fun and memorable and indeed they offer the player a chance to see sights and do things that otherwise would make no sense in the context of strict realism. However, these missions do not gel with the game's system which is more focused on large scale battles on open terrain between dozens of combatants. When you are sabotaging a German warship, for instance, the game quickly slows down to a snail's pace with a series of shoot-outs in identical cramped corridors. In many cases, you are left without any support from your squad, and on the higher difficulties, all it takes is one bit of bad luck to get wiped out entirely. I got through these bits with a careful approach and a bit of save-scumming, which broke the immersion and excitement for me quite a bit. What should have been a series of fun distractions after the more realistic missions became a boring slog that I couldn't wait to finish.

For all it's problems, the campaign also has some thunderous high points. The first two missions of the Russian Campaign are among my favorite in any Call of Duty game. The first opens up with you on the ship being sent to hold the thin strip of land that the Soviets still control in Stalingrad. You quickly notice that unlike earlier campaigns, your character and indeed all the enlisted men around you, are unarmed. The only ones with guns are the commissars and officers, and they seem more interested in pointing the guns at you than aiming at the Germans. When you get to the shore your platoon lines up for their rifles, but there's only enough for every other conscript to get one, so you get pushed ahead without a rifle and are told to follow someone with a rifle and pick it up when he dies. From there you have to push up the hill, unarmed, while a fearsome German attack rains down on you. If you turn back, the commissars will shoot you, so you're left with no choice but to rush from bit of cover to bit of cover until the artillery can take care of the fortified German positions. You don't even get a gun until partway through the next mission when you wrest it from the hands of a fallen comrade. The amazing part about all this is that everything here is more or less historically accurate. Commissars did shoot their own fleeing troops and soldiers were marched into battle without arms. It's all the more striking given how many World War II shooters simply pretend that Eastern front never happened, preferring to set their tales in France, The Pacific, or North Africa where the war was just as complicated from a technical standpoint but much more morally simple. Allies good, Axis bad. The Russian campaign in Call of Duty shows you that like every other war, World War II was a morally complicated story. I offer no excuse for the evil of the axis powers, which are well documented and well attested to, I only point out the evil done to stop them. The atrocities of the axis powers does not excuse the atrocities of the allies (the Russians most obviously, but American and British forces also carried out actions we would describe as war crimes). To be fair, Call of Duty does not go as far as I would like in this direction. The later, Call of Duty: World at War [2008], gives us a much better depiction of the Eastern front and all its assorted horrors. Even that game though falls short of reality, though this might be a necessary compromise with the medium; I don't think anyone wants a WWII shooter where you fight child soldiers, shoot old men, and rape women.

The only complaint I have is that Call of Duty leaves the moral arch of its campaign incomplete. We go from naive American soldiers, to tough cynical British commandos, to Russian conscripts whose fear of the enemy is a distant second to their fear of their commanders. Each step takes us farther and farther from moral certainty and the complete faith that we are the “good guys.” The next logical step is to play a campaign as the Germans, and see the war from the perspective of the historical bad guys. Certainly, German soldiers fighting a doomed war can, and have been made into compelling characters, one need look no further than Cross of Iron (1977) for proof of that. In today's cultural climate, where popular commentators accuse online multiplayer games of normalizing fascism by requiring players to be members of the Axis in multiplayer matches, such a move is almost unthinkable. Even Battlefield V [2018] had not amassed enough social justice brownie points to get away with this without considerable grumbling from the professional complainers. However, the world was a different place in 2003, and at that time a playable German campaign could still be seen for what it really was: An acknowledgment of our common humanity. It's a shame that Infinity Ward didn't take the gamble and give us a fourth campaign. Maybe it was too much to ask from the first entry into a new franchise, but great works are not made by playing it safe.