First-person shooters (FPS) and World War II have fused together to create a genre all their own during these last few years, and they've been warmly embraced en masse. From the Medal of Honor™ series to Battlefield 1942 to Call of Duty™ and now Call of Duty™: Finest Hour™, these games have found a way to feed our thirst for historical accuracy and finely tuned gameplay.
Of further interest, though, is the nature of gameplay itself. It seems natural that we may want to put ourselves in the place of a common soldier and get a taste for the horror, glory, and chaos of the battlefield. It's a mere extension of our hunger for WWII-themed books and movies. It makes sense. What's curious, however, is that these games are just as popular for their multiplayer elements as they are their single-player campaigns—if not more so.
Long after conquering the solo campaign, gamers can be found scuttling about war-torn maps, driving back the enemy and working as a team to achieve an important objective.
Defenders of Mother Russia.
The Environment of War It may seem odd (and even a little troublesome) that the multiplayer aspects of a game like Call of Duty: Finest Hour are as popular as they are, but it makes a whole lot of sense when you take a moment to wrap your brain around it.
Until now, our FPS death match and capture the flag experiences have been wrapped in a modern, post-modern, or even sci-fi setting, where crazy gadgets and weaponry take precedence over reality.Call of Duty: Finest Hour, on the other hand, offers an exceptionally down-to-earth and grittily realistic experience.
The game—and the competitiveness—become oh so much more visceral when you know you're digitally reliving a realistic wartime experience. There's a vibrancy and urgency in crawling through muddy trenches to storm a pillbox, setting up shop in a shattered building to pick off the advancing enemy forces, or calling for back up after you're pinned down.
Your environment makes it more real because the environmentis historically real. It's this attention to detail thatCall of Duty: Finest Hour can be most proud of.
The Modes of War Of course, without distinct and interesting gameplay modes,Finest Hour's wonderfully realized and balanced maps would go to sad waste. We need not worry about it, though, as Activision has taken the tried-and-true modes of past games and added its own unique vision.
To further illustrate, allow me to espouse on the nature of its available multiplayer modes on Xbox Live™ …
Female snipers are historically accurate.
Death Match and Team Death Match The loud ringing of flying bullets and shredding shrapnel reining down for hours at a time. Soldiers clinging to every life and bullet they have to try outdo their comrades. The intense scramble for a set amount of kills or simply the largest tally before time runs out.
These are staples of FPS gaming online—and Finest Hourdelivers the experience to the utmost. You can play death match solo or join a team, forgetting about individual glory while you strategically annihilate your enemy.
Capture the Flag (CTF) The beauty of CTF is its simplicity. Your job is to simply attain the other team's flag and bring it back to your home base. However, the complexities involved in achieving this end goal, while battling wits with an experienced team, lends all the depth you could want to the online experience. You could play the same map 100 times, and each round would ring with a different tone each time.
Moreover, the idea of a flag is so innocuous that it becomes easy to assign it different values in the midst of this WWII-tinged gameplay. The flag could be a set of orders, secret documents, a hostage, a high-placed enemy official, etc. The ambiguous nature of the "flag" allows your imagination to run wild.
That guy needs to move faster.
Search and Destroy Those of you that have played the bombing-run missions online inCounter-Strike™for Xbox® will be right at home with this mode—except, instead of just having one bomb to worry about, you have two. It's a race to the chaotic finish as those on offense scramble to support their bomb-carrying comrade and protect him as he arms the bomb.
On the other side, the defense scrambles to locate and annihilate the bomb carrier, and if that doesn't work, shoot their way through to the site and disarm the bomb. For those looking for the most frenetic and strategically complex mode, this is the one for you.
Little Options Finest Hour doesn't skimp on the customization either, as you can alter the respawn time, team balance, and friendly fire options to fit your own taste. You can also choose to Swap Ends, which allows for teams to automatically switch to the other side of the map after CTF games or to switch sides (offense or defense) after a Search and Destroy round.
You can even set up the map rotation as you play through multiple rounds, thus saving any backtracking to a lobby to switch things up.
Call of Duty: Finest Hour understands two things perfectly: the world it has painstakingly recreated and the essence of fine multiplayer gaming. It takes the best that online shooters have to offer and fuses it with the WWII setting that so many of us find so fascinating.
